AlanzosBlog

The key to understanding the true value of the Data Series lies in understanding the idea that there are many different types of logic.

Each logic was built for a purpose, and each logic performs a particular function.

For instance, binary computer logic was created to turn off and on electricity in ever more creative ways via the programming written into your computer. This type of logic was built to run computers.

The data series, a series of essays that L Ron Hubbard wrote in the form of policy letters, was another type of logic. Its purpose was to make Scientology orgs run better by finding the “whys” for expansions and contractions, and thus remove what was causing the obstacles to expansion. That was the real purpose, and real value, of the Data Series.

You would not use the Data Series to program computers, even though they are both logics. That would be a perversion of its purpose.

Classical logic - the logic created by Socrates and others, and which has been evolving for over 3,000 years, has the purpose of evaluating statements and arguments, and is used to preserve truth through out the reasoning process. It is another form of logic, separate and distinct from computer logic, and Data Series logic. You would not use classical logic to program computers, either.

But Hubbard actually told Scientologists that the Data Series could be used for classical logic. In the second policy letter of the data series, Hubbard told you this:

DATA SERIES 2 "LOGIC"

"LOGIC means the subject of reasoning. Some in ages past have sought to label it a science. But that can be regarded as pretense and pompousness.'

"If there were such a science, men would be able to think. And they can't.'

"The term itself is utterly forbidding. If you were to read a text on logic, you would go quite mad trying to figure it out, much less learn how to think."

"Yet logic or the ability to reason is vital to an organizer or administrator. If he can not think clearly, he will not be able to reach the conclusions vital to make correct decisions."

See how he mixes these two different kinds of logic together? I've read many books on logic, and did not go "quite mad" trying to figure it out. And who said "learning how to think" was ever the purpose of logic? And the other gem up there which should be questioned: "Man can't think". Huge advancements in every area of medicine, agriculture, space travel, etc - and "Man can't think?"

Come on, Ronnie!

So why would Hubbard want to make the subject of classical logic "utterly forbidding" to Scientologists?

Here's why: By getting them to reject "Earth logic" and getting them to use the Data Series for critical thinking skills instead.

See? A logic that was developed to find the reasons for expansion and contraction in Scientology orgs is being "re-purposed" by Hubbard and used to supplant a logic that was developed to evaluate statements and arguments, and to preserve truth throughout the reasoning process.

The Data Series doesn't work for that. You can't evaluate arguments, spot logical fallacies, and preserve truth through your reasoning process by using the Data Series.

For instance, the outpoint called "wrong target" in the data series is NOT the same thing as "ad hominem attack" in classical logic. By only knowing the outpoint of "Wrong target", you will never be able to spot the logical fallacy inherent in "ad hominem attack" because you have not studied classical logic. And that was good for Hubbard. Because, as a Scientologist, you were never able to spot an ad hominem attack, you would also never figure out that his whole PTS/SP technology is based upon the (classical) logical fallacy of the ad hominem attack.

It was a trick.

Why would he do that?

So all his other tricks would work on you, of course.

If man can not be trusted with justice, then how could every instance of justice which has ever occurred in human history have been created by Man?

The Third Party Law, by L Ron Hubbard:

"The law would seem to be:'

"A THIRD PARTY MUST BE PRESENT AND UNKNOWN IN EVERY QUARREL FOR A CONFLICT TO EXIST.'

"or'

"FOR A QUARREL TO OCCUR, AN UNKNOWN THIRD PARTY MUST BE ACTIVE IN PRODUCING IT BETWEEN TWO POTENTIAL OPPONENTS.'

"or'

"WHILE IT IS COMMONLY BELIEVED TO TAKE TWO TO MAKE A FIGHT, A THIRD PARTY MUST EXIST AND MUST DEVELOP IT FOR ACTUAL CONFLICT TO OCCUR."

Hubbard called the Third Party Law "fabulously useful", and he made liberal use of it to third party you against your society and many of its institutions.

The datum "Man cannot be trusted with justice" was used to 3rd party you against police agencies, courts, and the entire justice system. It was also used to justify making it a high crime for you to seek justice against Scientology for anything they may do to you, thus effectively getting you to give up all your rights when you became a Scientologist.

His implication was that while "man can not be trusted with justice", because he had somehow "risen above the bank", L Ron Hubbard could be trusted with justice. He created a huge and complex justice system within Scientology that made it seem like it was vastly superior to anything "Man" had. And yet, in the 45 years that this system has been in place, it has routinely been used to smash the rights of Scientologists and protect only the interests of the Church.

Never once in its history have I ever heard of the Church of Scientology, under L Ron Hubbard's system of justice, being found guilty of any crime or high crime, despite the most egregious exploitations and even outright thefts, false imprisonments and harms that have been waged against Scientologists.

This one insidious datum, "Man can not be trusted with justice", is a third party action against you and your society. Left uninspected, it can cause even newly independent Scientologists from seeking real justice for actual crimes that have been committed against them by the Church of Scientology or by other Scientologists.

I believe that some high-profile Scientologists are not going to the authorities right now - even though they have knowledge of serious crimes committed by the Church of Scientology - because L Ron Hubbard 3rd partied them against the justice system, and they believed it without inspection.

This one datum is only part of a broad campaign L Ron Hubbard waged to alienate you from your society, and to get you to be loyal only to Scientology. There are many such 3rd party actions that Ron took to separate you from things he did not want you to have that were available to you as a citizen in your society.

Can you spot any others?

Meet George Bailey.

George is a man who has spent many decades in the Church of Scientology, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars of his own money, learning its principles and applying them to life. Many who knew George long ago, say he was a wonderful guy.

Axiom142 found George on a street in England recently, and in order to earn his wings, asked George if he had heard, and if he cared, that the head of the Church of Scientology, David Miscavige, physically beat his staff members.

Here's what George has become after learning and applying all that Scientology.

This is the best display of what the Church of Scientology does to you as a human being that I have ever seen.

This is a Street Theater version of the same video, played out on the steps of the American Saint Hill Organization a few days ago in Los Angeles, using L Ron Hubbard Way as the stage!

Famed critics Mark Bunker, OT VII Tory Christman, and Class 8 Auditor Lynn Fountain Campbell appear - as well as a few members of Anonymous.

And now - Drum Roll, please!

A brand new video from the brilliant video artist TheEvilOfScientology narrows in on the exact dialogue between George and Axiom142!

A very good example of this particular trick that L Ron Hubbard played on you can be found in my "What is Criticism?" post. That, even if I do say so myself, is a very good example of how Hubbard re-defined the word criticism and made it into the "100% Standard Tech" definition: The one that, as a Scientologist you would always apply, and the one that would make you not "out-ethics" or "out-tech" for applying it.

But it's also a good example of HOW he re-defined "criticism" - by re-defining for you what causes criticism. As an in-ethics, in-tech Scientologist, whenever you see criticism, now you "know" what causes it - in every case. And so now, as a Scientologists falling for this one, knowing what causes criticism, you know how to "handle it". The standard tech handling is to ignore it, because it is always caused by the crimes the critic has committed. Always.

Further, this is "proven" by auditing. Anyone who has ever criticized something, and who has been taken into session, has found an overt on the subject he was criticizing. Every single one of them. So this is the proof to the Scientologist that the cause of criticism is always overts - just like Hubbard said.

Here's the problem with that: Human beings, being basically social, ALWAYS have overts, or "sins", or crimes. Especially if your group, its leader, and your own religious belief, says you do! However, as Hubbard also said in the lecture "Moral Codes: What is a Withhold?", moral codes are as infinite as behavior, and ever changing - in the past and in the future, and depending on where you are on the planet at any given time. So if you take someone into session to look for an overt - especially if you go into the vast blank mental canvass of "past lives" - you will ALWAYS find any overt you want. On any subject!

And for whatever purpose.

If that is so, then are overts really the cause of all criticism? What about the idea that overts exist, and you can find them everywhere, and criticism exists - you can find that everywhere, too - but one does not cause the other?

Ask yourself that, think about it.

And then think of this:

L Ron Hubbard was one of the biggest critics ever. He could be one of the biggest nattering and spinning malcontents you have ever seen! He was very often criticizing something in each lecture he gave. Whole swaths of Scientology policy and technology are based directly upon the criticism of L Ron Hubbard. Psychiatrists, the Government, the AMA, living on planet Earth, and almost everything else related to being human, was criticized heavily by L Ron Hubbard.

So when he does it, it's not because he has overts, or hidden crimes?

We were always supposed to listen to his criticism. But not anyone else's?

See?

That.

Right there.

It was a trick.

And you fell for it.

Robert Vaughn Young (RVY) was Mike Rinder's predecessor for many years as the head of the Guardian's Office under Mary Sue Hubbard. He woke up from the spell of Scientology in the 1990's and contributed some of the best critical writing on Scientology that exists.

RVY was diagnosed with prostate cancer and was dying when this letter was written.

I post it here because it is an important part of Scientology history. I post it also because I greatly admire Robert Vaughn Young, and he asks some questions here that he, apparently, never got answered.

I also post it because this subject is very important to the recovery of any cult member. It has been largely avoided: how does the group environment which shapes totalitarian cults like the Church of Scientology make people like Mike Rinder and Marty Rathbun act the way they did?

Marty has addressed many things (but certainly not too many) about his past actions as a fervent Sea Org member, working his guts out to "save planet Earth". But Mike Rinder has said nothing publicly about this. What motivated the actions that he took against critics of Scientology? Does he now see himself as having been a fanatic back then? Or is he still proud of the way he acted for the greatest good for the greatest number of dynamics?

Another reason I post this is because, as I move through this series on the history of Scientology criticism, Mike Rinder returns again and again. As does Marty Rathbun. There is really no way to avoid discussing Mike Rinder's and Marty Rathbun's behavior when looking at this history.

Robert Vaughn Young titled his letter an "Open Letter to Mike Rinder from Robert Vaughn Young"

You can find more of RVY's writings here.

***

From: writer@eskimo.com (Robert Vaughn Young)
Subject: Open Letter to Mike Rinder from Robert Vaughn Young
Date: 23 Feb 2000 00:30:12 GMT
Message-ID: <88v9mk$9e1$1@eskinews.eskimo.com>
An Open Letter to Mike Rinder
Sunday, February 20, 2000
© Robert Vaughn Young

Dear Mike:

It's a very early Sunday morning in Cincinnati. I finished three posts yesterday that I will put onto ARS and this will wrap it up for me.

I'm making this an "open letter" not for the benefit of people on ARS. Except for Stacy and Jesse, they haven't got a clue as to who you are and what really goes on. No, I'm doing this "open" so it can be found more easily by your staff, especially those who know me and the topics I'll mention. Otherwise, it would just be excerpted, sent to DM and that would be the end of that.

You and I go back a long way, Mike. And until a moment in Tampa during my testimony, I always considered us to be basically friends. You don't understand my side, but I understand yours because I've been there. That's why I know that while I might have you asked how things or the family were, you had to "keep your hat on."

In that regard, I've never held the harassment against you personally. Besides, I figured that there is some of it you actually don't know about because you never ordered it and the PIs don't report it to you. Besides, it's your job. You're supposed to make life miserable for us "suppressives," right? So to the degree that I've been there, I never held it personally against you.

But there was a moment in my testimony when it changed. It was the closing hour of the last day. Weinberg was doing is "re-cross" and I was sick and in pain and having trouble following the questions and asked for a break. Weinberg pushed it saying he had only a little bit more and I said I really have to break and you shook your head (one of those I-can-t-believe-it-shakes) and laughed and I called you on it. It should be on the record. And then we finally took the break. That was when it changed, when you decided to mock my condition. That's when I realized that you really are gone.

Then afterwards, we passed each other in that drug store downstairs. I would have normally said hello but not this time, so we just passed each other. As we did, I was tempted to turn around and tell you privately what I've said here, that you had crossed a line and I'm sorry for you, but I decided no, it's no use and he'd probably just file a declaration that I had made threatening remarks and go to the judge for a hearing. At the very least, you'd make a report and I wanted it to just be between us, but that was impossible. But I was left with wanting to tell you and so I was left with having to write this letter.

Don't get me wrong. It wasn't that what you said made me feel worse about my condition. It merely made me feel worse about yours. I've come to grips with my situation. You have yet to realize yours.

It's one thing when a couple of professionals go at it. They understand the turf. It's not personal. That's why I've understood your side of it. But it is another when you cross the professional line.

I may have made a lot of comments about your professional conduct, but I've never slighted you personally. I guess I always wanted to pretend that it was possible that we could sit down some time over coffee and chat, if nothing else about how kids grow up and life moves on. I knew you couldn't and wouldn't. It all has to be reported and you can't afford to relax around some "SP," can you? But that was okay with me. I wanted you to know that it was possible, that even though you couldn't be that way, I could.

Well, I was wrong. You really were one of those people who high-fived when you heard about the cancer and you really are glad that I'm dying. I'm sorry about that, Mike. I'm sorry that I was really wrong about you, that I thought that underneath it all, we were really friends.

It also teaches me that none of this will get through to you. It might some day, but not now.

It reminds me of a woman I was speaking to on the phone a few years ago. I don't recall who she was or how she found me but she called me to talk to me about her daughter (I think it was) who was in Scientology and she (the mother) was concerned. Well, I answered her questions as well as I could (always tempered with the caution that I have another plant being run in on me) until there was one question she asked. No one had ever asked me this one and it really rocked me back on my heels.

"When you were in there," she said, "was there anything anyone could have said to you that would have changed your mind?"

The question really rocked me. I went silent and thought about it for a few seconds and then the answer hit me even more.

"No," I answered. "I'm sorry to say this but there is nothing anyone could have told me or said to me that would have changed my mind. There might be something that someone can say to your daughter, but for me then, no."

That was a stunning realization. I wasn't able to explain to her why. I just left it there.

It was true. After all, being in Dept 20 PR and having to deal with all the criticism, I had read everything starting with the Australian inquiry back in the 60s which was probably the first real serious "organized" assault. I read the books by Paulette Cooper and the rest. Like you, I read every newspaper article and the accounts of defectors. Even after the FBI raid of 1977, I managed to read the seized Intell files. Those were the worst. What I read there made me sick. I had no idea how far over the edge B1 had gone. Attacking the "enemy" was one thing but what they were doing was another. It was like being a soldier in a war and finding that some of your fellows have taken to killing women and children. Even in war, it crosses the line. That's how I felt when I read those files finally one day. We (collectively) had really crossed the line. Yet even then, I didn't change my mind. I haven't thought about it that much, as to why I didn't. Maybe I thought they didn't represent us. Maybe I explained it away as being overly zealous. After all, I believed in what I was doing. These guys just went over the edge and now we were all paying the price so let's get thing back on the rails and get on with it.

So I did. I parked it and got on with it and continued for another 11 or so years and in the process, I continued to look the other way. That's how one moves up the ranks, isn't it? It's not how well you apply policy, but how well you can look the other way.

I don't know, Mike. Maybe I would have gotten to the point that I would have laughed at some "SP's" cancer. It turns my stomach to think I would have, but maybe I might have. I really don't know. I just know I never did get to that point when I really made it personal, when I really took on a former "friend" and really tried to degrade that "friend" personally. The closest I came was Gerry Armstrong, when I was called to testify against him. They really wanted me to come after him but I wouldn't. I tried to couch my testimony as they wanted it, that Gerry hadn't done certain research, but I wasn't able to use the language that they wanted because, as little as I knew him, I liked him and it didn't matter what he was doing or saying, that didn't change my personal feelings about him.

But it did for you and I have to call you on it, even though I know it won't reach you.

And something that just occurred today, Sunday. The girl that Dept 20 sent in on Stacy at the car wash. One of her lines was how Stacy was killing me, a clear reference to the cancer and a clear attempt to hit some button on her. You really have no scruples at all, do you Mike. I'm sure you gave DM a woodie on that one but all you prove is how low into the slime you really can go.

Little things like that show it is worse in there now than it ever was under Mary Sue, when it comes to the equivalent of wartime atrocities. B1 went over the edge because of the pressure and there has been more pressure these past years than there ever was back then. You've got DM breathing down your neck, not to mention Marty. He's a hatchet man from way back but he broke once and he might break again. In fact, I think there is a better chance of Marty coming to his senses and taking off than you.

There's another thing that's different now. You've got the threat of the Internet, and I don't mean ARS. (By the way, I have to compliment you professionally on how you guys finally figured out what to do about ARS with people like Enzo and various goons and shills and double agents. Not bad at all. The problem is that ARS is still there and still works. You've reduced its effectiveness but you haven't stopped it.)

What I mean by a threat is that any staff member or even a public can go onto the Net and get things that you can't control. Back in the "old days" we could control what the members and staff knew. When there was an entheta article in Philadelphia or East Grinstead, it could be contained. Now the damned things get thrown on the Net, not to mention court rulings and videos! It used to be that Dept. 20 was the only ones who knew about the entheta stories or adverse court rulings. Now they are right there for anyone to find, thanks to the Net. And nearly every public library has a connection to the World Wide Web so one of your staff or a public can walk in and log on and do a search and bingo, there it is. (And for the record, a good record of ARS is kept at , just to make your work even more enjoyable. - smile)

So you've got a chronic worry. It won't go away. Even this message and all of mine are preserved and my middle name is unique enough to allow an easy search. So you can't control any more what your staff and public comes to know. You can put secret little programs into their computers, but even that takes a chance. Some may not like being told what they can't read.

I have told Jesse time and again - and this last trip I said it several times - I am SOOOO glad that I am not a PR in there now. Lawdy, what a headache! And to have DM screaming the way he can scream. I can only imagine what he is like now that he has been named as a defendant in the McPherson case. We know that your ass is on the line and what your orders are. That's what it was like when LRH was being named and why B1 went over the edge and why you and your "B1" have done the same.

So the only question remaining is, who will be your Michael Meisner?

Who will finally say, I've had enough of this shit, and talk to the authorities? Hey, it might not even be in the US! You're already in deep kaw-kaw in Belgium and France, not to mention Germany. And from what I hear, you ain't exactly winning friends in Russia. Oh, and don't forget Greece and Spain.

And meanwhile, what's DM's #1 priority? Why, DM, of course! If he is served, all hell will break loose.

And THAT is why I don't envy you at all! I know what working with him is like. If anyone brings you to your senses, it will be David Miscavige.

Frankly, I don't think I'll be alive when that happens. I'd like to be. I'd like to see it happen. I just know that there is nothing I can say to you that will reach you. The only one who can change your mind is you and the only one who can prompt that is DM. He is personally responsible for more top staff leaving than anyone or anything else. Make a list in your head some time. You'll even know of some that none of us know about. It's just a matter of time before it is you. I hope it is sooner, rather than later.

In the meantime, I really am closing this out. I know you won't believe me and there is no reason for you to believe me, given the world of suspicion that you have to live in. But I'm retiring, as I said in the "hello & goodbye" post. And I really am looking forward to my new effort. I know what it is that I'm going to do. I just declined to spell it out in the post because I need to work out some details and they might change. No, it doesn't mean it is some "secret" (laugh) although you'll think that and be working diligently to find out. That's fine. Work away. What you might find out now is what you'll hear about later, hopefully, if I do this right. It's all in the direction of cancer education and has nothing to do with you guys. If you want to spend more IAS money there, go for it. And yeah, there are various ways that you can work to drag me back in, if you want to. But you're going to be chasing another dead end. (No pun intended. - laugh) I have better things to do now, things that I find more inspiring than playing stink finger with RTC. And as I said, you'll see or hear about my efforts in my new enterprise, or at least I hope so. There's a lot to be done in the field of educating men about prostate cancer and I just happen to have the skills, the initiative and the qualifications for what I want to do. (No, I haven't written any "scholarly" articles or have any degrees nor have I had a "peer review. - ROFL) You see, the only credential one needs to have to speak about living with cancer is cancer. It helps to have some writing skills and PR skills to know what to do with the experience and I have a little there. (smile) That's why my new enterprise excites me so much. I merely decided to use what I have - including the cancer - to make a contribution that I can be proud of.

So if you ever change your mind and want someone to talk to, you can call me. You'll know where I am. Just check the last surveillance report. (laugh) My only function will be to lend a sympathetic ear. But you'll have to apologize to me for the personal shit. That's for your benefit, Mike, not mine. Otherwise, I'm out of the loop now. I'm off to fight a cancer for which there is no known cure.

I do hope that when you hear about what I'm doing that you think it is valuable. It will mean that you have some shred of true decency, compassion and humanity left in you.

Take care,
Robert Vaughn Young
2/20/99

Everyone has a "Sacred Sense".

It's that feeling of awe and holiness that you reserve solely for those things you find sacred in life. Sacred things are so valuable they can not be priced. They are protected and lovingly preserved.

They are opposite to the profane. Profane things are those things which you find vile, repulsive, and even evil. Profane things are flushed away into the sewers of life. You try never to keep them around.

So there is the sacred, and the profane.

The one thing that you must never do, is mix the two together.

The very first time I found my self being a critic of Scientology in real life was during an OSA Operation that was being run on me. A friend of mine had a girlfriend whose mother was an OT VIII, and a fervent, even fanatical, Scientologist. She hated my friend, her daughter's boyfriend. And the fact that the two of us were talking about things that we found distasteful in Scientology gave her the perfect opportunity to prove to her daughter that she should dump her boyfriend, and it also allowed her to strike an effective blow to the Critics of the Internet.

A win-win for her.

I had been writing things on the Internet, as is, obviously, my wont. And some of those things were musings about Scientology. Well, all right, they were more than musings. They were downright disloyal. I had begun to commit the crime of telling unacceptable truths.

This was the year 2001, and the Church of Scientology was very hot on tailing people, running espionage operations, and gathering intelligence for Fair Game campaigns on those who were being critical of Scientology on the Internet.

Working with OSA, the fanatical OT VIII instructed her daughter to get into a conversation with me on Scientology in order to find out whether I was still loyal or not, and to see if I was on the Internet, writing things about it. Then she was to report back everything I had said.

We all three worked together at the same company, owned by Scientologists. I had been acting like I was still a Scientologist in order to keep my job as a Vice President there, and to keep all my friends who would disconnect from me if they found out what I really thought. I was also very terrified of being discovered thinking things and saying things and writings things on the Internet that might not be what I was supposed to say and think. And write. I had been seeing, picking at, and tearing open the cracks in the walls of the Scientology Truman Show for quite a few months now and my new awareness was putting my life in danger of falling apart.

I was about to lose everything. And I knew it.

But I was getting tired of it. I had gotten in to Scientology seeking the truth, and for the life of me, I could not figure out why I would give up that search just because I had become a Scientologist. So when my friend called me and said that his girlfriend was curious about my views on Scientology now, and wanted to talk to me, I knew exactly what was going on. I knew that if I told her the truth of what I thought, it would be the beginning of the end for me.

I decided that it was more important to tell the truth than to keep my job. And so when we met at a restaurant to discuss Scientology, I knew that I was committing suicide as a Scientologist. I decided that I was going to tell this girl everything that I had found out about the true life story of L Ron Hubbard, how he died, what his true war record was, and how many lies he told in order to sell Scientology to people. And everything else I had learned.

I was going to shit all over her sense of the sacred.

Once it began, something happened which I had not anticipated. It was the look on her face. As I sat there and told her that the founder of her religion never saw combat in World War II, was never "blinded and crippled" and never used Dianetics to cure himself, that this was all a lie to sell Dianetics, I could see, right there on her face, that I was crushing her. She was younger and I was an executive at her company. She looked up to me. And here I was, letting her have it with all the most profane lessons I had learned about what she found sacred.

She was obviously not up to the task of being an OSA informant, and I was not up to the task of being a hardboiled critic of Scientology. We both felt absolutely horrible about what we had done. When it was over, it was very hard to tell what benefit I had gained from telling the truth. In fact, I could see no gain at all. Only shitty feelings, shitty thoughts, and shitty words that make you feel like shit.

People believe things, and they take deep sustenance from those beliefs. Those beliefs give them the strength and the life force to get up in the morning and to handle what comes up in their day. When life becomes injurious, their beliefs heal.

Scientologists derive great joy and purpose and grace from their religion.

That's what sucks about being a critic of Scientology.

Ever since October of 1950, when Dr. Joseph Winter publicly left the burgeoning Dianetic movement and wrote a book called "A Doctor's Report on Dianetics", L Ron Hubbard had a problem.

Books like that made his stats crash. People who were involved in Dianetics, or the families and friends of those involved, would read these books and begin asking difficult questions about things that might uncover "unacceptable truths" in Ron's past, or other problems for his income. Sometimes it was easy for Ron to handle the difficult questions which came from the information these books exposed.

Other times - not so much.

In order to keep his stats up, LRH developed many handlings for this criticism problem over the years. One of the handlings he developed was to define the word "criticism" itself as meaning something almost completely different than its ordinary English definition.

In HCOB 21 January 1960 "JUSTIFICATION", Hubbard wrote "Most criticism is justification for having done an overt. There are rightnesses and wrongnesses in conduct and society at large, but random carping 1.1 criticism when not borne out in fact is only an effort to reduce the size of the target of the overt."

And then in February of 1962, on Saint Hill Special Briefing Course tape number 119, LRH said that "criticism is a hope that they can damage, and that's what a criticism is, with an inability to do so."

[SOURCE: Dianetics and Scientology Technical Dictionary, Page 98]

However, the English definition of criticism is somewhat similar to LRH's, but LRH's definition leaves out a very important concept that is essential to the word, one contained in the first definition of the Random House College:

"the act or art of analyzing and judging the quality of something, esp. a literary or artistic work, musical performance, dramatic production, etc."

The derivation of the word "critic" contains the essence of this concept that LRH leaves out:

From Latin critic(us) from Greek kritikos: skilled in judging. Also kri(nein): (to) separate, decide.

Present day, sloppy-thinking Scientologists tend to hear the word "critic" or "criticism" and think only what LRH taught them to think. LRH's built-in make-wrong of the concept kicks in on them and this instantly justifies that they ignore what the critic is saying.

Indeed, LRH himself, in 1967 developed the technology for handling "Critics of Scientology" in HCOB 5 November 1967 of the same name:

"Never discuss Scientology with the critic. Just discuss his or her crimes, known and unknown. And act completely confident that those crimes exist. Because they do.'

"Life will suddenly become much more interesting—and you'll become much less suppressed!"

So a Scientologist who uncritically accepts LRH's handlings for critics of Scientology tends to avoid all criticism of Scientology, including reasoned, critical analysis of Scientology by outside, objective sources. To be sure, there is good, honest, skillful and disciplined criticism. And there is criticism that is not.

Good, useful criticism does require logical skill, discipline and intellectual honesty.

In fact, the study of logic itself is now called the study of "critical thinking".

Is that "justification for having done an overt"?

Absolutely not.

So contrary to what LRH taught Scientologists over the years, real criticism is valuable. It is the ability to see the good and the bad of something, and to evaluate and to report those qualities with accuracy.

When you are going to involve yourself in a subject that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, contains 2.5, 5 and 1 billion year no-pay indentured servitude labor contracts, and which puts your family and friends at risk of disconnection, good criticism is a vital social service. It exposes information that would remain hidden from you, and it creates a climate that allows people to make more informed decisions as to their own involvement in Scientology.

Ever since the days of ole Doc Winter, good Scientology criticism has helped people to keep their critical thinking skills intact, and to avoid Scientology's pitfalls.

Now.

I am going to reveal something to you, dear AlanzosBlog Reader:

This post is an example of Scientology criticism.

There.

That wasn't so bad, was it?

For all you newly out independent Scientologists who have broken free of the chains of Miscavigology, and who have allowed yourself to be truly free - I salute you.

You have applied the courage and integrity to come up to a level of truth and personal freedom where you will not simply swallow the platitudes of some Scientology “Opinion Leader”, or the threats of some Church Bureaucrat, and you have willed yourself to confront and evaluate ALL the ideas about Scientology- its true history and all its many effects and activities on planet Earth.

You trust yourself to think for yourself – and to come to your own conclusions.

That is to be Highly Commended.

Welcome to AlanzosBlog.

As a former Scientologist who joined the Church in 1984 and sincerely and fervently believed in the same ideals that you did when you first joined – as expressed in the Creed of the Church of Scientology - I personally have the utmost respect and admiration for you.

I know who you are: You are just like me.

As a Scientologist, I believe that you should have all the freedoms that civilized nations recognize – the freedom of speech, the freedom of thought, and the freedom to believe as you wish – no matter what anyone else says or thinks – no matter who they are.

I can proudly say that I have actually fought for those rights of yours, and mine, and I have received some real damage in my own life for that fight. The damage I have received is nothing compared to others. But I will never back away from this fight – for it is far too important for you and all of us, no matter the damage I may receive myself personally.

Having said that - You should know who I really am.

I am nobody.

I was an Exec Dir of a Mission in Peoria, IL, of all places. It is the oldest established mission in Scientology, run by a Class VIII, OT VIII who I worked with every day – George Seidler - whose first cert on his wall is “Hubbard Dianetic Auditor” , dated June of 1950 – signed personally by L Ron Hubbard.

That mission, and my post as Executive Director, when I joined, gave my life purpose. I’d been a pot-smoking, aimless and depressed rock drummer kind of janitor-guy, with no real future that I saw for myself, and no hope of happiness and success that I could see.

Until I became a Scientologist.

Scientology saved my life at that time. And for that I will be eternally grateful to it.

After my time on staff in Peoria, I moved to Los Angeles to continue up the Bridge and I worked as a staff member in other missions in Southern California, disseminating Scientology, and working , basically for free, for 7.5 years – all tolled.

As a Scientologist on the Bridge, I made it to Clear, and OT Preps completion at AOLA, and studied up to Level J of the Saint Hill Special Briefing Course at ASHO. I am a Golden Age of Tech Ethics Specialist, and a Data Series Evaluator. I studied to Exec Status One in Admin Tech.

I devoted my life to the goals of the Church of Scientology for 16 years.

After writing up Knowledge Reports and all kinds of other reports of abuses and violations of the ideals of Scientology for years, I finally left the Church of What Became Miscavigology in the year 2000, and have since become a critic of the Church of Scientology for the last 9 years on the Internet.

I began my career as a critic on the Internet on Alt.Religion.Scientology (ARS), and then moved to Beliefnet.com, and finally ended up at the Ex-Scientologist Message Board (ESMB), where I have now reached to the top of the ESMB Bridge to Total Status, with over 10,000 posts. (That’s a lot of criticism!)

I have never stopped believing in the ideals expressed in the Creed of the Church of Scientology, and I have paid the price in terms of Fair Game from the Church of Scientology for them. I have continued to believe and to fight for those same ideals every day of my life since leaving the Church of Scientology 9 years ago, and I will never stop doing so.

That is who I really am.

And if that makes me an enemy of yours, then you should hide yourself away from my frightful ideas right now, before we continue on to Part Two - A History of Scientology Criticism.

But if you still have the integrity that made you first recognize the ideals of freedom expressed in the Creed of the Church of Scientology, then you should tie yourself to the mast, and beseech your better angels to soldier on.

For if you truly trust yourself, then you can discern the truth from the lies - no matter who tells them.

Then, and only then, can you finally be free.

Alanzo

Feeling "bypassed" and inadequate, long-term Scientology Critics across the Internet are flooding the natter boards with their constant carping about how "Marty's Mafia" has emerged to usurp the attention of all the online Scientologists and is exploiting all their years of hard work.

Everyone knows that anyone who left Scientology before 2004 or so, is an actual, real SP, and probably never got Scientology anyway (with all their overts and MUs), and only those who left after years of being beaten by David Miscavige (and who spent years inside the Church fair-gaming those same low-toned critics who left before them) were the REAL true-blue Scientologists anyway.

It just goes to show that following a fixed and pinheaded ideology to the absolute, bitter end will ever get you anywhere.

March 6th, 1981.

My story begins in an L-shaped room on Green Street in Champaign, IL. It was an L-shaped room because it was the corner of a hallway in an old house on campus that had been cut up into student apartments. It was literally a corner with a door on it. Inside the door was a place to hang my clothes. At the corner was a desk with a little refrigerator underneath. And around the corner was my bed, with a table hanging over, and a 13 inch black and white TV on top, with foil on the antennae for improved reception.

I told my friends that I did not want to be disturbed, that I was going in alone, and that I would not be coming out for the rest of the night, so don't call and don't come over.

I sat in my little room on my bed, anticipating my newest quest: I had just taken two hits of Microdot, a form of LSD, that came in little round pellets.

My mission was to take this acid and write down everything I thought. In this way, moving from one state of consciousness to another, I felt that I might catch a common denominator between the two, and thus distill a little bit of truth out of my existence.

The rest is taken verbatim from my handwritten notes at the time.

"5:55pm. Walter Cronkite is about to come back from a commercial break and say he is retiring, and I just took two hits of acid.'

"Walter said that this 'passing of the baton' is just him giving up his seat to another man. Nothing will change. Old anchormen don't fade away, they just keep coming back for more.'

"6:69pm. The back of my throat and my cheeks are beginning to feel 'anxious'. It almost feels like the roof of my mouth and the back of my neck wants to yawn and rid itself of the tension. It's not an unpleasant tension, it's almost an anticipatory tension that I don't want to be relieved. My spine seems like it's 'coming alive'. (I'm starting to note it in my sensory field)'

"7:00pm. I am getting tingles and shivers. My lips and tongue feel a little like I'm licking the top of a battery. I feel tense - but when I move, I'm reminded that I'm not. I'm farting quite a bit, too. The tension I feel can be described as the tension felt right before orgasm - without the intense pleasure sensation. (This is because of the lack of all the pleasure nerves in the other parts of the body that exist in the genitals.)'

"7:20pm. The anxiety and tension I feel is not so pleasant right now. I feel a little nauseous and I can tell my digestive system is working extensively. It is only through movements of various parts of my body that relieves this constant tension. So I'm rocking and tapping my feet a lot as I write. '

"7:28pm. I am aware that my digestive system is working. It feels out of balance.'

"Everything is in my sensory field right now. I am constantly moving around and fidgeting. It's hard to even complete a thought on this piece of paper because it takes so long to write. Yes, I'm moving around quite a bit as I sit. The TV can be very annoying at times.'

"7:39pm. I can not stop jerking or moving my legs. I can stop when I want to but I want to keep them moving. There is no doubt that this drug is working on my spine and lower brain. Same sensations as before. The sensation is like right before orgasm with no tension release. Nerve Gas!'

"7:42pm. The high inaudible scream that TVs emit is quite evident now. I also hear a reverberating tone coming from my TV. When I switch channels it goes away.'

"7:48pm. The nausea is gone now and I'm smiling a lot. The only smell I can smell is like either a skunk or a sour body odor. My spine feels quite good. The paper is breathing. Those things directly in my concentration are clear but those outside are furry and glowing and breathing. I can see flashes of color on this page.'

"7:58pm. I feel good right now though not "satisfied". Visual hallucinations. The shadows intensify in their shades and contrasts. At the borders. Where everything exists. I can immerse myself in anything I want. Tapping on a lamp or watching shadows breathe, etc. Shivers. Sensual.'

"8:34pm. I haven't noticed the the TV in quite a while. Boss Hogg is on. The Dukes of Hazzard. So many thoughts are whirling around it seems. I can't catch one and put it here. I am sweating. '

"9:10pm. Lights and shades are changing always.'

"12:49am. I'm done now, I think. I feel as if all the world was taken away, real quick, and in that void I looked around and saw how everything really was/is. Nothing matters. We are creatures of the senses. We see things of a sensual and erotic nature all around us every day. Whatever will fill up the senses is what we're looking for. Loud Rock-n-Roll. Pornography. What I have found though is that writing this down is telling another what I have experienced. All that matters is that I find someone to tell these things to. I need somebody to love. Love is the only thing that matters."

OK. That's it.

That was my first attempt at the scientific discovery of my existence.

I went in, alone, and this is what I came out with. It would not be the first time that a quest like this would come up short of what you had hoped for. But the scientific research of existence is a hit and miss kind of thing, isn't it?

My quest would take me from Champaign, IL, to Cairo, Egypt, to Jerusalem, the Sinai Desert, to Athens, to Casablanca, and back to Champaign. And then, finally to a mission, on John Street, and down into a dank basement.... with a Dianetics book in my hand.

The Champaign, IL Mission of the Church of Scientology was in the basement of a house that had been converted into businesses on the edge of downtown.

Through a screen door, you descended a flight of stairs that turned into a small, dank room with a used green couch, a beat up desk, and some bookcases. I later learned that the couch was Division 6 of the organization. The desk was Division 7, and the bookcase was Division 2.

Connie stood at the bottom of the stairs and greeted me. I stood there with a Dianetics book in my hand, breathing heavily. I had just ridden over on my bike, once I had gotten the courage to go in, and I'm pretty sure I had a determined, almost driven, look on my face.

I looked at her intently and said, "This is the most fascinating book I've ever read, but I'm not going to join any fucking cult!"

She laughed.

This was probably the best response I could have gotten from her. Had she been insulted, scared, angry, or even confused, I would have turned around and walked out. But she laughed. So I stayed.

We talked for at least two hours, which was perfect. There was no one else in the mission. The phone did not ring, no one else bothered us. It was exactly what I needed: to talk to somebody about my life and my problems. We talked about my dad and how much we fought. I told her about my ex-girlfriend and even how lonely I was. I said that I believed in past lives and I asked her:

"Do Scientologists believe in God?"

"Why do you ask?"

"Because I believe in God. And I believe that you can have a direct connection with God without the need for Priests, or Ministers or anything else."

Having checked my answer in order to decide how to respond appropriately, Connie said, "Of Course Scientologists believe in God!" She took me over to show me the Creed of the Church of Scientology, which had GOD written all over it. She told me about the 8th Dynamic which was how Scientologists referred to God, she said.

Then we talked about L Ron Hubbard. She called him "Ron". She told me what a great writer and world traveler he was. A barnstorming pilot, etc.

I told her that I was a world traveler, too - I had returned from a 14 month trip overseas, backpacking through Egypt, Israel, Greece and Morocco. Her eyes were wide with excitement and admiration, "Wow!" she said. She seemed fascinated with me and in my stories, beliefs, and experiences. She made me feel like I was one of the smartest, most interesting people in the world. Then she tried to sell me a book called "Self Analysis" by L Ron Hubbard.

I said I didn't have any money and she backed off.

I left that day with a lot of hope. I was supposed to come back and listen to a tape.

I was a very depressed kid in my early 20's at the time, sick of my life and sick of all the hypocrisy and materialism I saw in the world. Martin Luther King had been assassinated when I was 8 years old. I could never figure out who could ever do such a thing, and what kind of a world did we live in if that's how we are going to act? I got the impression that some day, through Dianetics, I may be able to understand that, and everything else, too.

For some reason Connie was very interested in the kinds of drugs I had taken, and was very detailed in her questions about them. I told her everything, and that I was sick of drugs, and had read in Carlos Castenada how the shaman Don Juan had only used drugs on him in the beginning to get him to "stop the world" so that he could see what he needed to see later on.

Connie said that if I truly wanted to have a better connection with God, then I could probably have a lot better one if I was not doing drugs. That seemed to make a lot of sense to me.

I went home, did a bong, and thought about it.

I started my first course in Scientology on July 4th, 1984. My abysmal Free Personality Test results, plus the conversations I had with Connie, provided the ironclad scientific proof necessary to determine that I was PTS. I was a "Potential Trouble Source". I was trouble to my friends, to myself, and possibly trouble to the Church, too. I "rollercoastered" which meant that I went up and down emotionally, and it also meant that I could lose my gains in Scientology. I needed to be stabilized.

So I purchased the "Ups and Downs in Life Course" and started immediately.

I come from an upper-middle class white family. My father and I were constantly fighting, ever since I was a little boy. While working on the furnace in the basement, he would always have me hold the flashlight, and I would never do it right. And so I would throw the flashlight down and storm off. Or he would come in to help me put a kite together because I wasn't doing it right, and he often broke the wooden parts of the kite. I would blow up and storm off.

And now, since I was a good-for-nothing college drop out, working as a janitor at a bank and partying like an alley cat, we were fighting pretty regularly.

In the early to mid-1980's, the Ups and Downs in Life Course in Scientology had practical exercises at the end of it. To graduate, a student had to apply what he had learned on the course to whoever came up on it.

The course taught me that the reason I was going up and down emotionally, and the reason I was a "Potential Trouble Source", was because I was connected to someone who was invalidating me or my goals in life. It taught me about "Social" and "Anti-Social" personalities. It talked about evaluation and invalidation, about "granting beingness" to others. And it taught me that when you have someone who is invalidating you, and acting like a "suppressive person" to you and your goals in life, you must either "handle", or "disconnect" from them.

My dad was the biggest source of invalidation in my life. Nothing I did was right to him.

And so my handling was to go home to my parent's house for the weekend and NOT get into a fight with my dad. We used role playing. First, they asked me what types of things my dad would say to me that would set me off. Then they sat across from me, acting like my father saying those things to me until I could control my reactions and not let it get to me. They called this "flattening my buttons" on him. It was actually very therapeutic, and really a lot of fun.

And, it was many hours of work from a lot of staff for $50 (the cost of the course back then) It really helped me to be able to sit across from someone and do all that.

When I got to my parent's house that night, it had been a typical Friday for me. I had been out at the bars all night and I snuck in at about 2:30am.

Everyone was asleep. Excellent.

I turned on the TV in the kitchen and opened the refrigerator: One of my mom's famous meatloafs displayed herself right back at me. As I took it out this luscious thing and placed it on the counter, I heard footsteps coming down the stairs and a throat clearing which sent the alarm waves out that my father was approaching.

Shit! I'm fucked up as hell! I've been drinking all night and I have to apply my Scientology course to my dad now! Oh God. Not now! I'm starting to get a stomach ache. I went over the things in my mind I needed to apply: Grant Beingness, no evaluation or invalidation, don't take up any entheta...OK.

There he is. He's entered the kitchen. I cut a slice of meat loaf and put the rest away in the refrigerator, being careful to re-cover it like I'm supposed to. My dad sits down at the kitchen table and starts watching TV.

My father was born in the South in the 1920's. He lived in Birmingham, Alabama when Martin Luther King first began the civil rights movement there. My father was a staunch Reagan Man. I was a member of the Communist Party.

I say hello and sit down with him.

I dig into the meat loaf. It was sooo good. Plus, it gave me something to do instead of having to talk to him. There was some kind of news show on TV. A documentary or something. I could not believe it at the time, but it just so happened to be a documentary on the Civil rights movement, and yep, there's a picture of Martin Luther King on the screen.

My father looked at me. "There's that nigger." he said.

I looked down at my plate and took the next big bite of my meatloaf.

"I said...There's that NIGGER!"

My head was starting to hurt now, along with my stomach. I looked up.

"Have you tried this meatloaf? It's excellent."

"Yes I have. It is good.... Where were you, tonight?"

"Went down to JJ's Saloon, saw Brad and Kelly."

"Partyin' again?"

"Yes. I had a good time. Jimmy Kerrick says hi."

"Oh. He's an all right kid."

"Yeah, he is."

Then, my dad got up from the table and went back upstairs to bed.

I dropped my fork. I couldn't believe that I had made it through that! My stomach hurt and my head was splitting, but I had successfully gotten through something I never was able to do before.

I had NOT gotten into a fight with my dad!

There was a phone on the floor of my old bedroom that had a broken ringer. For years, whenever someone called our house, and I was in my bedroom, I always had to listen through the bedroom wall to the phone in the other room to tell when when the phone was ringing.

I have no idea why, but this next morning I got up to see if I could fix it.

I shut the door to be able to work in peace. My dad was home and I was avoiding him to make sure that my "win" from the night earlier lasted.

I got out a philips screw driver and took the cover off the phone. I could NOT believe it - as soon as I had done this, he came into my room.

"What are you doing?"

"I'm fixing my phone."

"Here, let me see that." He literally grabbed the screwdriver out of my hand.

I glared at him.

Then I looked down at the phone and said, "It's that wire right there. It needs to go over underneath that screw." He tried to yank it over.

I said, "Here. I'll hold the wire, and you screw it in."

He did.

"Call Mr. Boeh (our neighbor) and have him call us to see if it worked."

I did, and when Mr. Boeh called back, my phone rang. I jumped for joy.

My dad was looking at me. "What's that course you're doing?"

"Scientology"

"It's good. I think it's good for you. You need it." Then he walked out.

I collapsed on my bed. I HAD JUST FIXED A PHONE WITH MY DAD!

This was a miracle. This was something that was really really bothering me - my relationship with my father - and I applied Scientology and it worked! It had shown me a way to improve something in my life that had been impossible to improve before.

I cried for two hours.

My next course was the Hubbard Qualified Scientologist (HQS) Course.

Now, this HQS course is not the one the Church delivers today. This HQS course contained all the communication drills that you pay thousands of dollars for in Scientology called "TRs", or Training Routines. It also had actual Scientology counseling on it, the kind you pay tens of thousands of dollars for today, called "The Objectives" and even some of the "ARC Straightwire" processes on it. It taught you some of Hubbard's "Study Technology" and all kinds of other things that people coming in to Scientology usually never get because they run screaming from the place before it ever gets offered to them.

The HQS course only cost $500. I was so excited from the successes I had from my Ups and Downs in Life Course, and I was so sure that Scientology could help me create a better life for myself, that I was easily convinced to take out a loan from the bank I worked for to buy it.

For this course, I needed a twin, or a person who I studied the course with and applied the counseling to, and who would apply it back to me on a turn-about basis. When I showed up for my first day, my twin was there. He was a kid my age, a star gymnast, it turned out, on the U of I gymnastics team. His name was Charles Lakes.

Charles had read Dianetics and had actually audited someone else. I was very impressed by this. Connie said that he was a very good auditor. I immediately felt the competitive urge to finish reading the Dianetics book and audit someone else, too, just to make sure that I was not lagging. And anyway, if Charles was a good auditor, I was going to be an even better one.

We were perfect twins for each other. Charles was from Southern California, and was one of the first black gymnasts in the country. He NOT a straight-arrow jock by any means. We both believed that Scientology was the most vital thing in our lives. We had many very similar viewpoints and interests.

The course took us 9 months to get through. At the end of it, I was a Scientologist. And Charles was one of my best friends. I had quit smoking pot, and all drugs, and had stopped partying so much. I had gotten a new job as a salesman and was making more money. I was much more stable and in control of my own life. I was a lot happier.

But before I had fully completed the HQS course, I was told that I needed to have some auditing on the EMeter. I was told that I needed a "Life Repair" and that could only be delivered by the mission in Peoria, IL because they had 3 very highly trained auditors there, George, his son Andy, and Andy's wife Cyndi.

The Church of Scientology, Mission in Peoria, IL was much bigger than the mission in Champaign. The Peoria mission was in a 6,000 square foot storefront on Main street. It had a huge bookstore, a huge courseroom, a full Qualifications area, 10 counseling rooms, an Examiner's booth, a Communications Nerve Center, Executive offices, and even a sauna in the back to deliver the Purification Rundown.

George was the Mission Holder. He was, at that time, a "New OT 7" and a Class 8 auditor. George's office walls were filled with all his certificates in Scientology.

In my first meeting with him, before he entered his office and I was in there alone, I browsed a few of them on his wall. The first Cert I saw was "Hubbard Dianetic Auditor" dated June of 1950, signed by L. Ron Hubbard. Since the Dianetics book itself was published in May of 1950, George had, in fact, been one of the first auditors on the planet and had worked directly with L Ron Hubbard.

I found out that he had been running this mission in Peoria, IL since 1954.

Another cert on his wall was "CLEARED THETA CLEAR". I had just read "A History of Man" recently, as well as "Scientology 8-80" where it talked about the abilities of someone who had reached "Cleared Theta Clear". They could read your thoughts and project mental image pictures into your mind. They could leave their body at will and travel anywhere they wanted. When their body died, they wouldn't. They could "postulate" whatever they wanted to come into existence, and it would.

And they could find the exact thing that was wrong with you, the stuff you could never see because it was unconscious and hidden from you, and they could free you from it.

I was in awe.

George is a short man, a little shorter than me, even. At that time he was in his late fifties and gray. He always had a smile on his face, with his eyes half closed. He looked like Yoda.

Andy, his son, was also a Class 8 auditor and C/S. He'd been in Scientology since the late 1960's, having grown up in Scientology. Andy was a great guy, always happy, always laughing. Always helping. Cyndi, Andy's wife, was from Los Angeles. They had met while studying the upper levels of Scientology there. Cyndi was a Class 6 auditor. She was very sweet. They were all the most helpful and the most welcoming people I had ever met.

These were the people who were going to repair my life for me.

I was beginning to get the idea that Scientology was the way out for me. I had begun to feel that my life was going absolutely nowhere, as, up to that time, I had been living it mostly from the top of a bar stool. My prospects for life were looking very thin to me, and I was not happy with the way things were going. In fact, I was very, very depressed.

When I look back on it now, from this perspective, I can say that Scientology saved my life. And these people - Connie, Charles, George, Andy, Cyndi and others, saved it.

Or else, I let them save it.

Or else, I paid them money and I took what they sold to me and changed my life with it for the better.

Or, I needed a big change in my life that gave me a new direction, and hope that my future would be better than my present.

Or, Scientology gave me the excuse to change. And so I did.

Or whatever - Scientology Saved My Life!

Scientologists in the Midwest are very few and far between.

Even though the Champaign Mission had probably 20,000 names in their mailing list, they were mostly names of college students who had temporarily lived in the area and moved away when they graduated. And yet L Ron Hubbard's policy letter called "GROSS INCOME, SENIOR DATUM" said that, in order to make money as an organization, it was always the number of names in central files, and the number of letters and mailings sent to those names that DETERMINED the gross income of a Scientology organization.

So Cary, the Commanding Officer of Scientology Missions International for the Eastern United States, would SCREAM on the phone to get all his Mission Holders and staff to send mailings EVERY WEEK to their mailing lists. When all the thousands of returns would come back, representing all that wasted money, he would just SCREAM for more. Because Gross Income Senior Datum by L. Ron Hubbard said what it said.

A later mission holder would be severely disciplined before a Committee of Evidence for destroying the Champaign Mission's mailing list. I've spoken to him about it since, and I believe that it was probably the most sensible thing that could have been done. He had to go down for it. But at least he spared the future staff of all that Gross Income going down the toity from applying L Ron Hubbard's GROSS INCOME SENIOR DATUM.

When I was on course at the Champaign Mission in the mid-1980's, there were two part time staff there - Connie, the Mission Holder, and Zach, the auditor/course supervisor. In the year or so that I was a regular public there, I met probably 10 other people who would self-identify as a Scientologist.

Because there are so few Scientologists in the Midwest, they have a lot to live up to if they are ever going to get any new people. They have to live up to Midwestern ideals and standards: They can't ever be arrogant or elitist, they can't charge a lot of money, they can't be too intrusive into others' lives, and they have to believe reasonable things - not whacked-out wierdo shit - ever. So you can see why Scientology has a hard time in the Midwestern United States.

As a result, missions had to be pretty reasonable places on the plains of Illinois in the 1980's if they were ever going to get and keep anybody. And for a kid like me, who needed more discipline and a greater purpose, and fewer drugs and less alcohol, they were a haven for the new life I was creating for my self.

I was on the Quad one day and the U of I and I looked over and saw Connie, the sweetest woman ever, standing there by herself, handing out fliers to a passing stream of students. The communications skills she learned from her TRs courses in Scientology were IN, and she handed each flyer out to each individual thetan with INTENTION. She got about 1 in 5 people to take one. A few, about 1 in 40, would tell her to "fuck off".

As I stood there, I saw that she cared a lot for these people. Why else would she be doing this? I walked up to her and said hello. She was glad to see me: She finally had an excuse to pack up and leave. Connie was an OT 3, the only one in Champaign at the time, and she would frequently talk to me about being an OT 3. I was very impressed by it. As we were walking away, she looked at the kids in the Quad and said "After what's been done to these people, they deserve something better. I won't stop until they get it."

She was completely sincere. I couldn't really figure out what she meant by "what had been done to these people" but I knew it was bad because Connie had told me so, and she was OT 3.

I began to think that my life would be better if I had a purpose, too.

I audited a lot of people on my HQS course and it really seemed to help them. This gave me a huge kick. And it made me much less nasty and selfish. Sardonic satire was no longer my favorite sense of humor. I enjoyed optimistic themes in movies. I was even starting to admire Ronald Reagan.

Deep down I had always believed that I was a secret genius, and that maybe this was what I was always meant to do - to save the world. As if some higher voice was leading me to it, I began to think that maybe Scientology was the way I was always supposed to fulfill this glorious destiny of mine. After all, Ron had said that Auditors were thetans who had lately arrived on the planet, and because they were less degraded than others who had been here longer than they had, they were more aware. Maybe Ron was describing me. Maybe Scientologists were my True Group of Secret Geniuses.

I made a decision that day that the Bridge to Total Freedom would be the new stable datum in my life. And going up it, and helping others to go up it, would be my life's central purpose.

I signed a 2.5 year contract to work on staff at the Champaign Mission. But I couldn't join right away, I had debts and money troubles to handle first. My dad was attacking again, and I was attacking back, and so it had been precisely and scientifically determined that I was PTS, Type A. It was thought to be very important to get that handled first or else I might be trouble to myself, to my friends, and to the Church. I would go up and down in life and lose my gains in Scientology.

The best place to fix that was back in Peoria.

So I went to the Peoria Mission for a "Search & Discovery" and some more "Potential Trouble Source" handlings by George & Andy - the smiling cornfed Class 8's of the Midwestern Plains.

When I got to Peoria, the first thing they did was route me onto the Introduction to Scientology Ethics Course. To this day, what I learned on this course has helped me more than anything I have ever learned in Scientology.

Scientology taught me a fundamental truth here that I will never forget: If you remain ethical, you will be happy. If you do not remain ethical, you will not. This one powerful idea literally changed my life. I was certainly ripe for the change. But truly, along with the auditing I received - the world was no longer the same for me.

Scientology teaches the hallowed truthiness that "Man is basically good". If you are basically good, and you do something bad, you can restrain yourself from your own success as punishment to yourself. And so they deal heavily in getting you to look at and confess fully all the bad things you have ever done. They call these bad things "overts". And they call the times when you hid those bad things from others "withholds".

New poeople aren;t really ever asked to confess all the bad things that you have done. It's too "out-gradient". They freak and run. So once you start to show signs of being on the team, or "with-Scientology", they start to have to tell them the bad stuff.

Also, Scientologists believe in past lives. And they believe that you have done bad things in past lives, and that's why you are in such bad shape today.

I encountered confessing my first big overt on Life Repair. Andy and I were in session, and he had uncovered an overt I committed when I was younger. I masturbated or stole some change or something. He asked for an earlier, similar overt and, looking into my mind, I didn't see anything in answer to his question. He asked again, and still nothing was there.

Looking down at the reaction he saw on his E-Meter, he said, "That. What was that?"

I saw a white scarf in my mind.

Right then, to me, Andy had instantly become the biggest asshole I had ever met. I fucking hated him. I told him that there was nothing there and that he should shut up and just fucking back off.

He laughed. And then, looking down at his meter, he asked again. "What was that?"

"OK, it's a white scarf, so what?"

"All right. Tell me more about the scarf...."

The scarf was a little white doily scarf, like the ones you see on the heads of Mennonites, or even Amish women today. There were Indians around. We were in the woods. And these Puritan people were killing Indians and being very unfair to them. Totally hypocritical. I was really, really mad at them.

So I raped the Mayor's wife. And they castrated me and let me bleed to death in the stocks in the middle of the town square.

After telling Andy about this incident in my mind, which had a LOT of upset, my eyes were WIDE. I felt horrible for having talked to Andy the way I did. He just laughed and said it was okay, a normal thing when you are being asked to confront something like that.

After that session, I was changed forever. I drove back home in a daze from Peoria and went to the local bar. (It was a Friday Night, after all) It's all I could think about. The whole world seemed totally different now. The bar was different. Earth was different. And more than that, I no longer saw myself the same way. I was literally in a daze. I kept gazing at the things in my mind while I walked through real life around me.

I sat down next to a childhood friend, ordered a beer, turned to him and said, "I raped the Puritan Mayor's wife in the 1600's and they castrated me and let me bleed to death in the town square."

He stood, picked up his beer, and walked away.

I didn't really even notice. I was still thinking about it, playing it over and over in my mind. It seemed very real to me. More real than the bar I was in. And it made so much sense, emotionally, to me and to the inner attitudes I'd lived with inside all my life.

More and more of my old friends would walk away from me, just like that, over the next few months.

It was the time in the mid 1980's when the first big national TV advertising was going on for Dianetics. You may remember the ads: "Why do you feel unhappy?"..."Answers on Page 234". Etc.

It was probably the only effective national campaign they ever had. Dianetics books sales were skyrocketing, and I was going to boom Dianetics in my local area.

I had a 1984 Honda Civic. I had plastered two Dianetic bumper stickers on the back of it. I had Dianetics books in my car. I was auditing my family, and anyone else who would sit still long enough. I was trying to get all my friends to quit drinking and smoking pot and snorting coke and to do Dianetics instead.

I remember walking into our local bar one afternoon. As I approached the door, I heard laughing and talking, and recognized many of the voices. I saw a lot of my friends cars in the parking lot. When I walked in, the whole place went silent. Nobody looked at me.

You know that feeling you get when you walk into a room and everyone has been talking about you?

Just then, a friend walked in the door behind me and yelled, "Hey! The I just saw the Dianetics Mobile - is Alanzo in here?"

Everyone bust out laughing. They thought that was real funny.

I didn't. I was beginning to think it was unethical to make fun of Dianetics, and of the people who were busting their guts out to bring everyone out of the mud. Maybe you've seen Tom Cruise interviewed when he gets all up in someone's face for criticizing Scientology. Well, Tom's lack of a sense of humor is nothing new in Scientology. That was one change that had started to occur.

Other changes were happening, too.

Even my mother had begun to notice changes. We were sitting around the living room with my family one day, and she said, "Look! Look at that!" I looked up and she was pointing at me. Everyone was looking at me. "See that?' she said, "He's smiling!" She was very happy seeing that I wasn't so sullen (and hungover) all the time.

My mother would read Edgar Cayce in the 1960's and other spiritualist writings. She would talk about it a lot when she was drinking. I wanted to get her into Scientology, as all Scientologists want for everyone, and so I told her that I was getting very, very interested in Scientology, spending more and more time there. (I knew this worried her a little because she had heard bad things about it.)

So, knowing that she was my mother, and knowing how much she worries, I told her one day "I don't know - I'm your son and I'm getting more and more involved in Scientology. You should probably check it out. It might be a cult."

She was in the next day. She routed onto the Success Through Communications Course. She loved it. She paid for auditing and pretty much became a Scientologist after that. I audited both of my sisters. My nearest sister came in and began taking courses. I even got my dad to come in and take a course. I got my whole family in. The mission loved me.

And things were much much better in my family as a result. We were quite a dysfunctional family, all fighting a lot, never eating together, slinging hurtful declarations at each other. It wasn't just me and my father. I wanted to use Scientology to fix my family. And it was true, after we began to look at Scientology, things got to be pretty good. At Thanksgiving, my sister even made a toast, holding her glass up and saying "I'm thankful for Alanzo, and his bringing Scientology into the family."

Even though I was losing friends left and right, the rest of my life was going much, much better.

With all the big wins I was having, and all the changes occurring in my life, my Life Repair was almost over. George brought me into his office and told me about a brand new auditing rundown which had just been released - the False Purpose Rundown. It was a series of auditing steps that located false purposes that you had been operating on in your life which prompted you to do bad things. Auditing those out, you could more easily be more ethical and not commit so many overts.

I was a prime candidate for this, it turned out.

He had been trained to deliver this False Purpose Rundown, and he had a special package he wanted me to know about: 2 12.5 hour blocks of auditing of the FPRD and a Purification Rundown for $5,000!

Normally, this would cost around $12,000 and this package was just what I needed and it would never be this cheap again.

Even with this awesome sale price, this was way more money than I had ever been asked to pay for Scientology. The Peoria Mission, in those days, was selling Life Repair auditing for $200 per every 12.5 hour block. "Life Repair" delivered by two Class 8's was basically taking up anything in life you wanted to talk about, and applying Scientology processes to those things to "release" them.

But this, 5,000 bucks, we were talking some money here. I had no way to get that kind of money.

"Well', George said, "How about your parents?"

"No way. I know I've gotten them interested, but...no way."

"Well, what if you told them about all the drugs you've done? And how the Purification Rundown was going to clean you out from that and help you to start new?"

"WHAT!!??!! Tell my parents about all the drugs I've done??? Are you crazy???"

George leaned back in his chair, half closed his eyes and smiled his smiled wide. He laughed real big and said, "It's not crazzzzy, Alanzo, it's the ethical thing to do!"

I thought about it. I am a graduate of the Intro to Scientology Ethics Course now. I should increase my integrity by confessing all the bad things I've ever done to the people around me. It was the ethical thing to do.

So I sat my parents down at the dining room table, these two people who had grown up in the 20's and 30's in ultra-conservative Alabama and Tennessee, and with as much gory detail as I could bare, I listed off the drugs that I had taken in my partying career:

"Cocaine, LSD, Psilocybin Mushrooms, Marijuana...pounds of marijuana...MDA, Mescaline, Angel Dust, Amphetimines, Valium, etc. etc."

They were both white with horror.

"But there's something I can do about it. Scientology has a way to clean me out from all that. It's called the Purification Rundown. This, along with this great new auditing thing called the False Purpose Rundown, is only $5,000."

It worked. They bought it. And the next day I went into the Peoria Mission with a $5,000 check in my hand from my dad.

George, Andy, and his wife Cyndi, literally JUMPED for joy when I handed it to them. They danced around in a circle and laughed. It caused an instant festival right there in the hallway.

"Wow." I thought. "I've really helped these people. They seem very happy with me."

I started on the Purification Rundown the next day.

And within two weeks I had signed a 5-year contract to work on staff at the Peoria Mission. This also made everyone happy with me. And since I had already begun my money handlings and other handlings there, I could start on staff in Peoria and get right on to my staff training and be an Expeditor. And when I was done with that, they would send me out to Los Angeles for advanced training to Class 6 auditor!

But first I had to go back to Champaign and tell Connie that even though I had signed a contract with her, I was actually going to go on staff in Peoria. When Cyndi was selling me to join staff in Peoria, I told her that I had reservations about signing another contract when I had already signed one with Connie. She told me that the Champaign Mission has only one auditor, and he's just a Class 4. Here, I would get all my auditing that I just bought and also be able to work on staff! And really, when you think about it, Alanzo, it's the greatest good for the greatest number of dynamics.

The "greatest good for the greatest number of dynamics" is a Scientologist's way of saying that something will produce the greatest good for the greatest number of people, and other areas of life, too. And so that thing is the most ethical thing you could do.

Scientologists are all about doing "the greatest good for the greatest number of dynamics."

So I went back to the Champaign mission and told Connie what I had done. She started crying. She had tried for years to get another staff member, and thought that I was going to be the next one. She and her husband wanted to move to LA, and she was going to need someone to replace her as Mission Holder. She thought it would be me.

I laid out all the reasons for joining staff there in Peoria rather than coming back here and working on staff in Champaign. "It's the greatest good for the greatest number of dynamics, Connie", I said.

She cried even louder.

Scientology, at first, offers to help you improve your relationships, communicate better, and become more effective at handling life. They interview you to find your "ruin" - the thing that you feel is your biggest downfall in life.

They then tell you - no matter what it is - that Scientology can handle that. Or, "something can be done about that".

Let's take a typical new recruit: a twenty year old male, whose ruin is that he feels he is shy with girls. He is told that "Scientology can handle that". He is told that if you purchase a communications course, you will become less shy when talking to girls.

So the guy signs up and pays for the course. He now has a purpose that he wants Scientology to help him to achieve. He feels that if this works, then Scientology will have improved his life in a very specific and measurable way.

He does his course and realizes some things about himself. He improves his skill at communication. He might be out at a bar one night, and he has learned about "confront" - the ability to be there and comfortably perceive. He talks to a girl and it goes well. He attributes his "win" to his study in Scientology. He begins to feel that Scientology is improving his life (and it very well may be).

But as he continues to participate in Scientology, he is told about Scientology's version of ethics and the need to take more responsibility in his own life. He begins to be sat down and talked to about bringing in more people - his friends and family - and getting them on course. He is told that this is the way to a better life, by taking more responsibility for others than just yourself.

Scientology salesmen sit him down and start to sell him on his next course or auditing. Usually it costs much more than his first course. He is told he'll need to apply "confronting", what he learned on his last course, to figuring out how to make some more money to pay for his next course in Scientology.

If he has further experiences applying his course to his shyness, not so good ones, he may start to feel shy with girls again. If he brings this up, he will be told that his next Scientology service, such as auditing, will address the mental causes for that shyness - which, he is told, is the part of Scientology he hasn't had yet, and so won't fully know if Scientology really cured his shyness with girls unless he gets ALL that Scientology has to offer in that area of life.

So he comes up with the money and buys the auditing. What he isn't told is that the drills he learned for communication were hypnotic techniques which were used to soften him up with trance states to make him more suggestible to statements like "a thetan can handle anything", "a thetan is immortal", and, "you are a thetan.".

For many reasons, he starts to see himself, not as the old self he was before Scientology, but now he sees himself more and more as a "thetan". The group he's in, made up of people he admires for how much Scientology they have done, are glad that he has finally realized that he is a "thetan".

"Thetan", of course, is defined by L Ron Hubbard. So now the way he sees himself is being defined and shaped by L Ron Hubbard, and he will look more and more to L Ron Hubbard tapes and writings to tell himself who he really is now.

He sees himself changing. Sometimes for the better. But as he does changes, his self-identity is being re-defined by L Ron Hubbard now.

The Scientology auditing he is getting is hypnosis. He is given suggestions by his auditor "we're going to handle your shyness with girls" and he is sent down into his mind to find the "causes" for this shyness. He becomes more and more positive that the causes for his shyness are there because all of Hubbard's books say they are.

He comes up with mental incidents during these sessions and these are all accepted, no matter how wild or impossible, and he is even praised for having them. As he digs around more in his mind, he believes he is learning more and more about himself as a "thetan". He begins to evaluate each new incident from his auditing with what LRH says about it. During this process, he is fitting his own self-identity into the concepts and cognitive structure of what a Scientologist is supposed to be. Now he is really looking very different to himself.

As he continues to reshape his personality to be more and more of a Scientologist, he begins to become more and more committed to the various causes and crusades that Scientologists are told to set out upon. He may be recruited for staff to "clear the planet" or "create a new civilization". Now, though, when he talks about how he still has his problems with girls, he is distracted off of that and onto the importance of clearing the planet.

Scientologists are continually told that joining staff in a Scientology Org is the way to "take more responsbility", and become more "ethical". At this stage of the Scientology Indoctrination, anyone who is still worried about finding a mate and settling down to build a life with them is stuck in a "Wog Mentality", and those old goals you had are continually devalued and even invalidated. Real thetans want to "Clear the Planet" and are no longer worried about such things. In order to fully change from his old self to be "more himself as a thetan", he may join staff now.

If so, he is now working 12-14 hour days for no pay and being pressured to keep his stats up week after week. All with the highest of ideals that his new Self has adopted. - to clear the planet.

Has he found a mate yet? Usually, no. Is he still shy with girls? Usually yes. But now he's playing a bigger game - not that old irresponsible wog game of finding a mate and settling down with her, either.

He's clearing the planet!

He now wants to use Scientology to clear the planet, not handle his shyness with girls.

Now he wants IMMORTALITY, and A CLEARED PLANET and A NEW CIVILIZATION. The human race is a bunch of "wogs" and they live pointless lives of nothing important. He sees his old goal of finding a mate and getting married as just so self indulgent now - while earthlings are "dying in the witchpit". He now lives on a planet that is part of the Galactic Confederacy, one that has been used as a prison by other alien civilizations. And now he has been given the opportunity, as a Scientologist, to FREE this prison planet and all the thetans on it - with Scientology!

He has completely forgotten why he came in in the first place. His goals have now all shifted from improving his own life to what Scientology says his goals are.

Yes, Scientology offers something completely different than other religions or self help groups.

Scientology offers a personality shift to a whole new "you"!

He has become an artificial, implanted personality, made up by L Ron Hubbard for the purpose of gaining greater control over his thoughts, feelings and behavior.

In other words, he has become a Scientologist.

There was a strange thing about the Peoria Mission.

Here they were in a 6,000 square foot building on Main Street in Peoria, IL, with 2 Class 8 auditors and a Class 6 (Andy's wife was a Class 6 auditor), and they were only open Monday thru Friday nights from 7 to 10pm.

Sometimes Andy or George would schedule an auditing session for a pc on a Saturday.

There was one other staff member on contract named Tim. He was the person in charge of selling new people Scientology. He came in Monday thru Friday nights. Usually he would come in and then leave to go "pass out promo". Then he'd come back at 10pm and go home.

Very rarely was anyone on course but me. Sometimes Tim's brother Brian would be on course, and Augie, a sweet old black lady who had been in Scientology since the 1970's and who sometimes volunteered.

But that was it.

Now, this mission had been in Peoria, continuously operating, since 1954.

While I was doing my staff training, I couldn't help but notice that this was not the ideal scene (even though I didn't really know what an ideal scene was at the time).

I began to believe that these people really needed my help. I was a secret genius after all. And Scientology was my destiny. And we would Clear the Planet. And so there was just no way anything was going to happen except that I was going to BOOM THIS MISSION!

I had read Hubbard's policy letter called "Keeping Scientology Working". From this, I knew that the only reason for downstats was Suppressive People and the technology of Scientology not being properly applied. But whenever I went into George's office SURE that I had found the NEXT BIG THING that would BOOM the mission, I would leave more confused than ever. It seemed like things were more complicated than I had realized.

There was something here, and I was going to find it. And after I did, then this place was not only going to BOOM, it was going to become the biggest organization in Illinois! Maybe even the first SEA ORGANIZATION in Illinois!!!

But first I had to get through Staff Status Zero....

When I finished my basic staff training, it was time for me to go to Los Angeles for my more advanced training. I had been to Cairo, Athens, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, even New York City (well, to the airport, at least). But this was LA. This was big. I was excited.

It was a simple plan. I would drive the Dianetics Mobile from Central Illinois to Los Angeles, train up to Class 6 Auditor, and come back. We figured it should take about 6 to 8 months, a year maybe if something went horribly wrong. But nothing would go wrong because I'm a thetan and I can make anything go right.

I took off sometime in 1985, traveling down through New Mexico and Arizona, and into the Southern Californian desert. After three days of traveling, I figured I was getting close when I began to see the orange/purple/brown haze up in the tops of the mountains in the western sky. I had been calling in my coordinates to the Advanced Registrar all along the trip. She was micro-managing me to arrive into the org on time the whole way. Ken was the Public Officer of the American Saint Hill Organization (ASHO), and he was getting thrice daily updates from her as he was the thetan in charge over the area. I was really under pressure to arrive. I wanted to do good. I felt part of an OT team that was going to get me trained to Class 6, and fired back to Peoria to boom my mission!

The last day I drove 13 hours straight, and then headed into heavy Friday night Hollywood traffic at the end of that. That was something big to confront for a boy from the cornfields. But I handled it and drove straight to ASHO, totally exhausted. I lumped into a chair in front of the Public Officer's desk at 10pm that night.

"WELCOME TO ASHO, ALANZO!" Ken said in his booming, "big being" voice. It took until 10pm to 1am for them to log me in as an arrival. Then, I was finally told to go to the Manor Hotel in Hollywood where I would be staying as part of my work-study program. By 2:30 am, I was taken into a dark room on the 7th floor with sleeping people filling all but 2 holes in three bunk beds. I had been driving since 6am that morning.

I was exhausted. I crashed almost immediately

I awoke the next morning and looked around the room. Everyone was gone except one other guy. He was turned over asleep against the wall. I heard him walk in after me and collapse into the last hole.

I was in LA! I was in the Manor Hotel, which the Church PR had informed me was the hotel of Bogey and Bacall, and Erroll Flynn and all the rest.

I ruffled through my my duffel bag to find my cigarettes and toothbrush.

When I looked up, the last guy in was glaring at me from his bunk.

"SHUT THE FUCK UP!! I'M TRYING TO FUCKING SLEEP YOU STUPID PIECE OF SHIT!"

"Sorry."

"You fucking better be. What's your name?"

"Alanzo."

"Don't you fucking ever wake me up again, do you hear me?"

I had started to whimper inside a little, because I had never been talked to like that before by anybody, especially not another Scientologist. George and Andy would never raise their voice or even not smile, no matter what you did. This was actually very low-toned communication, I thought. And not very good TR1, either. And who was this guy, anyway?

"DO YOU HEAR ME??"

"Yeah. Sorry"

I walked out the door.

I looked down the hall of the 7th floor of the Manor Hotel, and out the window. There seemed to be a door to access the roof there.

I opened it, and walked out on to a roof overlooking the 101 Freeway with all the rest of Hollywood beneath me.

The morning sun was burning through smog. A grimey dew gathered in splotches in the shaded portions of the roof. There were palm trees and honking horns on Franklin and apartment buildings across the street. I turned around and looked north and there, big as life, was the Hollywood sign, splayed out across the hills of Griffith Park before me. The smells were different here. The light, the dusty palm trees, everything about it was different. I picked my nose and even my boogers seemed different. Kind of greasier in a way. Maybe it was from the smog.

I lit a cigarette and congratulated myself.

I made it.

It was a bright blue Saturday morning in Hollywood.

Last night, after the Day organization had routed me in, I was sent to then route into the Foundation Organization, as well. There are two organizations, with two separate staffs, and two sets of books, in every Scientology organization. That's why it took me over 3 hrs just to register.

I was supposed to route onto course the very next morning at ASHO, so I quickly ate a couple donuts and poured a coffee down my shirt at the 76 Station on Franklin, just before jetting out onto the entrance to the 101 Freeway.

I made it through LA traffic to the complex on Sunset Blvd and parked in the parking lot. I couldn't believe all the cars in the parking lot! Most had those S and Double Triangle Scientology symbols on the back. Coming from Peoria, my eyes bugged out. Man! This must be the most sane place on Earth!

As I walked to the sidewalk on what is now called L. Ron Hubbard Way, the street in Los Angeles that is totally enclosed by Scientology organizations, a guy stopped me and handed me a flier for a movie. I took it. He was a staff member from LA Organization, the building right next to the one where I was going to study. His name was Chris. Wow. I thought, LA Organization. This guy knows what he's doing.

He asked me to come inside and look at the org. "Wow. Sure, yeah!"

I told him that I was on work-study at ASHO, here to train up to Class 6. I puffed out my chest a little as I said it, too. He seemed very impressed, almost worshipful. He took me into the Sales area, and introduced me to an Israeli Scientology Salesperson there.

I was already impressed but now, this was amazing! I had just returned from living in Israel a couple of years before, and I knew a little Hebrew. And here was an Israeli Scientologist! Wow!

He asked me what course I was routing on to. I told him the Professional TRs course. He asked how I was going to pay for it and I told him my mission had training awards on account at ASHO. He told me that my mission had training awards here at LA Organization, too. He said he knew Andy and George back in Peoria and we talked about how great they were. Chris and this Sales person both seemed to really like me, and Andy and George, too, and they were impressed that I was a staff member at their mission and I was here to train to Class 6 Auditor.

He told me that he could get me a better deal at LA Organization than ASHO could give me because of the difference in price between the two. The cheaper price at LA Org would be good for the mission, he said. They wouldn't have to spend so much money to train me.

"I don't know. I think we'd better talk to Andy." I said.

The sales person said that he talks to Andy all the time, they were great friends and that I should just route in, and he would call Andy this morning and let him know. He was sure that it would be okay. "Just route in now and I'll call him before lunch."

If it was going to save my mission money, I thought that this would definitely be a good thing. "But what about Ken at ASHO? He's waiting for me."

"That's all right, I know Ken. He's a good friend of mine. I'll let him know what's happening."

"All right", I said. And they whisked me into the course room, a little before 10 a.m.

The LA Organization course room this Saturday morning was almost full. These guys had routing forms and word clearers and supervisors and everything. It was all snap and pop! Look! All students have their statistical graphs on the wall! Now THIS is how you're supposed to run a Scientology organization! I thought.

They announced me as a new student. Everyone clapped and welcomed me. I took my new course pack (which had been debited off of our mission bookstore account), went over to the dictionary shelf, picked one out, and sat down.

I was so excited. I was on course in LA! These were the trained professionals. These were the people who knew what they were doing, who I would learn from and emulate. I would bring back everything they taught me here and boom my mission. This was great.

By noon, the supervisor called "That's it" and we all went to lunch. As I walked out the door with the crowd of other students, one was just introducing himself to me as a hand grabbed my arm and lurched me to the side. A huge voice boomed at me angrily "MR. ALANZO!"

It was Ken from ASHO. "WHAT do you think you are doing routing into LA ORG'S COURSE ROOM????"

"Well, the registrar said he would tell you. Didn't he tell you?"

"WHAT ARE YOU DOING ROUTING INTO LA ORG'S COURSE ROOM????"

He's pulling me out the door now. I recognized it as "Tone 40" from one of my Upper TRs drills on my HQS course back home. Cool. I'm being "Tone 40ed". For real, even. Wow.

"They said they could save my mission money, and that it was a better deal for us."

"A DEAL??? YOU CAME TO LA TO SHOP FOR A DEAL??? NO! You did not come to LA to shop for a deal for your mission. You came to LA to train up to Class 6 auditor AT ASHO!!!"

"We gotta talk to Andy." Now I was getting a little miffed. Why shouldn't I try to get the best deal for my mission? It's the greatest good for the greatest number of dynamics that my mission saves as much money as it can. We'll be needing to send other students out here, and the more money we had for them on account - the better.

"Oh, WE'LL BE TALKING TO ANDY" Ken said, as he continued his Tone 40 of me down the street.

We climbed the steps at ASHO and walked into the reception area. All the staff were glaring at me. The receptionist glared at me, the ASHO Course Supervisor, who we got out of bed last night to route me in, glared at me as he walked past us. "Alanzo! You were supposed to be at roll call this morning!"

"We're handling Mr. Alanzo on this right now!" Every staff member was staring at me, and they looked mad. Ken shoved me down in the chair in his office and shut his door. He picked up the phone and called Andy.

"Alanzo?? What are you doing?" Andy said over Ken's speakerphone.

"They said I could save probably 20% at LA Org, Andy. We have the training awards there, too, right?"

Andy busted out laughing and then checked himself. "Alanzo, you just need to route onto course AT ASHO. This is not okay. We had agreements with ASHO that you would train there and you can't go against those." Ken, arms crossed, was still glaring at me.

"And so we're going to spend 20% more???"

"ALANZO!" He was yelling, but still somehow smiling. "FORGET ABOUT THE DEAL! YOU ARE TO ROUTE ONTO COURSE IMMEDIATELY AT ASHO AND THAT'S AN ORDER!!!"

"All right." I said. This was the second time I've been yelled at today. Jeez. This is not starting out very well.

Ken had been keeping a mean look on his face the whole time. There he was, the first real Sea Org member I had ever really met, and I had pissed him off on my first encounter with him. I wanted to impress him, not have him glaring at me like this.

He physically took me to the cafeteria where the other Sea Org members ate to eat lunch with him. He said that he was not letting me out of his sight. The other ASHO Sea Org members there, who I recognized from last night, were still glaring at me. Some would smile as they looked away. I got the feeling that these guys had been talking about me or something. They seemed to all know what's going on. I felt kind of famous, but for all the wrong reasons.

After lunch, Ken Tone 40ed me back to the course room and the Course Supervisor was there to route me in. As I stood there, a tall thin guy, balding on top, with a dark brown mustache and eyes that pierced right through you, walked in and right up to me. "So this is the infamous Mr. Alanzo from Peoria!" He wasn't smiling.

The Sup said, "Yep. Mr. Alanzo, meet Mr. Skrivars, your practical supervisor." I was really scared of this guy. He really seemed to mean business, like a drill sergeant.

Scientology course rooms are divided in two: Theory, where you read and study, and Practical, where you practice and apply what you've studied.

I sat down in the theory course room, this time my face was red and I was very, very flustered. The atmosphere here was much more intense than at LA Org. There, they all seemed to love me and be so impressed with whatever I said or did. Here, I'm what I would later know to refer to as "ethics bait."

As I sat in the theory course room, every once in a while I would look through the glass window that separated practical and theory and see Bill Skrivars glaring at me. They were watching me like a hawk.

I fell into my new schedule and "made it go right".

Dick-O, the theory supervisor, would do my star-rate checkouts on Student Hat. He would always find TONS of misunderstood words on me and send me back to re-study. He told me once that students were not born, they were MADE, and he was having a hard time making me into a student. It was frikking pink sheet after pink sheet with this guy. But I came to love him nonetheless.

I can still remember some of the names for roll call. There were probably around 100 students on course at that time. We would all stand in a circle in the hallway, chatting in the morning or after lunch. Dick-O would stand in the center of the hallway, at the top of the circle, chatting and watching the clock.

At exactly the top of the hour, he would yell, "That's it - Roll Call!!" Everyone went silent, glancing at each other, smiling.

"Ricardo Ainsley"

"Here"

"Mo Budlong!"

"Aye!"

"Bill Keister!"

"Here!"

"Melanie Murray"

"Here!"

"Bill Tobin"

"Aye!"

"Cindy Tobin"

"Here!"

"Letty Smith!"

"Here!"

etc.

I don't remember if it was because I was taking too long on Student Hat, or what, but I was put on Pro TRs and Student Hat simultaneously. I thought this was highly irregular, but it was what I was told to do. So I did it.

I was on two courses at once. And there was one more thing that I didn't mention: Back in Peoria, I had completed the Purif and started on the FPRD Basic List. Well, I had used up more than 2 intensives on the first question alone!

The question was something like "Do you have a back-off?" and it would just not quit reading! I had win after win on it. Running down chains way back into "thetan in the universe" incidents with exploding suns and postulating objects into existence and TONS of confusions and somatics and even popping out of the universe. I blew implants, I screamed and I cried. I sometimes stumbled out of session made of jell-o, unable to walk and could only lie down on the couch and laugh and line charge for hours in the pc waiting area. I would have floating TAs, F/Ns lasting for weeks, and shifts in viewpoint after viewpoint.

But I was still just on the first question!

Andy and George decided that, given the time it would take to get me through the second question, let alone the whole rundown, the planet might already be dead. So they shipped me off to LA for my training anyway. It wasn't optimum, but we would just "make it go right".

So okay. Here I was in LA, on two courses at once, and in the middle of the FPRD. Well, the first question of it, anyway.

I was constantly being sent to ethics. I would sit there doing TR Zero from 9am to 6pm, a full 8 hours of it, and my head would go black. Dark clouds with lightening would appear around my head and I would usually want to kill somebody. Bill Skrivfars SCREAMED that students didn't have cases, and I would agree and go back to drilling TR Zero again. But I kept thinking about the FPRD, and it was really clear to me that I needed to finish it.

This was, of course, totally out-ethics and I was totally being a panty-waiste dilettante as an auditor-in-training. And the more they tried to get my ethics in as a student, and the more I would try, the more the thunderstorms and the tornadoes would return. I got to know the Ethics personnel very well at ASHO. And the rest of the staff, too. They would muster down in the hallway in front of the ethics office. I was normally there, sitting on the ethics bench. I got to see roll call of the staff and the briefings from the CO a lot.

I was soaking up every bit of it.

One day, my head was black again, sitting in my chair in theory.

Melanie Murray had been in the CMO and worked with LRH and Miscavage, and all the rest. She was busted for some reason unknown to me at the time and made to retrain her entire Bridge. She was doing her Pro Sup's Internship and was running the course room that day.

Pink sheets in hand, she approached me. "What's happening?" she said.

"I'm fucked up." I told her the story, as I'd told dozens before her.

She said, "It sounds like we need to take a look at your pc folders. Where are they?"

"They're at my mission in Peoria."

She stood upright. She paused and looked at me. "They're at your mission in Peoria?" I immediately recognized this as a Q&A. I would flunk her for out TRs if I had the standing to.

"Yes. I'm a staff member there, here on work-study."

She blinked. "I have a father in a mission in Peoria. And a brother and a sister-in-law, too."

"Gerorge? George Seidler?"

"Yeah, that's my dad."

Going up a pitch, I said, "Andy???"

"That's my brother, Cindy is my sister-in-law"

"Hah! But your last name is Murray!"

"That's my married name: Melanie Seidler-Murray."

"Hah!"

We became instant best friends. And to this day, I miss her very much.

She made a call immediately, and my folders were on their way. Melanie and I would eat lunch together. She would tell me stories about working for LRH in the CMO. We'd talk about Andy and George. We'd talk about books by Richard Bach and Dostoyevski. She'd teach me about some of the ways of Scientology that were a mystery to me so far.

She had a husband in the movie business named Pat. The two of them were in the old training films on Pro TRs. Pat starred in the original "Problems of Life" film.

Melanie had worked with LRH and David Mayo. And, from what I can piece together from the stories she told me over the years (Melanie always made sure to put the best PR spin on every story), when Mayo was busted, she and Pat routed out of the Sea Org and Melanie was declared as an SP. Through a long and drawn out justice cycle lasting years and many bureaucratic turnovers, she was able to overturn her declare.

And now she was retraining back up to Class 8 at her own expense.

I tried to reconcile Malanie's stories at the time with what I knew about Scientology ethics and justice, but I just couldn't make it fit. I figured I just needed to get my case handled then it would all make sense.

In fact, if I had any critical thought at all, through all my ethics handlings and every other handling I was getting, I knew that it was probably just my FPRD case kicking in, and that I should just come back up tone and set my case aside.

When my folders arrived, I became a target for regging by Craig Sargent, and Ruthie Silverman, and Lester - all of the Div 2 reges at ASHO. But I didn't have any money, and since I was a work-study student, contracted on staff, I was sure that we could make it go right to get my auditing from a BC student, and get me back on course and training to Class 6.

That's when I found out that BC Interns, and all other Interns, audited paying pcs in the HGC. No one audited for free.

I had really really fucking come to the end of my rope. It was looking like I was damaged goods, unable to fit anywhere in the massive wheels of Scientology organization. No one knew what to do with me.

And, to top it off, the CO Manor had gotten busted and the whole staff, including me on work-study, was put on rice and beans.

I was here in California, and ALL my time was taken up between ASHO and the Manor. I hardly ever even got to see a movie, or walk down Hollywood Blvd. And now I was eating rice and beans.

I was starting to get sick of it.

So one night, I decided that I was going to drive up the coast to Monterrey, taking Highway One, because I wanted to see the land of Steinbeck and smell the ocean. After course on Friday, instead of going on post, I just took off.

It was beautiful. I returned on Sunday and walked into the new CO's office. He screamed at me and told me that I had blown and that I was expelled from work-study. I went up to my room and all my belongings were gone. I went back down to the CO's office and he told me that when I blew, they confiscated all my property. If I worked up through liability, I would get it back.

For liability, I had to buy a set of tapes or something from him. He gave me my stuff back and all kinds of things were missing, cheap jewelry, mostly, and some shoes.

What the fuck ever. I found a place around the corner from the complex on New Hampshire. It was a house with bunk beds filling every open space.

At least now I could concentrate on studying.

But that didn't work either, as the same shit continued to occur.

So, after 5 months, I had completed no courses, and I was completely dejected. I was a total loser. We decided that I should just come back. So I went through a hellacious and dev-T filled routing out process with lots of screaming at ASHO. Ken Shapiro had been made the CO now. And he was the one to sign off the final step of my routing form.

"I hate to see you leave, Mr. Alanzo," he said in his booming big being voice.

"I know, but it really is the greatest good for the greatest number of dynamics." He signed it.

I was free!

I packed up the Dianetics Mobile and took off.

With $58 in my pocket, I headed out on the 2,000 mile trip back to Peoria.

The price of gasoline was between $1.15 and $1.20 in the first 6 months of 1986.

The Dianetics Mobile was a 1984 Honda Civic that got over 30 miles to the gallon on the highway. I figured that if I didn't buy any food, and spent it all on gas, I would still come up around $12 short.

Oh well, I'll just have to make it go right.

I had a few cans of Coke and some bread and crackers in a paper bag in the back seat. There might have been some cheese in there, too.

I took the northern route through Colorado and slept in rest stops in my car. For some reason that, today, I still can not fathom, I had taken my 13" black and white TV with me to LA. It was in the front seat next to me. In a small town west of Denver, I sold the TV at a used furniture store for $20.

Now, with this extra $20, if I only bought one or two meals in the 2 days more it would take to keep driving straight through, I would make it.

I rolled into my parent's driveway on "E", totally exhausted, 2 days later.

It was when I got out of the car, and looked at the parent's house, that I knew I had changed. Today I realize how profoundly I had changed, but back then, I only knew that there was a change in my worldview.

I now saw things in a very disciplined, almost para-military way. The losses and humiliations I had suffered in LA did not diminish my purpose to Clear the Planet one bit - they had strengthened them.

I now knew what was necessary to get the Mission on track. I was out-qualed for the Sea Org as I had taken LSD. But, nonetheless, I was going to be a Sea Org member right there in Peoria to make that mission contribute to planetary clearing.

With this new viewpoint, I still felt like a complete failure. And when I showed up at the mission the next day, George greeted me with open arms. There was not one hint of censure or disapproval at all in his whole presence.

He just audited me.

And it was SUCH a relief!

Through Green Forms and C/S Series 40's, student repair lists and lots of handlings, I no longer felt like a total loser, but instead, I was rehabilitated right back to, and even more enthusiastic than before.

The mission was only open 7pm to 10pm Monday through Fridays. I moved a mattress on to the floor of one of the abandoned auditing rooms and told my parents and George and Andy that I was going to "align my dynamics" to the mission. And that meant that if the mission suffered, I would suffer. If the mission prospered, I would prosper.

And that was all there was to it.

So I kind of made my own little Sea Org right there in Peoria. I was a Sea Org of one, and let me tell you, that was plenty.

Of course, the first thing that needed to be done was to get everyone's ethics in.

Why else would we have no public? Why else would we only be open 15 hours per week? My God! Wogs were burning in the witch pit! We have a virtual monopoly on knowledge of the mind, two Class 8s and a Class 6, and we're only open 15 hours per week?

George was the Mission Holder, and Andy was the ED. Applying the principles of "Post from the top down", which I had learned in LA, I demanded that Andy give me the post of Hubbard Executive Secretary. I would hold HCO from above, as well as Ethics Officer, and I get ethics IN, and would establish this mission for blood.

Especially with all that I had "learned" while being handled by Sea Org members in LA and seeing how it was really supposed to be done.

Cary Goulston was the CO SMI EUS, and Andy was only too happy to give me the job of calling the stats into Cary every Wednesday night. Cary was a screamer and a throat-ripper, and a completely unreasonable idiot on the phone. And that was fine with me.

It seemed to me at the time that Cary was the only one who "got it". Andy and George were these kindly old fumblers, were obviously out-ethics, and had made a dog's breakfast of this mission.

Cary and I were going to handle it, fully and terminatedly.

I can remember my first project of going to work recruiting people in the field.

The Peoria Mission, as the longest running mission in North America, had a huge Central Files. I immediately started a call in campaign to clean up the ARCXen field, brush off any reasonableness I might run into, and revitalize their purpose.

This was the summer of 1986. There were long time Scientologists in the field, OTs no less, who would have nothing to do with the mission, or Scientology any more. This, to me, was a major outpoint. And I was going to get to the bottom of it.

I brought in one ball of entheta after another. They all new what needed to be done, and they all told me to get to it. Well, I had a little different view of it than that. THEY were out-ethics, and whatever problem they had, was at it's root, obviously, an overt. And so THEY needed to write up their overts and withholds and get back to contributing to clearing the planet!

I learned that the mission used to have 100s of thousands of dollars in reserves. They had it in gold and cash in bank accounts and safety deposit boxes. Yet this 6,000 square foot building we were in was 7 months late on the rent. There was no money in any accounts any more.

Something had happened?

What was it?

As HAS HFA, I started recruiting right and left. While I was away, my sister had become much more interested in Scientology. She signed a 2.5 year contract to train up to be the Course Supervisor. Randy Spurgeon was the son of a woman who had been in the Sea Org, Carrie Spurgeon. Randy signed a contract and was made the HAS. Then we found Barb, a girl from a small town nearby, and she took over Treasury. Tim Crowley’s brother Luke had been a cop, and had just won a big legal settlement. Carrie Spurgeon was coming in a lot more to help out on staff and she got Luke to buy his whole Bridge at Flag with his settlement money and sign a five year contract to be the Mission OES.

Andy was at the end of his last five year contract and he and Cindy were going to move to LA. Cary went on a tour of the “Cont.” and came to the mission one day. He and Andy sat me down in the ED’s office. I think he brought another ED from the East Coast with him. Cary said that I should take over for Andy as ED.

“Me? I’m just a Mini hatted HES. And anyway, I’m going back out to LA to get trained. My goal is to make 5 clears per week!”

“Well, how many clears per week do you think you could make as an ED? Then you’ll have a whole team of auditors to make Clears with.” I actually bought that. If my goal was to make Clears, and thus Clear the planet, then he was right – I could make a lot more Clears as an ED than as a single auditor.

And just like that, I gave up my goal to be an auditor.

It was the greatest good for the greatest number of dynamics.

I was going like gang-busters. But I was basically all alone, living alone in the mission at night, alone during the day, answering the phones and keeping the mission open. I wore all the hats until the rest of the staff came in at 7pm.

One Friday night, I had had enough. It was too much, really. Andy was in tonight, and he would be headed to LA pretty soon. I took a shower, put on a shiny nylon shirt and some cologne, and took off to the bars downtown. I was going to get laid.

I went to a local bar and started talking to some of my old wog friends who I had not seen for over a year now. As we talked, a girl walked up and I said hi to her. We started talking and I found that she had read many of the same books I had read – a lot of Carlos Castenada and others. I asked her if she had ever read Dianetics, and she said that she had always meant to. We left together that night, bought some beer and a scratch lotto ticket at a gas station. The lotto ticket won!

We “nested” for three days straight. I had completed the Minister’s Course in my training to be able to use the meter for exams, and whole laying in bed, I told her that I was a Minister in the Church of Scientology. This seemed to have a kind of subversive appeal to her, having grown up a Baptist in Missouri.

On Monday night, I took her in wearing a leather mini skirt and showed her the Bridge to Total Freedom. I said, “See, we’re actually timeless immortal beings who, over time have become degraded to the point where now we can only run these bodies. This Bridge is a series of steps designed to rehabilitate us back to our original state so that we regain all our lost abilities and become powerful again.”

She said, “Fantastic! What’s the first thing I do?”

“Well, you get onto this course.”

And so I had personally achieved a First Service Start.

Andy said that was an excellent way to make up for blowing Friday night. And now I had a girlfriend who was into Scientology!

A couple months later I got her to sign a staff contract and she became the new PES.

So now I had an HES, an OES and a PES. Andy and Cindy left for LA, and I became the ED.

Cary would call at least three times per night. He would always have an urgency in his voice. As soon as you answered the phone, he would say, in machine gun fire language, "What are you doing?"

I would say that I was making folders for my drawer. "NO! You should not be doing that on post time! This is prime production time! Where are the First Service Starts??"

"We're at 3 for the week." (This was phenomenal)

"THREE??? Jesus! Connecticut gets that in one DAY! Who's body routing?"

"Well, Tim's passing out promo at the mall."

"Shit. That's bull shit. You need to get 5 people out there! Think Big Alanzo!!! What about some students? The Birthday Game ED says that you should get the public involved and you should brush off any reasonableness you bump into. How many students on course?? Can you get to them on break? Get them out there! All hands out handing out promo!!!"

"We have 5 people on course."

"5??? You gotta get that place booming! When I call back I want there to be 4 First Service Starts. And in order to get that you need to OUTFLOW. OUTFLOW EQUALS INFLOW ALANZO - START!!!"

Then he'd slam the phone down and do that to someone else on the “Cont”.

The thing is, I would hop to it. I would take that same manic energy and go around to all the staff and spray it at them.

I wasn;t very popular. But so what? I was a fire-breathing product officer and I got products.

I really didn't notice how much of an asshole I had become. I had been taught to be UNREASONABLE, and I had taught to be FIRE-BREATHING, I had been taught GET MAD, as that was how I achieved ETHICS PRESENCE.

This had been the way I was treated while in LA, and I had learned "the winning valence". And swallowed it up.

This was the technology which was going to save the planet!

Who was I to question it? Every time I had, I had been slammed and told I was out-ethics, a critical natterer, and asked to write up my overts.

And every time, I found overts to write up, too.

So it must be true.

I was now, very fully, a Scientologist.

In my struggle to clear the planet, I inevitably had wrong ideas.

And so, from time to time, I needed correction. I was often called back to LA in order to see what I needed to see in order to fully and completely be in the beingness necessary to do the doingnesses necessary to have the havingnesses necessary to clear the planet from Peoria.

And so it was on one of these trips in 1987 that I met back up with Charles Lakes, my twin on the Hubbard Qualified Scientologist course. Charles had continued to work his postulate to make it to the Olympics.

So when Charles and I met again that day in the reception area at ASHO, he told me he was ready. We had discussed this very thing many times while on the HQS course together, and this was now it.

He wanted to take what we learned together on the HQS Course and use it to compete better for the Olympic Trials. He wanted me to go with him to Salt Lake City where we would do the Training Routines again. We would do them each again before his competitions so that he would be totally in Present Time when he walked out on to the floor. With all the TV cameras, and the bright lights, and all the SP media reporters bullbaiting him, he would stay in focus and wow the world with his awesome abilities.

He wanted me to stay with him in the same hotel in Salt Lake so we could do the TRs together before every event. And he would have a "terminal" there who knew how to help if he needed it.

I enthusiastically agreed.

This was Planetary Dissemination like we had never seen before. This was using Scientology to reach the highest heights possible for Mankind. This was The Olympics!

Penny, the Deputy Exec Director of ASHO, raised the donations necessary to send me from my little mission in Peoria. And when I finally got the call at 10pm the night before from Cary, my senior at Scientology Missions International, okaying me to be off post as ED of the Peoria Mission, to go be with Charles Lakes to ensure that a Scientologist won the Olympics, I was on a plane very the next morning, checking into my hotel.

I was excited. This was where we would show the world what Dianetics could do. This was where we would apply The Tech and begin to take over the world. I rushed upstairs and dropped my bags in my room. Then I rushed down to the lobby to see the other contenders arrive and to look for Charles.

There were national sports media people everywhere. In corner hallways, bright lights were set up and journalists were interviewing different gymnasts from all over the country about their hopes and dreams of winning. Charles was not anywhere to be found. Nor could I reach him on any phone, or in any room. All I knew was that his first event was the next day at noon, and he had agreed to be at my room by 10am.

At 10:15 the next morning, there was a knock at my door. It was Charles, smiling widely in his half-Chinese smile.

We got straight down to business. I had two chairs set up facing each other, and all the Scientology references I might need in case there was a crisis. I knew that one of the most important parts of the trip was for Charles to credit Dianetics for his success during an interview to the national media. But since he had not yet won anything, we needed to get him to win something at the meet, so that when he won, someone would interview him. Then, he could credit Dianetics for his success in gymnastics to the world.

This was major.

We sat right down and went into TR Zero.

TR Zero is a communication drill that L Ron Hubbard created to get a person to "be there comfortably and perceive". You sit across from another person, about three feet apart, and"comfortably perceive" them as long as it takes to get you to "be there".

This drill turns on quite a few weird perceptions. While you gaze into the eyes of the person across from you, their face can turn to molten lava, the room sometimes turns completely white, except for their glowing eyes, staring at you. I always considered that this was their true thetan coming through, while the physical universe dropped away.

Charles and I had done this particular drill for hours a day, for weeks at a time. So we now did it for as long as Charles needed to feel "in present time" ( in PT).

We wanted to get him in PT and prepared to go out on to the competition floor. We wanted him to comfortably confront all the world media, the huge crowd of howling and clapping people, and to be fully "there" to concentrate fully on his routine and get through it exactly as he intended, and then stick his landing.

And win his event.

That first day, he competed very, very well. As we continued doing TRs, and as he kept competing, he continued to do very, very well.

In fact, Charles was doing VERY well.

Before the meet began, Charles was not considered a contender to make the US Olympic team. It was considered a huge long shot for Charles to even make the position of Alternate on the team - the guy who would travel as a back-up in case one of the other athletes got hurt.

But little did anyone know, and very much did Charles and I know, he went on to win the whole meet. Charles Lakes was the number 1 qualifier for the US Olympic team for the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, Korea.

And he was the first Black Thetan to go to the Olympics for gymnastics!

I was there.

I saw it all.

In fact, I helped to make it happen.

It was one of the most exhilarating things I've ever experienced. As I was learning, a "win" is also a "win" for anyone who helped.

And we used Scientology to do it.

When I was young and dumb, I worked with OSA in Illinois.

Randy Kretchmar, Carol Brookes and Mary Ann Ahmad were the Office of Special Affairs at the Chicago Org at that time.

The Cult Awareness Network had not been infiltrated, taken over and destroyed by OSA yet. They were still the Church of Scientology’s number 1 enemy, like the Anonymous movement is now. Based in Chicago, CAN was having a nationwide conference in Bollingbrook, an outlying suburb.

As the Exec Dir of the Peoria Mission, I was recruited to drive up to the conference and check in at the hotel, to stay there as a guest, and act as an asset for OSA during that weekend.

It was my first real undercover work. I was very excited that my whole track purpose as an espionage agent, which I had uncovered through all the False Purpose Rundown auditing I was getting, was finally being utilized.

I slinked into the lobby of the Lincolnshire Resort Hotel and scanned its inhabitants. In a group of chairs and couches in the middle of the lobby, which everyone must pass by to get to the front desk, sat Randy Kretchmar, big as you please, reading a copy of Robert Jay Lifton's Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of "Brainwashing" in China. He was right there, where everyone could see him.

“See?” I thought.” Right there is proof that Scientologists are not brainwashed. If he can read the Deprogrammer's Bible, and still remain a Scientologist… well what else do you need to know?”

Scientology was different. It was above all these other religions. We were not only fighting our own enemies, but we were fighting the enemies of all religions, and all mankind.

I walked by, Randy’s eyes met mine very briefly. We did not wave.

I saw Margaret Singer standing off to the side of the front desk, talking to some people in a group. You could identify the CAN Conference attendees by the big yellow name tags they were wearing. Most looked like couples in their forties, maybe parents of the children who had sought refuge in their chosen, but possibly unconventional, religious pursuits. Looking very unlike drunken Shriners or Aircraft salesmen, I was surrounded by people whose sole purpose was to get others to leave their chosen religions. I was in the esophagus of the beast itself, heading in.

I checked in, got the key to my room and walked over to the elevators. As I stood waiting for the next one to arrive, a group of very pretty 20-something girls came up and stood next to me. They were talking amongst themselves. When the elevator doors opened, I got on first and acted like I was holding the door for them as they boarded. I was smiling.

As the doors were about to close, we all heard, "Hold that!" and I quickly shot my hand out to stop them. It was Stephen Hassan. Slim, well built, 6 feet tall, holding a briefcase and dressed in a shirt and tie. He jumped on and settled himself right into the middle of the girls. Standing next to the floor buttons, I let the doors shut, my rising blood pressure making my temples vibrate. Stephen reached by me, brushing against my shirt, and punched his floor.

I’m reeling, but still undetected. "I am standing in an elevator with one of the biggest SP deprogrammers in the world. If this was 1930, in Germany, and I was right next to Adolph Hitler, I could have taken an action that would have saved the planet from WWII. Well it's 1987, and I'm in an elevator in Bollingbrook, IL..."

One of the girls almost squealed. "Are you Stephen Hassan?"

"Yes I am."

I was right. It’s him.

The other girls gathered closer to him.

"I've read 'Combatting Cult Mind Control'. I wanted to thank you for that. It’s been so helpful to me and my family. So are you here for the conference?"

"Yes. Are you here for that, too?"

"Yes. My brother joined a cult a few years ago and my parents haven't been able to reach him."

"Well, hopefully we'll have some things that you can do." Invisible black clouds were forming in front of my forehead. Yeah, like kidnap people and torture them until they finally denounce their chosen religion, I thought. I had read what he had done to a kid in Iowa, how he had held him there against his will as he worked him over for days at a time until the kid finally cracked. This was a conference where all the biggest deprogrammers were the stars, and everyone else was fawning all over them.

The door opened to my floor. I jutted out of the elevator and into the far end of the hallway, taking my first breath in minutes. "My God that was fucking disgusting! Her brother has every fucking right to pursue any religion he wants. These people are EVIL. Fuck!"

I got into my room and immediately called Carol Brooks at command central, as instructed. I was told to walk around the hotel and get oriented. “Take note of what you see but don't contact anyone else you recognize. We need you as eyes and ears this weekend, so be available.”

Roger that.

After unpacking my bags in my room, I sat down at the little round table next to the window and looked out into the parking lot. People were streaming in to the front doors of the hotel below me. Just 30 days earlier, we had gotten word that CAN had elected a new Executive Director.

And already we had taken him out.

It turned out that CAN had elected a sex pervert as their leader.

Imagine that.

Once he’d hit our RADAR, OSA agents had looked into his past and found a conviction for soliciting a male prostitute on his record a decade earlier. Digging further, they had been able to obtain the transcripts of the undercover arresting officer, the pretty boy standing on the street corner in Baltimore when CAN’s leader had approached him. The officer reported that a man had walked up and asked what he could get for $50. The officer further wrote that, “Subject said to me, ‘I want you to put clothes pins on my nipples and suck my dick.’”

This quote had appeared in the Church of Scientology’s newsletter that they sent nationwide to every member of CAN, along with their new Exec Dir’s mug shot, after they had obtained CAN’s mailing list. He had been quietly forced out, and CAN was presently a headless organization, decapitated by OSA.

So the Good Guys were winning.

I made my way down to the conference. The place was packed. Off the lobby, there was a hotel bar, a restaurant, and then further down the hallway was a large conference room. People were standing in line, waiting to get in. They were checking a list of registered attendees, and handing them their yellow badges.

After a few minutes of getting myself oriented, and seeing no one else I recognized, I headed into the bar to collect my thoughts and figure out what my strategy would be. Maybe I could overhear some conversations in there and get some valuable intelligence. Maybe I would see those girls again. Maybe I could get a break that would blow this whole thing wide open.

So I sat down at the bar and ordered a beer. I thought, “What the hell. It’s Friday, it’s about 3pm. Well, 2:30 anyway. And I want to blend in, right?”

Scattered in small groups, some at the bar, and some sitting around tables, you could see the yellow badges of religious intolerance huddled together. My inner contempt must not become outer derision. I must act curious, and oblivious to what is going on. I need a cover: I am an insurance salesman, here on business.

My beer came, and I took a drink of it. Two men and a woman in their forties, wearing badges, sat down at the corner of the bar nearest me. They ordered beers. “They’re probably alcoholics” I thought. I listened to what they were talking about while pretending to scan the different beers on tap behind the bar.

One of the men and the woman were married. The other guy seemed to be alone and they had just met. The woman was talking about her son, and how he had joined a cult a few years earlier and had changed over night, she claimed. She said that every time they talked, he seemed to go further and further away.

That’s because of your own invalidation and evaluation, I thought. If these people only knew TRs, and how to communicate, none of this would have happened to them. I downed the rest of my beer and ordered another.

Soon, the bar began really filling up with people. Maybe there was a speech that had just ended, or maybe it was just Miller Time for these wogs. I sat and looked around the room. All these people seemed to have some family member who had joined an alternative religion that they did not approve of, and they had driven them away with their milque-toast, middle class values and robotic, materialistic ways. Their sons and daughters and husbands and wives had broken free to pursue their own dreams, and these people were here, plotting how to deprogram them and pull them back in to their small minded hells.

As I finished my third one, and ordered my fourth, a badge sat down next to me at the bar. Our eyes met and I smiled. He nodded. This is it, I thought. My mission has begun.

Pointing to his badge, I asked innocently, “What kind of conference is this?”

“The Cult Awareness Network.”

“The Cult-Awareness-Network” I repeated back, as if I was learning a new phrase from a foreign language.

“Yes. It’s a group that helps people who have lost others to cults.”

“Oh. Lost others to cults. Seems like a lot of people.”

“Yes. We deal with over 1200 cults across the US. We send out information to people so that they can try to get their family members back. What are you doing here?”

“I’m in insurance. Taking a class. Here on business.”

“I see. “

We sat in silence for a while, looking at the others in the bar.

I began thinking about pan determinism, the Scientology concept that if you could take responsibility for both sides of a game, you could rise above it. There were definitely two sides here, and if I could keep my TRs in and really try to understand this whole thing – outside of my own viewpoint – then maybe I might be on to something. So I asked him

“Did you lose someone to a cult?”

“Yes. My wife and daughter. About 5 years ago, the three of us joined a group in Montana that turned out to be a cult. I saw it but my wife didn’t. When I started speaking up about what I saw, they immediately began working on my wife and daughter. They kicked me out. My wife and daughter stayed and now they want nothing to do with me.”

He looked very sad. I could tell he was being restimulated by this whole conference and this problem of his was being made more acute by the environment he was in. They were all restimulating each other into a frenzy of religious intolerance.

“Don’t you think they have a right to their own religious choices?”

He looked at me. “Of course. But why can’t they talk to me? Don’t you think there’s something wrong when whole families are destroyed just because of a religious choice?”

My family had not been destroyed by my religious choice, I thought. In fact, my family had come closer together over Scientology because I had recruited every one of them into it.

I said, “That’s a good question. I hadn’t thought of that.”

He picked up his beer and walked over to some other attendees.

I ordered another beer.

Intelligence work has greatly benefited from the emergence of cell phones. But this was 1987, and cell phones were called "car phones" then, and they were enormous bricks that were connected to the dashboard of your car by a curly wire, and only the most annoying people had them.

As a result, things were happening with my intelligence team that I was unaware of.

Midway into my fourth beer, it was time for a bathroom break. I got up from my bar stool and steadied myself onto the floor, moving through the crowd out to the hallway where the restrooms were. I walked into the men’s room and stopped.

There were clothes pins scattered all over the floor, on the sinks, the towel dispensers and the toilets. Yellow Badges were washing their hands and drying themselves right there among them. I fought back a visible sense of simultaneous delight and disgust. It was kind of funny, but it was also incredibly tacky. In fact it was kind of sick. I didn’t really think that it was all that enlightened and tolerant, really. And I had no idea that this high-minded group of OTs that I was part of would act this way.

These were just regular people. They weren’t all sex perverts. As I stood at the urinal, I was unable to understand what I felt about this.

Walking out of the bathroom, I began to notice large men with sharp haircuts standing outside the conference room, near the elevators, outside the bar, and all along the hallway. Obviously the presence of security had thickened. I’m just a mild-mannered insurance salesman, here on business.

I put a curious look on my face and wandered toward the entrance to the conference room.

This may seem courageous to you, dear reader, but I have to confess, this was not my first OSA operation against CAN.

As Executive Director of the Church of Scientology, Mission in Peoria, I had run into people, mostly fed by information from CAN, who would try to get students and PCs to quit coming into course. We had lost a few public that way, and, trying to survive on my staff pay as Scientology mission staff, I had decided that CAN was not only an enemy to mankind, but to my own paycheck as well.

So I had called CAN, on my own, to speak to them and see what they would say. I pretended to be a concerned husband whose wife had just started on the Purif, and wanted to know more about this unusual group their spouse was becoming overly fascinated with.

From talking to Randy Kretchmar in Chicago, I knew that CAN was denying that they had anything to do with forcible deprogramming. We all knew that was a lie, and that they were the sole source of referrals for the kidnapping deprogrammers who were operating across the country against Scientology and other unconventional religions that the middle class could not understand.

I decided that I was going to strike an effective blow, be a causative thetan, and get some information that would link them to forcible deprogramming.

On the first call I made to CAN, the woman who answered the phone had given me some coaching on what to do. Her name was Ann. She said that the first thing I should do is not let on that I was in touch with CAN because Scientology would have me declared a Suppressive Person and make my wife divorce me if she found out. So Ann took my address and said she would send me some pamphlets on Scientology.

I thanked her and hung up. This was not good enough. I didn’t need pamphlets, I needed kidnapping deprogrammers.

So I sat and thought about what I would say and then called back. When Ann answered again, I said, “Look, I wasn’t entirely honest with you before. My wife has been involved with these people for around 6 months, and I’ve already read some books on Scientology, and I already know it’s a cult. I am terrified of losing her and I need to DO something rather than just read more pamphlets.”

Then Ann said, “I could give you a list of deprogrammers.”

I hungrily took down each name and each phone number. I then immediately called Randy and told him what I had done. He was ecstatic. He told me to write it all up in affidavit form and then get it notarized and Fedex it to him. It could be used as evidence in court cases against CAN to prove that they were clearing house for forcible deprogrammers, and maybe lead to the conviction of some of them and shut them down.

So as I strolled toward the entrance of the Conference Room, with about 4 beers in me, I was not some lilly livered neophyte in the world of espionage. In fact, with all my whole track experience, I considered myself pretty much a pro.

The bulge of people at the conference desk was keeping the greeters busy, and so, keeping an innocently curious look on my face, looking up toward the ceiling, and putting out a vibration all the while which communicated how much I belonged there, I sauntered past the conference desk and into the conference room itself.

I saw tables with more pamphlets scattered on them. People were standing in groups and talking. There was an area which contained rows of chairs in front of a speaker’s stand. I stopped in front a table to innocently fork through a pamphlet ...and immediately felt a hand on my arm.

“Sir. This is a private conference.” Two huge security guards were standing in front of me.

“Oh! I’m sorry. I was just curious.”

“This way, sir.”

They escorted me out.

I put my head down and kept walking. Security is very tight here. I went back into the bathroom to think. All the clothespins were gone. I needed to think some more.

I went back into the bar.

The bar was packed.

My beer was gone and someone was sitting on my stool. Yellow Badges were everywhere. I walked up to a space next to the busy waitress station and ordered another beer.

Glasses were clinking, I could hear “Oh, that’s terrible!” and “You know it’s like she became a different person. She just snapped.” A stool opened up on the other side of the bar and I sat down, continually scanning for another intelligence opportunity.

As I sat there, something was not sitting right with me. I had joined Scientology because it was a better way. It would lead to a better civilization on Earth, where war, crime and insanity would finally be handled. I couldn’t reconcile how clothespins scattered across the bathroom floors of a conference fit in with the wisdom necessary to create a new and better civilization. What’s worse, the more I looked at and chatted with the badges in the bar, the more the people attached to them grew in my consciousness.

I began to wonder what the hell I was doing there. It was better than working all weekend at the Mission, I knew that. It was good to get a break. But my attempt to understand these people and why they are members of CAN was not fitting in well with the cartoons of Anti-Social Personalities I had studied in my Ups and Down in Life Course pack.

It was around 7pm now, and I thought that I should probably check back in. So I finished my beer, I had lost count of which one it was, and I went back up to my room. When the doors opened at every floor, there were two huge men standing there with wires coming out of the back of their shirt collars and into their ears. They were everywhere.

I called Carol.

Her grating tone was the first thing that hit me. “Alanzo! Where the hell have you been? Right now there are two deprogrammers in the restaurant and we need you to get down there and sit behind them at a table and listen to what they are planning.”

I was silent. I was not responding eagerly and right away.

“Alanzo?”

“I saw the clothespins in the bathroom.”

Carol laughed gleefully, like a mean little junior high schooler. “That’ll introvert them!”

I said nothing.

“Alanzo? Where have you been?”

“I’ve been in the bar talking to people.”

“Alanzo, you didn’t come here to party. Are you drunk?”

“No.”

“Jesus Christ. ALANZO – GET YOUR ASS DOWN TO THE RESTAURANT AND FIND OUT WHAT THOSE GUYS ARE PLANNING.”

“I don’t think the clothespins were all that great of a thing.”

“What? You are so out-ethics. Jesus fucking christ! You’re fucking drunk.” Then she hung up.

I sat down on the side of my bed, thinking. OK, maybe I was a little drunk. I knew I was in trouble, but what the fuck? I was paying my own way here, I can take a fucking vacation if I want.

The phone rang again. It was Randy.

“Alanzo, listen. There is going to be a press conference tomorrow morning. I have a press pass for you and I want you to be there.”

“But I’m not a member of the press. Isn’t that against the law?”

“Oh, Alanzo. You are so PTS. No, it is not against the law. It’s just a press pass. You are just saying that you are a reporter, that’s all.”

“But I’m not a reporter.”

“Oh, fuck this. You’re fuckin worthless.” And he slammed down the phone.

I laid down on my bed. I had been drinking beer for 5 hours straight.

Yes. I was drunk.

When my eyes opened, light was streaming in through the window and I was fully clothed, on top of the bedspread. My head ached and I was dying of thirst.

I made my way to the bathroom and sucked cold water from the faucet.

I looked at my watch. 7am.

I got my bag, gathered up all my things and left, leaving my key in the check-out slot at the front desk.

A lot of what I had seen that weekend didn’t sink in with me for another 13 years. I remained a Scientologist, but never really worked with OSA again. They gave me a highly commended certificate a few months later, and tried to get me to pay money from time to time. But OSA had grown distasteful to me and I put off examining exactly why until I got further up the Bridge. Maybe after I had become Clear and OT, my aberrations would be cleared away and I could see why my mission as a spy in the fight for freedom for all mankind had been so unproductive.

I only knew that I was aberrated.

And I needed to handle that.

From George Orwell's "1984"

Quote:

..."At this moment O'Brien glanced at his watch, saw that it was nearly eleven hundred, and evidently decided to stay in the Records Department until the Two Minutes of Hate was over. He took a chair in the same row as Winston, a couple places away. A small sandy haired woman who worked in the next cubicle to Winston was between them. The girl with dark hair was immediately behind. '

"The next moment a hideous graiting screech as of some monstrous machine running without oil, burst from the big telescreen at the end of the room. It was a noise that set one's teeth on edge and bristled the hair at the back of one's neck. The Hate had started.'

"As usual, the face of Emmanuel Goldstein, the Enemy of the People, had flashed into the screen. There were hisses here and there among the audience. The little sandy haired woman gave a squeak of mingled fear and disgust. Goldstein was the renegade backslider who once, long ago (how long ago, nobody quite remembered), had been one of the leading figures of the Party, almost on a level of Big Brother himself, and had engaged in counter-revolutionary activities, had been condemned to death, and had mysteriously escaded and disappeared. The program of two minutes of hate varied from day to day, but there was none in which Goldstein was not the principle figure. He was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party's purity. All subsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of his teaching."...

I read 1984 at least twice before I became a Scientologist. George Orwell was a hero of mine. His writing, quite ironically, inspired me to become deeply involved in Scientology so I could devote my life to preventing the coming techno-robot society we were all dreading, and which Orwell had warned us about.

During a Scientology event, while my leaders were damning psychiatry and other people, stirring up fear and hatred within all of us, I would get an inkling that this whole thing was slightly familiar. But my purpose to Clear the Planet overtook any impulse to awaken, and I surged forth my hatred of the "psychs" along with the rest of the crowd of my fellow Scientologists.

After all, Mankind was burning in the witch pit, and we knew we were the only ones who could really help.

There were four employees standing in my office, each with pressing questions about how to do their jobs. My phone was ringing every 2 minutes with another question from someone else, or another pressing decision I had to make right away. There was a stack of 20 leads on my desk waiting for me to proof and to send out to the client, and I had been working until 9 or 10pm every week night for the last 4 weeks at least, just to keep up.

I was in a constant state of siege on my job, trying to meet the impossible demands of running 40 brand new employees by myself on a project that contained deliverables that were completely delusional. It was only a matter of time before the client fired us, but until then, I had to do whatever I could to make it go right.

In addition to the 4 employees standing in my office, my office mate - another manager on a different project - had three of his own juniors standing in line, listening to him correct every single little comma that they had written incorrectly on their work.

That's when the phone on my desk rang.

"This is Alanzo."

The screeching voice on the other end of the phone seethed: "I hate you so much I could fire you right now!"

I pulled the phone away and looked at it. "Phyllis?" I asked.

"You sent a false lead to the client yesterday and it ended up on the CEO's lines as an example of the kind of shit work you are doing for my client!" About 5 of the 9 people in my office heard what she was screaming, and they stopped talking and looked up at me.

"Listen Phyllis, I'm very busy right now and this type of communication is not conducive to production. You need to talk to Craig or Gary. I'm too busy to have this kind of entheta on my lines, even if you are the CEO." She started screaming even louder before I hung up on her.

I sat there, completely overwhelmed. Before, I was barely making it. But that phone call just put it over the top. I told all the people in my office to please leave, I needed to handle something right away. When I walked out of my office and looked down the hall through the window into Gary's office, I saw him on the phone with a scowl on his face. He looked at me as if to say, "It's her, and here she goes again." I walked down the hall and turned the knob on his door. He covered his phone and mouthed "Go Away! I'll talk to you later." Then he resumed his grim acknowledgments to Phyllis' screaming rage.

I stood there outside Gary's office with more black clouds surrounding my head. I was about ready to start whimpering. I was scared, angry, and reeling at the injustice of this, not to mention the Dev-T of a CEO bypassing two levels of management to reach for the throat of a middle manager and threaten to rip it out.

In Scientology's terms, I was restimulated. So I headed straight for the front door and went for a walk.

Phyllis and Craig were partners in the company I worked for. Craig headed the Calabassas branch, where we had a call center and performed the interviews for market research and lead generation, and produced the reports. Phyllis ran the sales and graphics portion from Orange County.

In her late forties, Phyllis was an OT 5 who tied her hair into a severely tight bun. She wore huge diamonds and drove around in a red jaguar with sunglasses and the top down. When she visited Calabassas, we all went into ship-shape mode to avoid her wrath. She seemed to enjoy the fear she instilled in the people who worked for her. To her, this fear and propitiation told her she had ethics presence.

She flew to companies and sat down with their CEOs and vice presidents and told them half-truths and obfuscations about the things we could do for them if they hired us to do their marketing. Almost every client she closed had fired us before the project was over, and most of those ended up in a lawsuits against the company.

This project, which I had been picked to manage, was looking exactly like the most impossible project to date, and its fate looked the same as all the others. I had known this project was going to be a bear, because Craig had told me it would when he made me manager over it. I was flattered that they decided that I was going to be their best chance at success. But now, I was pretty sure that what I was being paid was not worth the futility and abuse that came with it.

As I stumbled the corporate parking lots of the industrial park complex where I worked, looking at parked cars and cement streetlights, near and far, I hoped to recover my ability to control my attention units and not be so overwhelmed. I hoped to regain some kind of composure to go back in there and get back to work.

After about a half hour, the emotions had subsided somewhat, and I returned. Gary's door was open but Gary was not in his office. I looked through the window into Craig's office and saw him sitting there with Craig. Craig was on the phone with the same grim face that Gary had, and he waved me away, just as Gary did. Phyllis was laying into both of these guys very heavily. Gary looked looked up at me. He looked like he had been crying.

At this point, I was ready to quit. These guys were making hundreds of thousands of dollars on this program alone, not to mention all the others, and I was making less than $50,000 per year. And yet, as the dedicated employee, I was working 60 hour weeks at a minimum and doing things that were completely impossible. That was actually fine. But if I was also going to have to put up with Phyllis, then this would be it for me.

So when Craig waved me into his office after he hung up the phone, I sat down not really caring if he was going to fire me or not. I was ready to quit.

Craig looked at me. He smiled widely and even laughed. He told me that I had not experienced half of what he had experienced working with Phyllis over the years. Craig told me that Phyllis routinely called his home after 10pm, and, when things were going poorly, she would say some of the cruelest things to Craig that anyone has ever said to him in his life. "Here, Alanzo, let me just give you one example. One time, while we were on the X project, Phyllis called me at midnight and got me out of bed. She screamed and screamed at me. She told me, and this is a direct quote, that everything I had ever produced was shit, and that I would never produce anything but shit." Craig laughed again.

I kind of laughed, too, relieved to know that everyone got this kind of treatment from Phyllis, and that if she is treating me this way, it must mean that I am worth it. I felt like I had joined an elite little club of the privileged and abused. I felt important. I felt like a Real Executive in the company.

But before I left Craig's office that day, I let him know that this was not part of my job description and that I would not put up with this kind of treatment from anyone, especially for what I was being paid.

He seemed to understand exactly what I was saying to him.

So when the client did finally fire us a few months later, being mislead about the capabilities of the company and the lies they were told by Phyllis, the company started to go into a tailspin. During this period, I had begun to become more aware of what I'd observed of the OTs that I had known in Scientology. I realized that they were not the types of people that I always thought they would be.

In fact, of the five OT 5s that I had worked for while a Scientologist in LA, three of them were batshit crazy, Just like Phyllis, they flew into rages. They seemed alternatively saccharin sweet and tyrannically abusive.

The questions began to sink in with more and more experience: Was this what I was rising to, after all, on my Bridge to Total Freedom? Would I end up like these people?

When I was first getting out of Scientology around 10 years ago, I was talking to an ex-Scientologist who worked at the Lisa McPherson Trust. She received phone calls and emails from people getting out of Scientology all the time.

I told her that one of the things I realized about leaving Scientology was that I no longer had a religion. There was a big hole there where a religion used to be. She said that this was one of the most common things she heard from Exes as they were getting out: What am I supposed to believe now?

For the last ten years, I have done a very severe critical review of my own beliefs. And I have, for long periods, taken a totally material view of the world and my own place in life. I have looked from this viewpoint and said to myself - this is all there is. This material body is basically the same is that rock. My thinking processes are the result of hormones and little electrical sparks in my brain. When I die, that will be it. There is no more to anything than that.

This, of course, leaves you with a colossal sense of absurdity. If life is actually this way, then Life is completely absurd. There is absolutely no purpose to life than becoming fertilizer for the next generation. And so I would look at that absurdity and sit with it. I would embrace it. I would go to bed with it and wake up with it, and sit next to it during the day. I made Absurdity my buddy.

I would look back on the sense of spiritual certainty I had when I was a Scientologist. I would see that most of the things that I believed were actually outright lies - not just foolishness on my part. And then there were the conclusions I'd made out of nothing but emotional needs - without evaluation or critical examination at all. I'd sit and look at all the decisions I'd made in my life, catastrophic decisions, based purely on emotionalism and lies.

I realized that there was a better way to live, and that was through constant examination and scrutiny, and the eternal willingness to change my mind when new information presented itself. To have the courage to cling to nothing.

And so now I believe that I have examined things thoroughly from a material viewpoint. And I can say now that I have come to a conclusion about it.

There are good and bad, right and wrong, true and false, constructive and destructive, practical and impractical, aspects to both spiritual and material viewpoints on life.

To choose one, and exclude the other, is the major mistake.

Because life is neither all spiritual, nor all material.

It's a choice - a constant choice we have to see things the way they are.

I took a trip back home from Los Angeles when my mother died. I drove 2000 miles to her funeral. She traveled with me in my Jeep, and talked to me, most of the way. She said things to me that came to pass.

A material viewpoint would call this the magical thinking which comes from the chemicals which squirt in your brain as a result of grief, and it would not matter that the things she said to me were what happened, and were things that only she could have said to me, nor that they were things that I could never have predicted would be said. Those things that were said to me on that trip had to come from her - they could not have come from me.

My material viewpoint keeps trying to explain this away. And yet to explain this away leaves me with a loss of meaning, and with nothing but my old buddy absurdity sitting there, and everywhere I look.

I've decided that absurdity has a place. But not everywhere.

I now believe that I have looked at things thoroughly enough to make a choice about them. And I have chosen that a person can have a spiritual outlook on life, and use logic and reason to temper it and keep it constructive.

Never again will I embrace any one guru and assign him infallibity, or ever accept anything without thoroughly testing it. Nor will I ever sign a 2.5, 5 or 1 billion year slave labor contract to promote a spiritual ideal that's been implanted in my head.

But I will not deny those things that are undeniable.

I've learned a lot from Scientology - mostly what NOT to do when approaching a spiritual philosophy or practice.

But just because a fire has burned you, does not mean you should never cook again.

No matter how material you get - it's still just a choice.

So you might as well choose both.

I am healed.

The Bitterness

I have found that the biggest obstacle to healing from the abuse of Scientology, and getting on with your life, is the bitterness that you feel from having been scammed and abused by the cult.

The most insidious part of this is the feeling that if you finally let yourself let go of your own bitterness, then Scientology will have "won".

I am writing this not from some lofty perch, looking down on all you bitter and militant exes, but as someone who was more bitter than any one of you here.

Last summer, I began to let go of my bitterness and began to run a big "HAVE" on Scientologists. I decided that they deserve any religion they choose, and that their right to it is as valuable as any of my own rights.

I decided that every person is following their own path, and trying to make their own lives better from their own viewpoint. And if that is true, then who the fuck am I to continually fault them for their choices?

Just as some Scientologists have to admit that Ritilan or Prozac has helped some people live better lives, then Exes have to admit that Scientology is truly good for some people.

And so then it becomes a question of "Who the fuck are you to tell people how to live their own lives?"

That's what bitterness, run rampant, will turn you into - the same type of militant, pinheaded fanatic that you see in the Church.

It's only after you lay down the bitterness that you can start to be who you always wanted to be.

And the way to lay down your bitterness is to have the courage necessary to "let Scientology win", too.

I say "too" because criticism of Scientology still remains absolutely vital, and should never be abandoned. So critics and their criticisms should still be allowed to "win".

But so should Scientologists.

The only way to live is to let others live.

This was taught to us in Scientology, when we first got involved, as "granting beingness". It was taken away soon after through "ethics" and PTS tech, upstat and downstats, etc etc. But it was a timeless truth held out to us as something shiney to attract our attention, and to keep us grabbing.

It was worth grabbing for then, and it still is now.

Have the courage to let Scientolgists win, too, and you will be a much happier, and much wiser, Ex-Scientologist.

And a big chunk of the freedom and healing as an Ex will be yours.

Hi.

This is an Open Letter to Tom Cruise of the Church of Scientology.

Hi Tom. My name’s Allen Stanfield.

I was a Scientologist for 16 years. And I saw so much fraud and abuse in Scientology and found that the Church was so incorrigible, that I left in the year 2000, and I’ve been trying to correct those abuses ever since.

So I was very encouraged to see the video that you made in 2004 where you expressed a massive intention to “clean this place up” and that you have no hesitation to get other people’s ethics in. This was very encouraging to me because I need your help in getting ethics in on your own Church of Scientology in 3 very important areas of abuse.

OK?

1. Enforced Abortions in the Sea Organization. As you may or may not be aware, when a woman gets pregnant the Sea Organization she is made to have an abortion. If you weren't aware of this then ask your friend David Miscavige - he's the one enforcing them. OK? So I need you to clean this up, Tom. No more enforced abortions in the Sea Organization.

2. The Destruction of Families through the policy of Enforced Disconnection. I’m sure you are aware that when the Church of Scientology declares a Scientologist an SP, then all of his family members, friends and business associates, who are under the control of the Church, are made to disconnect from that person and have no contact with them ever again. This has resulted in the destruction of thousands of families over the years, including David Miscavige’s own family as revealed on TV recently by his own niece. So Tom, I need you to clean this up. I need you to stop the destruction of families by the Church of Scientology. OK?

3. The Suppression of the right to the freedom of Speech, and other rights, of Scientologists. I’ll illustrate the reality of this particular abuse just by just asking you a simple question. Do you think I could make a video like this and put it out on the Internet and still remain a Scientologist in good standing with the Church? Of course not. Because I am talking about the abuses that the Church performs on Scientologists on a daily basis. They suppress that. They don’t want anyone to know about it, or to talk about it. And they threaten you with declare if you do. That suppresses the right to the freedom of speech and keeps all these other abuses hidden in the church. I need you to clean this up, Tom. I need you to raise perception, and get ethics in on your area and restore the right of the freedom of speech, and all other rights, for all Scientologists.

So in review,

Number 1: Stop enforced abortions in the Sea Organization.
Number 2: Stop the Destruction of families through the policy of enforced disconnections.
Number 3 restore the right to the freedom of speech, and all other civil rights, to Scientologists in the structure of the church so that these abuses can always be exposed and handled in the future.

And by the way, to all you other Scientology celebrities: John Travolta, Jenna Elfman, Kirstie Alley, Chic Corea, all you guys who benefit from the abuses of the Church by reason of your privileged position there? I need you to twin up and help Tom get ethics in on the Church as well.

Because your good name is being used to recruit people into an abusive cult.

And you need to handle that.

Now, I’ll be checking on your progress on this program over the next few weeks. So let’s get started on this right away.

Anyone who has read anything about hypnosis from a source other than L Ron Hubbard can see that auditing produces a hypnotic state and makes a Scientologist highly suggestible.

Here's a good place to start to learn about what hypnosis really is: Scientific American

And here's a good definition of the term by the American Society of Clinical Hypnosis:

From their website:

"Definition of Hypnosis

Hypnosis is a state of inner absorption, concentration and focused attention. It is like using a magnifying glass to focus the rays of the sun and make them more powerful. Similarly, when our minds are concentrated and focused, we are able to use our minds more powerfully. Because hypnosis allows people to use more of their potential, learning self-hypnosis is the ultimate act of self-control."
...
"Practitioners use clinical hypnosis in three main ways. First, they encourage the use of imagination. Mental imagery is very powerful, especially in a focused state of attention. The mind seems capable of using imagery, even if it is only symbolic, to assist us in bringing about the things we are imagining. For example, a patient with ulcerative colitis may be asked to imagine what his/her distressed colon looks like. If she imagines it as being like a tunnel, with very red, inflamed walls that are rough in texture, the patient may be encouraged in hypnosis (and in self-hypnosis) to imagine this image changing to a healthy one.'

"A second basic hypnotic method is to present ideas or suggestions to the patient. In a state of concentrated attention, ideas and suggestions that are compatible with what the patient wants seem to have a more powerful impact on the mind.'

"Finally, hypnosis may be used for unconscious exploration, to better understand underlying motivations or identify whether past events or experiences are associated with causing a problem. Hypnosis avoids the critical censor of the conscious mind, which often defeats what we know to be in our best interests. The effectiveness of hypnosis appears to lie in the way in which it bypasses the critical observation and interference of the conscious mind, allowing the client's intentions for change to take effect.'

A Scientologist will recognize each of those applications above as very familiar parts of auditing.

Hubbard mis-defined hypnosis and made it this VERY BAD thing over there, while making auditing very different and VERY GOOD over here.

It was a misdirection technique he used on us.

Auditing came straight from techniques of hypnosis, and auditing, I believe, is correctly categorized as a highly developed form of hypno-therapy.

The trouble in recognizing this while being a Scientologist lies in these misdirections. Hubbard told them that hypnosis was a state of unconsciousness and that during hypnosis you would not remember what the hypnotist did or said. This only happens very occasionally during hypnosis sessions. Most often during hypnosis, the client is completely awake and aware, and able to recall everything that went on in the session.

That fact is that during many auditing sessions, the same thing happens to the PC. But Hubbard explained this away by calling these times of unconsciousness during auditing sessions "boil off". He told Scientologists that they were "boiling off" deposits of unconsciousness out of their minds during these periods in auditing and it was very therapeutic for them.

Hubbard told Scientologist that hypnosis makes you more and more unconscious and auditing makes you more and more awake and aware. So Scientologists believe that hypnosis is a robot-making procedure with all kinds of "woo-woo" weirdo feelings and states of mind.

The fact is that hypnotic states aren't weirdo "woo-woo" states at all.

Anyone is very familiar with them.

For instance, have you ever become totally absorbed in a really good movie? It could be three hours long and, when the movie is over, you had no idea the time had passed. You kind of "wake up" when the movie ends and start looking around and realize that you have been somewhere else the whole time.

That was a characteristic of a hypnotic state.

In that state of mind, you are not unaware, or unconscious, at all.

Instead, you are VERY aware and VERY conscious of ONE THING, to the exclusion of ALL OTHER THINGS in the environment.

Just like being really IN SESSION with a good auditor.

That's why LRH isolated the Training Routines (TRs), which are communication skills that auditors use to keep a pc "in session" and placed so much emphasis on them. They were so important because TRs serve as the vital skill necessary to keep the pc "interested in own case and willing to talk to the auditor" (the definition of IN SESSION).

So, the state of being IN SESSION is a trance or hypnotic state.

Along with the social coercion techniques that Hubbard built into Scientology like:

The emphasis on statistics
The enforced disconnection from dissidents
The screaming at juniors
The elitist hierarchies which can not be questioned
The forced confessionals for any doubt or dissidence

I think that the hypnotic nature of auditing served to soften up Scientologists so that his positive suggestions, and enforced suggestions, would take hold more deeply.

Hubbard was a hypnotist.

He knew what he was doing.

If you read the Chapter in Barefaced Messiah on the missing research for Dianetics, you'll see interviews with Forrest Ackermen and others about Ron's use of hypnosis on others at Science Fiction conferences and dinner parties. Russell Miller could not find any other evidence for Hubbard's research into Dianetics than his work as a hypnotist.

The guy who coined the word "hypnosis" in the late 1800s, James Braid, realized that since hypnosis has nothing to do with sleep at all, he had used the wrong term for it. So he tried to change the word to "MONOIDEAISM".

But it was too late. "Hypnosis" had stuck.

And even Ron says that focusing one's own mind on one's own data has a similar effect. Remember SOS and DMSMH and those early books where he's always talking about hypnosis?Take a look at some of those references from Ron by way of the indexes on hypnosis, or "hypnotism". I believe it was in SOS that he said that any time you return a pc down the time track you make him more suggestible.

And anyway - whatever happened to the "cancellor" from DMSMH?

If Dianetics was going to make you so vulnerable to suggestions that you had to install a cancellor at the end of every session, then where the hell did it go after 1951?

The key is to look into hypnosis, suggestion, trance states, etc on your own and WITHOUT data from Hubbard.

Get an understanding of these things from those who had nothing to do with Hubbard.

You will see what Hubbard was doing with hypnosis, and with Scientologists.

Don't get me wrong.

Hypnosis is not at all what Hubbard told you it was: Hypnotic states can be extremely therapeutic and always have been for human beings. They are states of mind in which you can become extremely aware of one thing, to the exclusion of all other things. And in that state you can finally grasp things you were not able to grasp before. As a result, your whole world can change.

You are just vulnerable to certain degrees in that state to suggestions from others slipping in and taking over your inner world.

Unethical practitioners will exploit those vulnerabilities for their own gain.

Like Hubbard.

What I gained from Scientology:

I gained the ability to eat cheese & crackers from the gas station across the street and call it lunch.

I gained an understanding of the importance of following someone else's goals in life.

I gained the ability to retain my TOTAL CERTAINTY in the face of overwhelming evidence against it.

I gained the ability to hold my position in space while cow-towing to a screaming senior, without ever getting angry, or crying, or even letting it bother me.

I gained the ability to doubt my own thoughts and feelings as coming from my reactive mind.

I gained the ability to ignore financial ruin, and believe that I was an OT.

I gained the ability to jump to conclusions, based on fixed and pre-set ideas that I already believed.

I gained the ability to take a walk in a park on a beautiful day, and see a degraded prison planet all around me.

I gained the ability to work for free.

Scientology is truly making the Able more Able.

L Ron Hubbard made many claims for Clear and OT which have never once come to pass for any of the people who paid tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of dollars, to achieve them.

Many of them have quit and tried to warn others, only to be shunned and even attacked in various ways by the Church, under orders of L Ron Hubbard to do so. Even to this day, 23 years after Hubbard's death, the Church that he founded still attacks those who stand up and decry the abuses of the Church and the lies it tells about what it sells.

The question for each Scientologist who continues to sell Hubbard's claims for OT and Clear are:

1. Have I ever really seen any of this actually come true?

2. Can I justify fair game tactics and other "ALWAYS ATTACK, NEVER DEFEND" style policies if we can't actually create Clears and OTs as Ron claimed?

3. Where is the line that I must be aware of, and never cross, considering what I myself know to be true, and what Ron has said?

After years of careful consideration, I came to the conclusion that I could not ethically support, or vouch for Scientology, or L Ron Hubbard's claims. That is not necessarily everyone's conclusion.

But what is moral and ethical in this area of dissemination?

Can you ask someone to pay $50,000 for a service that does not make a person "stably exterior", but still sell it by saying that it will?

Can you ask a person, as I've seen asked, to mortgage their homes to pay for their OT 5, because they have just been diagnosed with breast cancer and this is the service they need to be able to "handle it"?

Can you stand by while a woman who has just lost her husband, and who is in a grieving state and very vulnerable, is pressured to pay $45,000 for her BC, because it will help her "get back in comm" with him from beyond the grave?

Can you stand by while young teenagers are signing billion year contracts to work for free in the Sea Org, and their parents are cut off from seeing them?

Can you stand by while women in the Sea Org are forced to have abortions if they should become pregnant?

How can you justify the many thousands of families that have been destroyed by enforced disconnection?

These are very important questions to ask.

How can you ethically disseminate Scientology for so much money, and for so much loyalty and sacrifice and time, when there is no evidence that the claims that Hubbard makes for it are true?

Just so you understand me, I have decided, based on the same ideals that got me into Scientology, that I can not support the Church of Scientology any longer. And for the reasons above.

Just so you understand me.

To Scientologists:

Have you ever noticed that there are two Scientologys?

When you study the chronological development of Scientology, and watch L Ron Hubbard, develop his tech and policies, you can really see the change from one Scientology to another as it evolved from the 1950's into the late 1960's and 1970's.

All the introductory books you read, and first services you took when you first started making your decisions to get more involved in Scientology, were written and developed in the 1950's. But most Scientologists don't realize how different the Scientology of today is from the Scientology of the 1950's.

For instance, there was no Bridge in the 1950's. None. It did not arrive until 1962.

There was no such thing as a Suppressive Person, although there was the "aberrative personality" and the "Merchant of Chaos", etc. The term and concept of "Potential Trouble Source" did not exist until the mid 1960's. No courses existed on it, no tech or policies, and no "Ethics Officers" existed to "handle" Scientologists to get them thinking the way they need to think as an "in-ethics Scientologist".

None of those concepts existed in the 1950's. All the materials you studied to get yourself involved were written in a completely different environment.

Ethics technology such as the conditions, did not exist, nor did any of the "Crimes and High Crimes" that came with them.

While the assumption is that these were all later developments as the technology "advanced", few Scientologists notice how radically different these ideas and procedures are from the ideas found in the basic books.

If you can imagine a Scientology without all those things, and then imagine a Scientology in which these things get introduced, then you can see what I am saying.

A big change occurred in Scientology. So big that you can say that there are really two Scientologys: One in the 1950's, and the other one that was developed from the mid 1960's on.

A lot of Scientologists, because they read the basic books, think that, today, they are walking around in the first Scientology. They look at the Bridge to Total Freedom and all the ethics handlings and the policies on "SPs" and "Potential Trouble Sources", and the disconnections, and they kind of dub-in how it all got that way.

What's missing is an understanding of what was going on with the Church historically, and the problems that Hubbard solved with tech and policy on a piecemeal basis. When you see certain policies published by Hubbard, and you look at what was happening to Scientology in the society at that time, you begin to see that a lot of the long-standing policies were written by him to handle a single, specific "attack" at the time.

His writings in the early 1960's declaring Kennedy and Nixon "SPs", for instance, were all responses to government agencies, such as the IRS and the FDA, investigating "liberties" that Hubbard had taken against various tax and health care laws.

Yet Scientologists today consider the designations of "Suppressive" government agencies "advances" that Hubbard made while he "cogged" on the origins of the society that we live in. And the reason you believe that is because that is what you were told.

Well, there is another view to these things, usually found in court documents, court testimony and the newspaper articles of the time. They contain data and facts that can fill in missing pieces of a very different puzzle than the one you have been given as a Scientologist.

Sometimes, a person can become too attached to Scientology to really make a critical investigation of its ideas.

You can become so involved in it that you stop seeing its contradictions. Especially when you are told that all contradictions in Scientology come from your own misunderstandings.

A great thing to do is to take the Creed of the Church of Scientology, which was written and adopted in 1954, and compare that to the policies that the Church runs on today. You can see very clearly when you do this that the Church of today does not operate on, or believe in, the Creed of the Church at all.

Yet you think that it does. To you, that is your Creed. And it sometimes just makes no sense when you see it violated all the time. You say to yourself, "That is not Scientology!" And you may write a Knowledge Report. But nothing is done about it.

Why?

Because you are still in the Scientology of the 1950's. You still think that's the Scientology you are walking around in. It's why you became a Scientologist in the first place - all those beautiful ideals and love of freedom and rights, etc.

But if Scientology really believes in the freedom of speech, as the 1950's Creed says, then why is it now a high crime to go to the press about Scientology?

If Man really has an inalienable right to his own religious practice, his own organizations, etc., why does the Church so heavily attack the Freezone and Psychiatry?

If the Church really believes that all men were created with equal rights, why does Scientology now teach that only "honest" men should have rights?

Keep separating out the writings of the early 1950's, and contrast them with later writings that get applied today. You will see more and more contradictions and outright violations of the basic ideas that appealed to you about Scientology and got you involved in the first place.

In this way you can get a very clear picture of the group that you actually joined, rather than the group you thought you were joining.

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