Unraveling the Enigma: Courageous Exits and the Quest for Truth Beyond Scientology's Grasp - Scientology Stories #39

Emerging from the shadow of Scientology, Jon Atack and I peel back the layers of our personal exoduses, revealing the raw and intricate journey of reclamation and self-discovery post-departure. Our dialogue unfurls the poignant tales of escape and the arduous quest for growth, underscoring our commitment to aid those grappling with similar paths. We confront the doctrine's insidious grip, scrutinizing its self-reinforcing mechanisms and the broader implications of societal control, illustrating through stark comparison to China's One Child Policy how deeply environments can shape beliefs and behaviors.

The heart of our conversation lies in the courage to dismantle the constructs of Scientology, laying bare the painful process of seeking objectivity and recognizing the fallacies that once ensnared us. I recount the turbulence of challenging Scientology's communication rules—rules that starkly contrast with the parental instinct to offer unconditional love. Together, we dissect the logical inconsistencies within the teachings, arriving at a staunch renouncement of the ideology through a synthesis of our lived experiences and moral reflections, all while revealing the myth-making that underscores the foundation of Scientology.

Finally, the episode navigates the delicate terrain of language and thought reclamation, offering listeners a glimpse into the exercises that catalyze critical thinking and self-examination among former believers. We expand upon the intricacies of redefining one's beliefs and the nuanced dance of supporting loved ones still ensnared by the Church. Jon and I share strategies for engaging current members with empathy and patience, providing a beacon of hope for those striving to reconnect with their essence outside the confines of the organization. Our candid narratives and insights serve as both a map and a compass for those on the journey to find themselves again in the wake of Scientology.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:12

Welcome back to the channel. I'm your host for today, claire Headley, and this is my next episode of Scientology Stories, in which I talk with people about their experiences in Scientology and getting out of Scientology. And, as always, here is my important note Whether you're currently in Scientology, a former Scientologist or just curious about hearing these stories, please know Scientology does not want you to hear these. So thanks for being here, thanks for watching, thank you for sharing and thank you for helping us to educate people on the true and abusive nature of Scientology. And my guest for today is the wonderful and amazing John A Tech. We're back for part two. Welcome back, john.

Speaker 2: 1:02

Wonderful and amazing. That sounds good. I must go and look at that.

Speaker 1: 1:07

Yes, well, I say that because I, as I've, as I, as we talked about in part one, is the first time you and I have ever talked face to face, and it's just amazing to compare perspectives. And you know, I've just found so much learning on this path of recovery, 19 years now, after getting the heck out of Scientology, with the clothes on my back and $80 in my pocket, so it's just really. It's an amazing path to be on and I'm grateful to have you here today.

Speaker 2: 1:41

Thank you and it's lovely to be here, and I'm worth saying that the path to recovery is also the path of growth, that there's post-traumatic stress and there's post-traumatic growth. And by having had the experiences we've had, even horribly negative ones, by digesting those experiences we become better people and I'm sure that, on a daily basis, you and Mark realize that you're much better than you were yesterday.

Speaker 1: 2:10

Oh, absolutely.

Speaker 2: 2:12

Every day, every day, I get a little of it.

Speaker 1: 2:15

Well, speaking for myself, yeah, no, of course there's many road bumps. We'll continue to hit road bumps. We'll make mistakes, we'll you know. But and again, I just have I the learning process and the peeling of the layers, and the extricating and understanding of the first 30 years of my life as a child born into Scientology. And then you know everything, every experience I had. I'm here despite those and you know, if I can turn that my experiences into helping somebody else, then that's, that's okay.

Speaker 2: 2:58

And that is the is the significant part that by digesting the experience, integrating the experience, we do become capable of helping other people, and that's the most important thing in life helping other people. For sure, I think certainly from the perspective of society, it's the most important thing that we're helping other people rather than, you know, leaving them be or messing with them, as Scientology does. Yep.

Speaker 3: 3:26

Completely.

Speaker 1: 3:28

Yes, and so for today, I thought it would be really good, in that theme of what we just talked about, to discuss your work in helping people get out of and recover from Scientology, because your body of work is huge, extensive and significant.

Speaker 2: 3:46

Thank you. Yeah, there's a lot of it and and it it's sort of I didn't go off and and spend eight years training as a doctor or something like that. I I hit the track running that. So I came out of Scientology in October 1983. And was accidentally elevated to the central position in the UK independent movement, totally accidentally.

Speaker 2: 4:22

John Mace who'd been doing it was going back to Perth, australia, and had handed it over to a guy called Bevan Priest.

Speaker 2: 4:29

And I was wakened at 9 30 in the morning which is early for me, I'm a night out by a man standing by my bed going sir, sir, would you take this guy, bevan Priest, come on. And he was. You know, three days later, captain Bill was there and who I'd never heard of and was a complete maniac, and we had the first meeting of disaffected Scientologists in the UK and from that moment there were all of these hurt people, these angry people, these people who'd been lied to, been disappointed, been been treated horribly, and they wanted to talk to me. And so my first experience was listening to people talking about it. I didn't really know what to do and at first, you know, for the first few weeks and months it was well, you know they need another auditing session. You know they need to sort out their problems, or you know their upsets and tell us their withholds and what have you, and that'll sort it out. And that faded because it wasn't working and by January, and to comment.

Speaker 1: 5:41

Those are the. Those are the mechanisms, from my perspective, that that make it so that a person in Scientology keeps themselves into it Once the programming has been established. Those are the mechanisms. Like, any reason you'd want to leave is simply because of something you haven't confessed to or something you've done wrong.

Speaker 2: 6:06

Yeah, yeah, and that's such an important insight. Scientology is self-reinforcing. If you look to model of the Chinese sort reform the reeducation camps which Hubbard was aware of and I think, used as the basis for the rehabilitation project force then you have people unwilling. And so when people say, well, brainwashing didn't work, it's because when you release somebody from the environment, it's not being reinforced anymore, so you build it into the person and all into the society, chinese society. To this day.

Speaker 2: 6:45

There's an awful documentary called One Child Nation about the one child policy, and you realize just how horrific this was, that women were forced to have tubal ligations, were sterilized after they'd had a child, and the thing that got me about this documentary was, years later, this Chinese filmmaker who's, a few years before, gone to the US and goes back to China to show off her new baby and make a little bit of film that people who've women who were forced to have terminations, women who were forced to have tubal ligation, are saying, yes, but it was necessary for China, so they've fallen into the, they're in a reinforcing environment which is Chinese society. Those who left China stopped believing. So brainwashing doesn't work. Well, no, it worked. Look at China today.

Speaker 2: 7:43

It worked, but Scientology self-reinforcing, and so you will tend to be in the fixed system. For myself, my way of leaving the belief system after my last auditing session in January 84. When I just I don't want to do OT6 and OT7. I'm just having no interest in any more body tatens because I'd come to the conclusion there was no such thing.

Speaker 2: 8:10

It was a nonsense. I was imagining these things to fulfill Ron Hubbard's nightmares. They didn't exist. They weren't beings that inhabited me, and I think it is one of the most dangerous ideas that we have inside us an alien enemy that's making decisions for us. Whether we call it the reactive mind, the unconscious mind, demons, body tatens, dibs, gadons, whatever language we go into, genies this is a really dangerous thought. There's some invisible element inside of doing that there isn't. We have unconscious processes, but there isn't a mind in there. There isn't an agent that's plotting against us. It's absolute nonsense. But you're given this thought that this is going on inside you and I was in touch with the Scientology kids about five years ago I think it was who and they were doing wonderful things.

Speaker 2: 9:06

I had very positive attitude towards organization where people who grew up in Scientology have got together and somebody there had seen me, probably at Tony Otega's site, talking about the put downs in Scientology You're a down stat, get up tone, all of this sort of stuff and they wrote me.

Speaker 2: 9:30

They did a collective thing and they wrote me something like 400 different phrases make it go right that are used in Scientology that actually they're put down, they're ways of controlling you and it becomes automatic. So that if you look to cognitive therapy with Aaron Beck, what he realized when he abandoned the Freudian nonsense he was trained in was that we instruct ourselves, we say things to ourselves that sometimes it goes by so quickly we don't realize we're doing it. So you knock a glass of water off a table and you say to yourself I'm so clumsy, I'm always doing that, and those instructions become Scientology. You know that. Make it go right. You know the way out is the way through the, whatever that means. Yeah, great question. You don't have to think anymore. You've got these little programs on the in your head that basically say you're wrong and run her birds right. You know you'll be totally self determined when you do exactly what you're told by Ron.

Speaker 1: 10:41

No, that's.

Speaker 2: 10:42

Ron, determinism. It's one of the things he didn't put in and undoing that in somebody. So, coming to this point where people become alert to the way they're instructing themselves, my thought was well, if I believe in any part of Scientology, I can't have an objective view of it. I have to be outside it. And so I decided to disbelieve it, all of it. And I went I'll look at the elements of it and anything that's useful to me I'll take back, and none of it proved to be useful. It's 40 years later, because anything that did seem useful was stolen from somebody else.

Speaker 2: 11:21

Yeah, I've written about a written paper called possible origins for dynetics and Scientology Long time ago. Jeff Jacobson's papers on the subject are very good too, showing that you know Hubbard just plagiarized things and, what's more, he altered them. You know he has this thing about alter isness For something to persist, it must have a lie in it. What's the lie in Scientology? Well, the lie is easy. It doesn't work. Alvin Hubbard Jr said it works, as Alvin Hubbard intends it to work and as it claims to work. You won't be able to communicate freely with anyone on any subject after you've done grade zero, because you can't talk to suppressives, you can't talk about your case, you can't have verbal tech about what Scientology is. Here are all these rules about communication you can't do. But you'll be able to communicate freely with anyone on any subject, and that happened.

Speaker 1: 12:14

Yes, I know, no, totally. In fact, one of the last, well, the last conversation I had with my mother and my stepfather, I said don't you believe that communication is the universal solvent? I'm sure you know that.

Speaker 2: 12:30

When in doubt communicate.

Speaker 1: 12:32

Right, exactly Like really you think that this is a solution. You just never having any relationship with your daughter for the rest of your life, like anyway, yeah.

Speaker 2: 12:47

Yeah, and I mean in ethical terms. That's one of the things talking. I was in St Petersburg and I was talking to a former jivers witness, and not St Petersburg in Russia, not in Florida. I just realized there's more than one, isn't there?

Speaker 1: 13:02

Yes.

Speaker 2: 13:02

And this guy was 35 years old and he told me his parents didn't talk to him and it somehow the resonance of that. I have four children. I don't have the right, till the day I die. I don't have the right to not love, support and help my children, and if somebody comes along and orders me to do that, then I have no interest in them, you know, because they are a monster. Anybody that interferes in the familial relationship between parent and child children are going to mess with you. They have the right to be awful to you because they're born to it, but you chose to have them, so they're your responsibility, like it or not, from then on, completely the duty to love. You know, taking that away it's despicable, it's a terrible one.

Speaker 1: 14:02

Yeah, and that's where my conclusion from my experiences is that unconditional love does not exist in Scientology. It's undermined and broken that capacity and that responsibility from a parent standpoint, which is heartbreaking because the hurt that does, is incredible.

Speaker 2: 14:28

And it makes us less than human. What makes us human, I believe, is empathy and our ability to care for others, and when you take that away and in Scientology that is so the idea that sympathy is bad, the idea that compassion is bad. A question I've often asked people who had kids while they were in Scientology is if your child grazed her knee, did you embrace her and say, there, there, it'll be all right? Or did you give them a silent treatment, and what does that do?

Speaker 1: 15:09

The latter is my answer to that, having grown up in it. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2: 15:14

And that is so wrong because our attachment to our security in the world, particularly as infants, is utterly dependent on our caregivers and the sense that they care, they give care, and so, yeah, this awful thing. So I rejected it. The first thing I rejected was the data series. I'd done the data series evaluators course, which is quite rare among public Scientologists, as I found. I got to the end of the course and we went to the then Guardian's office to get some evaluations for me to look at, and they went he can't do this course, it's ours, it's like, well, you know, it's on the oh well. And so I realized that not many, many of us had done this. And I started looking at the data series evaluators course and this sort of it didn't make sense. This is the very definition of logic, this course, this is the most the best training in rationality ever produced by humanity, the logic series and all of this. And then you look at it. You go well, data series According to Hubbard?

Speaker 1: 16:24

of course not reality.

Speaker 2: 16:26

Yeah, and his research, which had taken minutes sometimes, and you go to it and it's like, let's look at logic. Then Data series 48 out of sequence. The data series policy letters must not be read out of sequence. Data series 48. You can only read that when you've read the 47 before it, but you don't know it exists. It should be data series zero, obviously, and it isn't.

Speaker 2: 17:01

You also got things like some 14th century psychiatrists. I got stuck on that with a course supervisor when I was doing it and he was a PhD who worked for NASA and he tried to persuade me that 14th was not in fact an error. I said, well, hubbard probably wrote this and it's 19th, and the nine and a four, when they're handwritten, look fairly similar. Somebody's typed it up wrong. I got this whole thing about faculty psychology and Thomas Aquinas and this that nearly it's like no psychiatry is invented in the 19th century. In fact they were called alienists at first. So it's just a mistake. You know it's an error. Oh no, there can't be any errors. You know this is the perfect run hub.

Speaker 2: 17:48

I then started looking at outpoints and going well, importance, the importance of something, what's the importance of the different elements of Scientology? Where does it say? And when I came to write Blue Sky years later I realized there is no simple statement. Yeah, there are lots of books, new Slant on Life, problems of Work, fundamental Thought. None of them say the most important thing in Scientology is this.

Speaker 2: 18:14

Well, the most important thing in Scientology is the first factor before the beginning was the cause, that's. That's before the beginning. So we start there. Then we go to Axiom one life is basically a static, has no mass, no meaning, no motion, no location in space or in time, as the ability to postulate redefine by Hubbard and to perceive. I mean he means to wish. By postulat he doesn't mean making a basic philosophical premise, which is where it comes from.

Speaker 2: 18:45

But so I started you know where it came to it ordering these things again. But hang on, if this is the most rational thing in the world, why doesn't it follow the principles of the data series, data series itself? And so from there I just pushed it all away and since then I've looked at elements of it. Now what I come to is that to recover from Scientology, it's necessary to understand Scientology. So the first part of that I wrote a book. When you know Piece of Blue Sky, let's sell these people a piece of blue sky and the unabridged edition, for which I do actually get the proceeds, unlike the pirated first edition of Piece of Blue Sky which he published without a link to the right one.

Speaker 2: 19:31

Yes, the one with the pretty clouds on and not the one with the big thunderstorm on. You know that's.

Speaker 1: 19:39

Okay.

Speaker 2: 19:41

I did not know that Good to know.

Speaker 2: 19:43

So the first stage was to say what's the history of the subject and why is it that the man who founded this subject was such a liar? You know so these simple ideas. He was a nuclear physicist? No, he wasn't he. He failed atomic and molecular physics. And he says it himself the lecture introduction to Dianetics, september 1950, published finally by David Miskavic. He says I failed molecular and atomic physics. So he's not a nuclear physicist Studied at Explorer oh, come on.

Speaker 2: 20:19

You know I looked into the Caribbean motion picture expedition and the thing that denies it. It is an article written by Hubbard himself when it was finished, where he said we didn't do anything. We got into a fight and these people are suing me because of the mess I made. We didn't enact any pirate battles at all. And we're enacting pirate battles becomes an expedition, I'm not sure, the Alaska Radio experimental expedition. He spent months stranded in Ketchikan, alaska, and we know this because he recorded radio shows while he was there. And all the pictures they show in the run the Explorer are of Ketchikan, alaska. You didn't leave the harbor, you know. So then we get the.

Speaker 2: 21:02

You know the studied with gurus in the east and at different places. He claims to have studied with gurus in China, india, tibet and Mongolia. Now, I'd like to point out, there aren't any gurus in Mongolia, before we go any further. So and then you find the first time he went to India was, I think, 1954, when he landed at Calcutta airport on his way to somewhere else, and I don't think he went there. So he didn't study with many gurus there.

Speaker 2: 21:28

Tibet oh, come on, pull the other one getting into Tibet this time. You know, I went and read all of Alexandra David Neal's books. I know about this. He was never there. And that leaves China. And, yes, he had two short holidays in China and I've got his diaries, handwritten diaries for both of those trips. I've also got the retype of one of them where he makes everything a little bit better, which is something he'd be working on for the rest of his life, to massage data and make it sound better. So the only thing in those diaries that talks about gurus or anything like is a visit to a Lamasari where he says that the Lamas had voices that sounded like bullfrogs and in terms of condensing all of the wisdom of the East, well, maybe it is in there and I'm just not understanding it.

Speaker 1: 22:18

But I don't think so.

Speaker 2: 22:23

And so you get all of this hyperbole, all of this fabulous and exaggeration. The last one, of course, well, the last two being the, you know, wounded war hero. And that story he started to tell in 1965. Before that, in my philosophy, you know, crippled and blinded with physical injuries, physical injuries to hip and back not pretend injuries, but physical ones Liars tend to do that, they tend to put words in so you'll believe them and injured optic nerves, he tells us.

Speaker 2: 22:57

Then we go back to 1959, communication I think it's 59, communication, and hisness Wei says on July the 25th, he was in Hollywood. Yeah, well, so that's like 20 days before the war ended. You weren't crippled and blinded. You're in Hollywood and you beat up three petty officers. And it is true, he did get into a fight with two petty officers not three and was summoned as a witness to their court martial for them having attacked him. But him slamming a beer glass in somebody's face and using his judo to throw somebody, no, absolutely nonsense.

Speaker 2: 23:31

So then back to 1950, november, december, and there's an interview with him in Look magazine where he has no war wounds whatsoever. He talks about having fallen down a ship's ladder and being affected by the blast of a gun, the light from it affecting his eyes, that's it. And ulcers and pink eye conjunctivitis, those are his war wounds. So that, and then the final claim is that he developed a therapy through which he cured his war wounds, which he didn't in fact have. And then we see the famous you know, I think we talked about I've talked about this before the 1947 letter. Gentlemen, this is a request for treatment. Where he's it's in my little book, scientology, the Cult of Greed, and there's the letter reprinted, where he's, oh wow, saying you know that his mind is. Let's have a look at it. Just throw my spectacles on the floor to help the process a bit. There we go. Cool Little gold discs in front of my eyes aren't working anymore. Oh, dear 1950s run.

Speaker 2: 24:47

I cannot account for nor rise above long periods of moroseness and suicidal inclinations and have newly come to realize that I must first try and for above this before I can hope to rehabilitate myself at all. Signed with the flourish Elrin Hubbard signature that we've.

Speaker 2: 25:09

Oh yeah, so I cured myself, not really. January 1949, a letter that Tony Ortega published. I didn't realize he didn't have it. You get used to that when you've collected hundreds of thousands of documents. And in 1949, he wrote to his literary agent, fari Ackerman, from Savannah, georgia, where he was staying with major books his guru at the time and said he'd worked out a technique whereby you could women and they'd know nothing about it. That's the first mention of dionetics. Oh my gosh. He also says he's going to make a huge amount of money from it. He doesn't say anything about helping anyone.

Speaker 2: 25:55

So that's the first part of getting out of this, to understand that this man was a pathological liar. He wrote Pulp.

Speaker 2: 26:05

Fiction and he then extended that. But the next part and the part that is vital. I mean, people have often come to me and I know Ben Corridon, when he left, was taking his emeter to go and help people, you know, recover from Scientology. It's like, ben no, that's really not we. And people come to me and say, oh, but it'll take thousands of hours of auditing to undo this and you go no, it takes about 10 minutes. What you have to understand is Just find something he said that's not true and realize what that means. So I took with Aaron somewhere every year ago and I pointed out to him that what Hubbard says is if you increase any of the three corners of the affinity reality communication triangle, the others will increase too. So it's a piece of mathematics, it's a piece of geometry. So if you increase communication with somebody, you'll increase their affinity for you. But Hubbard also said bullets too are communication. So what he's saying is if I shoot somebody, they'll like me more.

Speaker 2: 27:17

If I yell at somebody, they'll like me more and you go, but this is a foundation of Scientology. And if that's not true and it isn't then what we've got is pseudoscience, which, curiously enough, is what the word Scientology means when it was first used in 1910 by a man called Alan Upwood.

Speaker 2: 27:39

He said there is science and there is Scientology, and he was so right. In Scientology, what we have is not a nuclear physicist who studied with gurus in the East, bringing together all of the mysteries of the East. I mean, as somebody who'd studied Buddhist and Taoist teaching. I didn't find anything In Phoenix lectures. He makes some comment, but he evidently doesn't have the vaguest idea what Buddhism and Taoism are, and his access to Taoism is Alastor Crowley's translation which is dreadful of the Tao of the Jing Mine's. Much better, much better than Alastor Crowley. So you come to this point. So when I first talked with my friend Carmen, who had grown up in Scientology and had a horrific experience of it and she was then, I think, 37 years old and in our first conversation on Skype or Google Hang-Ups or whatever it was, she said to me is it true that reality is an agreement? Yes, if you're the hypnotist, reality is an agreement, but otherwise no.

Speaker 1: 28:56

Oh my gosh.

Speaker 2: 28:58

The world's out there, whether you want it to be, whether you close your eyes, whatever you do, it's out there and it's constant and continuous. It doesn't matter if you stop believing in it, it'll still be there, because Emmanuel Kant, I'm told, said and I've never read Kant because it's way beyond my pay grade, but I'm told that he said we have the world in which we live and we have the world that we inhabit, which is in our own heads. So we live in our interpretation of the world, how it makes us feel and what we believe about it. Our own universe, hubbard would say. Though that is in fact, a misdefinition of the universe, which is a whole system of created things you don't have your own universe.

Speaker 2: 29:41

You have your own head, your own thoughts, your own ideas. But nonetheless, off she went. And a week later she came back and she was jubilant. She said she'd used centered laundry conditioner. Now this is the whole of my method. You step forward. Yeah.

Speaker 2: 30:03

I haven't talked about the St York hygiene hat or Hubbard's phobia of scents, which was shared by Rajneesh, curiously enough. So it might be a particular element of narcissism that they over-emphasize smell, but she basically said I have never in my life used a perfume because I was taught that it's the psychiatrist controlling the world through scent, which is a wonderful idea. Yes, and that is the process. It's that simple. If you can get hold of something and go, he was wrong about this then you can keep thinking go, well, he was wrong about that, he was wrong about that, and the enchantment fades, the belief fades.

Speaker 2: 30:50

You realize in the end it's just Hockham, that Scientology has no substance. It achieves none of the things it claims. There are no clears, people who don't catch colds, people who have the proper emotional reaction to everything, people who are not distressed by anything in the world anymore. No, the reality is and I have heard somebody and I won't name him in the countercult world say that you're only cured when you can laugh at the experience, which is pretty much what Hubbard was saying. You've come up the tone. No, if you think about those of your comrades that fell beside you, you should always feel sad when you think about it, for sure.

Speaker 2: 31:32

But if you are human, if you are decent, the thing is that that response can become less, that one can get to a point where one is not overwhelmed with grief, One can say well, these things happen yeah.

Speaker 1: 31:49

Interesting, and so my comment on that. By the way, I completely agree. The struggle that I had in it when I was in is that I felt handcuffed by my family being in, so I wouldn't even allow myself to do those steps that you're talking about because of the consequences I knew it would have.

Speaker 2: 32:16

Yes, and there's also the thought, which is completely and absolutely wrong, that there are operating fatens in Scientology who can read your mind.

Speaker 2: 32:29

And that's a weird thing. I remember when I first encountered that when I got involved. It makes you feel kind of squirmy that you might think something awful that this person's going to read. And did I tell the story last time? We spoke about Stephanie Ryburn who ran the Birmingham Mission, and she always treated me. It seemed to me with disdain and I thought it was because I had long hair. I thought you know, I was hippie or something. But she never smiled, she never called me by name. And seven years on we're both doing OT5 in the waiting room there and she came out beaming and she said John, she used my name and isn't it great that Ron's come up with something that handles the mess that OT3 makes. She was a class 8 auditor, trained by Hubbard. She done OT3. And she's saying her life for 15 years thereafter had been a chaos because of that.

Speaker 2: 33:37

And now she was looking for something to repair the danger of that. So you have that other thought, which is if you dare to have these thoughts, somebody might read your mind.

Speaker 1: 33:49

And they won't, yeah, or even the belief that the emeter, whatever their device, will uncover it.

Speaker 2: 34:03

And I mean it's a ridiculous nonsense. It is such a pathetically bad piece of equipment I'm sure Mark knows about this and understands it better than I do.

Speaker 2: 34:16

But I had a friend, barry Pemberty, who he and his friend, they mended the emeters at St Hill for years. And they were going why, why are we using these awful cheap components? And he was very upset that they were using germanium transistors, which didn't mean very much to me, but apparently they really are crud. And so they went. What would happen if we built a meter using the best components? So they did, and they were so pleased with themselves. They set up chart recorders with pens on a Mark 5 emeter, as it was then, and their ability meter, as it came to be known, and they went to the pub to celebrate. When they got back, there were twice as many reads on the Mark 5. So they went oh, we've got it wrong, what have we done? So they didn't go down the pub next time and they found that half of the reads on the emeter were being generated from the inside.

Speaker 2: 35:16

So the most famous thing about that is the rock slam that Hubbard confined a huge amount of the crew at Clearwater, the Flagland base, to the rehabilitation project force because they were list one rock slammers. They'd had a rock slam and the rock slam. I mean, I saw it. You perhaps did as well. I saw it often enough. It didn't have to have the cans plugged in. An e-meter could rock slam without having any input. I saw that several times. Yes, and they introduced silver ceiling somewhere around 81 so that you could pay to have the meter. The defect in the meter, the meter was that it had a carbon filter, silver, starting the silver.

Speaker 1: 36:05

Oh, yes, yes, yes.

Speaker 2: 36:07

Your e-meter would and they also.

Speaker 1: 36:10

Yeah, and they added the step of if a rock slam starts which is obviously the erratic just loose cannon needle bouncing all over the place that you do a test and you unplug and you do this and you do that, and most times it was a mechanical flaw, what it's?

Speaker 2: 36:30

a very specific flaw that you have a carbon potentiometer which is pretty much like a dimmer switch for lights. That's the tone arm on a meter and every time you move it it's giving off little bits of carbon and they're getting into the circuitry and causing rock slams. So I mean to add to that story. When I interviewed Otto Rose, who was the only person to do OT8 under Hubbard's direction, one of only five people to be trained to the level of class 12, the highest level by Hubbard he, when Hubbard got ill, you know, every winter Hubbard would get bronchitis. Because if you smoke 100 cigarettes a day you get bronchitis. What am I saying? Right, if you deal with the problems of the world and all the suppressives, you get bronchitis.

Speaker 2: 37:19

And so you know, the clearing course came out of a bronchial attack. Ot3 came out of a bronchial attack. He was trying to cure himself. David Mayo, of course, later on got to develop new aerodynamics for operating Thaetons, because Hubbard was yet again a potential trouble source. No, no, sorry, it was ill With him. It wouldn't be that because he was a superior godlike being. I'm being a little sarcastic here, I think.

Speaker 2: 37:45

Of course, as you should be, yeah exactly Otto comes to this and Hubbard's ill. And Otto said he went through every scrap of paper, things written on envelopes, everything that could be considered a part of Hubbard's auditing folder, and at the end of it he said, ron, you said that rock slams, which used to indicate the presence of the rock, the thing that was causing you to have a case at all, which that's an idea that disappeared in the early 60s the rock slam shifted over to indicate you had evil purposes. And Otto pointed out to Ron Hubbard that he'd found 200 rock slams in his folders, 200.

Speaker 2: 38:29

And the next thing he knew in Hubbard's folders the next thing he knew standing on the dock with his passport and that was the end of his post association for Ron Hubbard.

Speaker 1: 38:41

Yeah, which, by the way, now David Miscavige does the exact same thing. Anyone who says that he is a suppressive person, or that he's the reason they're failing, or he's the reason they're sick, they're out, they're gone.

Speaker 2: 38:53

Quite right too. The thought that David Miscavige is anything but the most benevolent human being who ever lived is just such a foreign thought to us all, those of us who know and love him yeah, it.

Speaker 1: 39:06

I love your sarcasm. The craziest part was, I'm sure you remember the Anderson Cooper show A History of Violence the series that he did, which in which many past executives who'd witnessed David Miscavige physically abuse staff, and for that show there were affidavits provided from current members of the SEAL organization and they're like. The tone of them was oh, I saw him rescue a baby bird, a helpless baby bird, and you're just like oh, come on, enough with the lies, seriously, stop it.

Speaker 2: 39:49

Yeah, the first time I ever saw or heard of David Miscavige was in. I think it's called the SEALG Moves In and it was an account of the San Francisco Mission Holders Conference in October 1982. And there's a picture of Miscavige. This was published throughout Scientology around the time that David Mayo was declared in that period and there is Miscavige holding somebody you know forcibly and threatening them. So he's right there. And years later, decades later, I had an email from a guy who said I'm the man in the photo.

Speaker 2: 40:30

Oh, my gosh the guy and slammed me against a filing cabinet. So the first time we find out about Miscavige, he is committing an act of violence and he says that we are going to be tough and ruthless. Those are the words in the thing and that was what. That was very important to me when I read that, which in 1983, the year I left and kind of went, yeah, tough, got to do that, ruthless never.

Speaker 2: 40:57

As soon as you do that, you've lost everything Right and away. It went. So yeah, that. So yeah. The thing is to to be able to recognize Scientology thinking in yourself. When I came to know the wonderful Cyril Vosper, the man who wrote the Mindbenders about his experiences with Runhaburd and Scientology over a 14 year period, he told me and he'd been out for 14 years by this time when I met him, he told me that he still would be crossing the road and wondering if he'd committed an overt. So that's the other part of it. To look at language and say that this is propaganda by redefinition of words. If we use our own Hubbard's explanation of why you have to change the meanings of words, nobody, even Shakespeare, didn't create as many neologisms as Runhaburd.

Speaker 2: 41:53

There are 600 page dictionaries the tact dictionary and modern management technology defined and lots of contradictions and conflicts. This is not a precision language, it's a very ugly language. There's nothing poetic about Hubbard's language, but he's trying to make it sound sciency. You know he's trying to put one over and kind of get you to believe that there's something scientific here and the lambda interacts with theta or theta and all of this stuff. Right To look at language and pull the language out If you find yourself using a Scientology term. I mean I was lucky, because I lived in the WOG, to use Hubbard's term, the WOG world. That's a very abusive term in the UK, by the way. It's like the N word, right?

Speaker 1: 42:45

Yeah, which I know that's been brought to my attention multiple times and it's just shocking to know that's a word I grew up with as a child and it was a different kind of oh, we're better than everybody else, we're better than the outside, than a regular person on the street, but the thought of finding out it's a racial slur was shocking to me.

Speaker 2: 43:08

Yeah, you are undermench, the rest of you and we are ubermench, we are the elect. We are superior to you, this ridiculous idea. But because I lived in that world, I was never a staff member. I had to talk English, so I always had. And now that I see former members, you know there was an interview with somebody who'd left and she said that she didn't feel any blame, shame or regret. And, of course, to somebody who's not been indoctrinated in Scientology, you wouldn't notice this.

Speaker 1: 43:46

No, you wouldn't catch that as a phrase.

Speaker 2: 43:49

Yeah, and the language we use is most of how we actually think, that our thinking there is non-linguistic thinking, but most of how we think is caught in language and we start believing the things we're saying to be true.

Speaker 2: 44:08

So in the history of science has many examples. Phlegistin is the one that she usually brought up, the idea that when you burn something, it weighs less than it did before you burned it, so it's given off. Phlegistin, you know the idea of the aether, the luminiferous aether, that the universe was packed with this stuff and the planets were all held in it which had come on from the crystal spheres. And Einstein comes along and shows why you don't need the aether, but that people will. Even so, even in the scientific community, people will believe things which are in fact only words. Phlegistin turned out to be oxygen among other things that are lost when something burns.

Speaker 3: 44:53

And we got.

Speaker 2: 44:53

Levoisier and all that good stuff. I would say that if one's interpretation of the world is in Scientology's, then it's a good idea to find a normal word, and that process is also part of recovery. So I guess what I'm saying is you don't need somebody to sit down with you in auditory for a thousand hours, you just need to start two processes going One, questioning the veracity of what Hubbard said whether it's about himself or you know how we should live in the world and two, looking at language. That can be accelerated a bit. I've advocated this many times. I don't think anybody's followed up on it, but I will tell the story again.

Speaker 2: 45:35

Back in I think it was 1903, in the old days, you know, in the last century I collected together 11 ex-Scientologists and sat with them in my living room to try something out, and the idea was this between us we had more than 200 years of experience of Scientology, so that's quite a lot. So I said look, what I'm going to do is I'm going to call forward a Scientology principle. I'm going to go from my left. I'm not going to be the first person to speak, because that's quite important, because I know far too much about this and people will just start looking at me to give them answers, and that really isn't what's meant to be happening.

Speaker 2: 46:13

I'll go from the first of my left and tell me a time you've applied this idea, and then we'll go around and everybody will add to it, and then we'll come back to me and I'll put my experience in and then we'll talk about it. So I started with the eight dynamics, the urges towards survival. You know the first dynamic, self. The second, the family, sex. The third groups, the fourth, mankind, and on up to God, who has the position at eight, or infinity.

Speaker 1: 46:38

Yes.

Speaker 2: 46:40

I don't think they're the same thing. But so I said you know so. The first person said oh, I've never used it. The second person said never used it. Third, fourth, fifth, it came all the way. Background to me 200 years experience in Scientology. Not one person in that room had ever tried to apply the eight dynamics to solve a problem. You know every dynamic gets a vote. I then deconstructed it and said so what you're being told is that if it's good for you, it's good for the Mrs, it's good for the cricket club, it's good for your pet rock, and the spirits around are happy with it. That's five votes. We don't care what God thinks.

Speaker 1: 47:19

Oh my gosh, good point.

Speaker 2: 47:23

Those are the seven votes who are relevant and why do I get a vote and the by now, nearly eight billion people only get one vote? There's some disproportionate here. There's something psychopathic here. In fact, I'm as important as all of mankind. I'm as important as God. This is the kind of thing Ron Hubbard thought. This is not a safe way of thinking about things. So I realized that me being in the room probably interfered with the process because I've spent too much time thinking about it. But I do advocate if people get together online in a zoom chat or something and have a small group of people excluding anybody who's hostile, negative and angry.

Speaker 2: 48:03

I'm afraid I'm a small group of people and take a passage from fundamentals of thought or one of the axioms. Try and work out, if you can, why space is a viewpoint of dimension. You know I had two hours sitting with a convinced Scientologist who, when I said you know this is tautological nonsense, she said no, I'll explain it to you. And two hours later she said it's tautological nonsense. Space is a viewpoint of dimension. It's like you know words are a wordiness of wordfulness. You know it's like yeah, what did you tell me? Liberate yourself from the ideas, from the beliefs from the concepts, because it is the beliefs are, if you like, the software that's driving our behavior and our activity. If we think it is good, for example, to give somebody a contact assist, then that's what we'll do Ask for evidence instead.

Speaker 1: 49:06

And you're right, the language does reinforce the belief system, and so for me, like when I escaped, we ended up in the middle of nowhere, relatively speaking from a Scientology perspective, in Kansas City, missouri, absolutely nowhere, from anybody's perspective, isn't it? Well, you know, it's all relative. It's seen significant growth of late it depends where the rest of nowhere is.

Speaker 1: 49:33

Yeah, exactly, but my point being that. So you know, three days out I was working as a waitress in a pizza restaurant and had to forcefully shut off all language, you know. But that was an interesting process in and of itself, because I found that I couldn't always tell what was Scientological language and what wasn't, because I was born into it.

Speaker 2: 50:02

Yeah, and that extends to belief that, in talking with people who've had the great misfortune to be born into Scientology, when they leave those of us who were tricked and conned into Scientology, nobody chooses to join Scientology. That's just a silly idea.

Speaker 2: 50:22

If you were told yeah, you can work 90 hours a week and not have any children, and somebody will shout at you every day you're not going to join, basically, so you have to be lied to to start it. But however we got into it, I could revert back. In fact, I never actually abandoned my, my Buddhist beliefs they were consistent or indeed my Daoist beliefs throughout Scientology, because to me, the idea that Scientology was a religion was a laughable idea, you know, and I didn't think religion was a very good thing, so I didn't want to be part of religion. But my beliefs and, technically, daoism and Buddhism are not religions because they have no objective worship, and, by definition, religion must have an objective worship.

Speaker 2: 51:12

So you could say the Buddha is in the body, satan as a worship. You could say that Lod Su and Jiang Su were worshiped. They shouldn't be, though, because the teachings actually say they shouldn't be. Oh, so did the teachings of Scientology. We shouldn't worship Ron Hubbard, but people do, and his stat, I'm told, was, at events, how many minutes have spent clapping the picture of Ron? That, for him, was a very important statistic.

Speaker 2: 51:37

He wanted to know how much adulation the part of admiration is the best, and you should never desire to be liked or admired. You know there are a lot of contradictions in that?

Speaker 1: 51:48

Yes, endless, endless contradictions. In fact, once you open that door, you're going to be waiting through a lot which it should be opened, as we're talking about.

Speaker 2: 52:00

If you leave and you've, you know, went from a Christian background and into this then you can head back there and then think about what you want to believe, which is a very important step in this whole process going. You know, what do I want to believe and what's the truth? Because, separating that out and going, well, I want to believe that there's this heroic warrior king who has given us this philosophy which will save all of humanity which, by the way, hubbard wrote in a story called the End is Not Yet a year before starting Dianetics where he said there's a nuclear physicist who develops a philosophy that prevents World War Three, you know. So he then started trying to get himself into his own childish script, as ever. But if you leave and it's all, it's what you've grown with it, it's how you've thought, it's how you've looked at the world, overcoming that's going to be a lot more difficult, but also potentially more rewarding. You know that when you read the Dada Jing say or Jiang Si, or little bits of Buddhist scripture or, I don't know, bertrand Russell, bertrand Russell is a great thing to read because he was brilliant and he enjoyed life and he wrote a book about happiness, which is great, good, fun. So it's finding the right things to engage with and say you know, a Derren Brown's book, happy, is a really good book for some of you who've been involved with Scientology, because you've got a guy who's saying you don't actually have to believe anything but you can be happy. You know, you can be an atheist and be happy. You can believe in God and be happy. It's. There are some ways of approaching this and you do it.

Speaker 2: 53:51

For me it was a very deliberate process leaving Scientology because I felt great. I felt so good that I didn't have to think in these blinkered ways anymore. I didn't have to be thinking about the ideal scene or you know these nonsensical concepts. I could just decide what I wanted to think about. And so the first year I was really quite, you know, it was very good, even though I was dealing with a lot of very troubled people and being harassed every day. It's the liberation of it was and then being able to go.

Speaker 2: 54:28

I'll read these books and you know, by their hundreds as the years go by, realizing that the world is so much more than Elron Hubbard would give us access to. You know that there is so much beauty and wonder in the natural world, in other people and in our relationship with them, and in creativity and the arts that we are part of this. You know, there's the whole universe out there and there's this one planet that we know of, with this one species that we can be sure has developed language and perception and communal memory, so that we can keep adding to our knowledge and keep going further. For me it's been a very positive experience, but I have tremendous sympathy for anybody who has to, as you do, to struggle up and find out what to believe, and I say hopefully it becomes an exciting and positive thing, as long as you don't read the rules.

Speaker 2: 55:32

Don't start reading, you know Rajneesh instead.

Speaker 1: 55:39

Absolutely for sure.

Speaker 2: 55:42

Well.

Speaker 1: 55:42

I would love, yeah, go ahead.

Speaker 2: 55:45

Yeah, I just quickly wanted to say. The other thing that you brought up was how do you, if you have a loved one in Scientology, how do you approach that?

Speaker 1: 55:55

Yes and as, I said to you, this is the question that Mark and I, I think, have been asked the most in the last 19 years. First of all, where is my loved one? And second of all, how do I approach this? Because, as you and I both know, if you say hey, you're in a cult, you need to get out, you end up a Scientologist will shut down and shut you out and there's no path forward there. So I was very curious to get your thoughts on this.

Speaker 2: 56:27

I had an actual situation. I did a few interventions with very committed Scientologists back in the early 90s and in the end I decided that the harassment that I got from that it was just too much to deal with being followed by seven Carlos, the Scientologists and all of that, you know, being yelled at and all of this stuff. It was just silly to help one person leave, because there were so many people who were leaving, naturally, and I could help them. I couldn't charge them money, which felt wrong, you know, so I had to borrow money so I could do it, which was a bit silly really, but nonetheless I could help them, rather than the intervention scene where you know it's so intense. It's such a process. I'm happy I did it. I learned a great deal from doing it.

Speaker 2: 57:21

Anyway, this is one case and what happened was I got a phone call saying that this young man was returning from the United States where he had signed a billion year contract. Now he was meant to go up to Oxford University and he decided and remarkable young man, I really admire him for the way he approached this. He'd gone to Oregon, had a dianetic session, it had got rid of all of his problems in life, and now he'd signed a sea organization contract for a billion years. But he felt ethically compelled to actually explain this in person to his parents rather than just I'm gone.

Speaker 2: 58:05

And he knew that they'd be a bit disappointed that he wasn't going to Oxford because it's quite difficult getting in there and he'd been involved for nine days. That was the whole involvement and the parents rang me up and.

Speaker 2: 58:20

I said look. I said you know I need three months to prepare before seeing somebody. I need to know so much about what's happened to be effective. And they said not going to have that chance, he's going to fly back. So I walked into the room and he came in and his dad looked at him and said you look so brainwashed when you got off the plane. And that was the next two hours of my day, you know, trying to get this poor lad to.

Speaker 2: 58:49

So what you say is so true. If you tell anybody you're an idiot involved in a load of stupid nonsense, it's probably not going to make them feel better. So brainwashing cults, showing them the newspaper clippings, telling them to read my book None of this is going to work. What does work is having the best possible relationship you can with that person, and that usually means not talking about Scientology at all. If they want to talk about Scientology, it means not criticizing them and encouraging them to say as much as possible.

Speaker 2: 59:27

What benefits have you received? What was your expectation when you first met it? What help did you think it would give you? How many people have you seen who've achieved these benefits? What are the promise benefits? Get them to talk about the benefits and do not in any way criticize them or try to make them think rationally, just get them to talk about it.

Speaker 2: 59:52

Because what I find is that when you talk about it, as with anything, you start realizing what the gaps are in your information. You start realizing well, actually I haven't seen anybody produce any OT phenomena Very important, no leading questions. No, they want to talk about it, let them talk about it. But otherwise, as Steve Hassan and others have wisely said for many years, remind them of the time before, show them pictures, talk about the good things, the happy things. I have a slightly different take. You know, steve, in Combating Cult Mind Control, which everybody should read. It's a brilliant book, but he talks about an authentic self and a cult self. I don't see it that way. I think that all of us are a combination of many identities, many behaviors that are responsive. The mood I'm in and I talk about this at some length in opening our minds the mood I'm in is, let's say, the Y axis, and who I'm talking to is the X axis. So if I'm talking to my cat, lucy, who you met the last time, If.

Speaker 2: 1:01:07

I'm talking to Lucy, then I will talk to her in a particular way which is different from the way I'd talk to somebody who was my boss, or somebody who was my employee, or somebody who was my sibling, somebody who was my child. That is one aspect of identity. So I don't believe there are all these thousands of little beings or anything like that. I believe we occupy a certain identity at a certain time. Then there's the mood I'm in. If I'm annoyed, if I'm cheerful, if I'm fearful, whatever, those two things will determine where how I behave.

Speaker 2: 1:01:43

What happens in Scientology is there's an expectation of mood. You're supposed to be enthusiastic, right? Really, I'm so enthusiastic about getting two hours sleep every night. You know it's unbelievable. And I'm supposed to regard Hubbard as an all-knowing parent to whose attitudes and ideas I submit my fellows as siblings, some of them older siblings because they're further up the bridge than I am, some of them junior siblings, but they're my siblings. And the doctrine of the cult and I owe this point to Yuval Law, the brilliant Yuval Law the doctrine of the cult is the baby. Do not criticize the baby. If you want to talk to somebody who's involved in Scientology, don't say that's an ugly baby, you've got there because, you will get the automatic response that, of course, any decent parent gives my baby does not look like Winston Churchill.

Speaker 2: 1:02:44

How dare you say that? So you treat the person as your friend, as somebody you really want to communicate with, and you encourage them to do all the talking, you get them to externalize what they believe and they will start, and when they go, oh, but that doesn't make sense. You just leave them, don't say anything, don't acknowledge, it don't, because this is as delicate as the ugly baby. So be kind and don't give them any money, Anything you want to give to them should be something that they can't sell that will help them.

Speaker 2: 1:03:31

And no, and I have seen this work with a family where this man had been involved for 20 years and he got to the point where he hadn't spoken to his parents and all but one of his siblings and he had quite a lot of siblings none of his other siblings in seven years. And what you want is to be kind of. What you want is this is the point where communication is more communication, not less. Be supportive, be encouraging and understand that if you hold on there, there are so many people who got stuck in the sea org and have nowhere to go because they've antagonized or been antagonized by everybody else they knew. Stay in touch with them, even if it's just sending a postcard once a month or an email picture of a flower or something. I've been criticized for appending flowers to my emails. Andy Nolch in Australia is the key.

Speaker 2: 1:04:31

I like your flowers, yeah, I like flowers too, but he seemed to think there was something very suspicious about somebody that appends and I do take the photographs too. They're not things I steal from anywhere, so and I find them beautiful and I really, with Andy Nolch wasn't expressing a desire to have a f*** with him, which I think is.

Speaker 1: 1:04:52

Oh my gosh, how he interprets flowers to his wife. Don't send him the birthday card, whatever you do, so yeah, I wouldn't read something like that into a picture of a flower.

Speaker 2: 1:05:04

No, but Andy Nolch is a special case. All in all, I had great fun. I did three. He interviewed me three times and he started out by saying that he'd left Scientology because he'd been looking at my work. But then we start the first interview and he's saying I'm a half Scientologist and it's like, oh no, where are we going? And I was really busy so I hadn't checked him out.

Speaker 2: 1:05:30

I didn't realize that he's this really contentious figure, the space cowboy or whatever who is. And so then he, after we'd done this, he did this video attacking me, which I welcome, you know, bring it on, and my son, sam, and I deconstructed this line by line. It's one of my favorite videos on my channel because it's going to the conspiracy theory. And so he said at one point you know, john wants strong evidence. He should be willing, like me, to take weak evidence. I'm like, because you know and you know he knows that global warming is not happening, because he's been down to the beach in Melbourne and the water level never changes and you're going, you don't have tides in Melbourne. That's weird. So it was fun. But he's recently written to me and said that the CIA are monitoring my email, so I'm a little bit worried about that almost.

Speaker 1: 1:06:30

Okay, and well, best of luck with that, I guess, right.

Speaker 2: 1:06:34

Yeah, it's crazy, but yes, be in relationship, be a good person, think about communicating and communicate the good stuff. You know, wasn't it great when we went to Scegnès? It wasn't actually thinking about it. Well, wasn't this experience that we shared great? And send photographs in those emails of happy days, you know, and when the day comes, where they go.

Speaker 1: 1:07:03

Yeah, no, I was just going to say I've given that advice many times too that if you can get a member of the CIA organization to come visit you, then invest the time in creating amazing memories, because those will plant seeds that words will not. Words will be ineffective, but memories of really amazing times spent outside of that environment has great value.

Speaker 2: 1:07:33

And get them to talk about what they love. My way in talking with fanatical members I started out. Steve Hassan shared with me the inventory he used. This was back in 1991, and I adapted it over the four or five years that I did this and I came to this position where actually all I needed to know about somebody was what was their favorite music, what was their favorite movie and what was their favorite book.

Speaker 2: 1:08:02

If they read books, and knowing that about somebody gave me references and getting the person to think about as long as it's not death metal, obviously, getting the person to think about the music they love, the cinema that's meaningful, and getting them to talk about it, talking about their favorite food, as you say, it's giving them good memories, but it's also pulling up their good memories and so they'll feel comfortable with you. The other part of that is be thoroughly genuine. If it comes to it and you have to say something, say I don't really understand Scientology, explain it to me. And it's certainly a bad idea to go and read Hubbard books and start saying well, he says this here and all points out that John ATak said this that's not gonna work.

Speaker 1: 1:09:01

No, or that you've been watching Scientology and the Aftermath on Netflix or listening to this podcast or that podcast or.

Speaker 3: 1:09:12

Bareface Messiah.

Speaker 1: 1:09:14

Yeah, exactly Interesting. Well, thank you very much for covering that, and, as always, just fascinating to hear your perspective and learn more about the incredible work you've done, because there's a lot more of that that's needed, for sure, and it's a challenging task, isn't it?

Speaker 2: 1:09:40

And I think it's. I mean, what I saw as the years went by was that Scientology is a kind of microcosm of just about everything that's wrong in the world. But the lack of care for other human beings, the lack of empathy, compassion for other human beings, this statistical management which is actually the Taylor management system from about just before the First World War, the Hubbard hijack it's not an original thought and it's long been shown that if you try and manage people by statistics rather than by creating a community, that your business will fail. It doesn't work. When Jesse Prince was at Toronto and was saying in 2015, and he was saying that St Hill at that time that the independence were rising up, 83, 84 had 180 staff and seven people in the East Grinstad scene who were independence had more auditing hours and more training completions than the whole of St Hill, and this was such a thought that you've created this monstrous machine which is largely people spying on other people.

Speaker 2: 1:10:55

So flag reps, elrin, hubbard communicators they're all making sure that the money is all going into David Miscavige's bank account, which is the well the governing policy of Scientology, isn't it? As Elrin Hubbard said, make more money. Make others produce so as to make even more money. I didn't read that until after I'd left them. That's the most important policy in Scientology make money. Oh no, right. So yeah, good fun. Thank you, is that the truth?

Speaker 1: 1:11:24

Yeah, yes, no, absolutely Always fascinating. Thank you so much for joining me today and I hope we will be able to regularly touch bases because, like I said, I learn new things every day and your perspective is very enlightening.

Speaker 2: 1:11:39

Well, thank you, that's most kind. And yeah, I'm absolutely delighted to be doing this and we will post it on our site and if you want me to see comments, post them on my site and I will try and get to them. I don't always, but, and yeah, it's, these are important things and they spread into the world. People who have learned this, people who have lived this, people who have been able to integrate this we have a tremendous gift that we can give, because we live in an authoritarian world where techniques similar to Scientology are being used by politicians, by public relations people, by advertisers, by all sorts of people. And by having had the experience and overcome the experience, we can really help people. And we should be doing rather than all of this sitting about insulting one another and which is just childishly tedious, frankly that we should use the skills we have to help the world rather than to screw up other people, whoever they are.

Speaker 1: 1:12:51

Yes, definitely Do the work one day at a time Awesome. Well, thank you, john, until next time. I appreciate you greatly and take good care.

Speaker 2: 1:12:59

Thank you likewise, you too. Thanks a lot, Claire.

Speaker 1: 1:13:02

Thank you.

Speaker 3: 1:13:03

Thanks for watching. If you'd like to help support the channel, feel free to check out the merch store link in the description. We have Hale, zinu, zinuismyhomeboy and BFG branded mouse pads, shirts, mugs, all sorts of other stuff in there that helps us to bring you new content on a regular basis. You can also pick up a copy of my book Blown for Good Behind the Iron Curtain of Scientology in hardback, kindle and audible versions as well. There's also a link to our podcast and you can get that on Apple, spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts, and if you'd like to watch another video, you could click on this link right here, or you could click on this one here, or you can click on the subscribe button right here. Thanks a lot, until next time.