Hello all.
My foray into Scn was very brief. I'll try to recap it, along with my subsequent obsession with the cult, to provide yall with some background on myself.
My best friend (my very best friend, in fact) was born into and raised within the church. He experienced a lot of gains, and would still be working his way up the bridge if he had the funds and lived near an org. His apparent gains, together with the concomitant abilities of the state of clear and the secrecy surrounding the upper levels, motivated me to look into my local org.
I remember being very unimpressed with the org itself. It's a very small, under-furbished building, run by a staff that exhibited none of the cognitive abilities that I had witnessed in my friend (despite the fact that they were, presumably, mostly at or above the level of clear).
I was put on some little Life Improvement Courses, which I agreed to do to pacify my reg. My main goal (aside from running through the bridge) was to get as much data on the metaphysical tech as I could, and so I was soon confounding the staff by taking the courses for Fundamentals of Thought, Scientology 8, and Scientology 8-80, while simultaneously resisting what I viewed as bullshit indoc courses (such as the PTS/SP stuff they were constantly trying to push on me which, I intuitively felt, was rather paranoid tech).
I soon found out why the indoc courses are pushed ahead of the metaphysical stuff. The physics and metaphysics presented in Scientology 8-80 were so indefensible in light of our modern understanding that I was hard-pressed to reconcile them. When questioning the course supervisor about LRH's claims regarding energy (and how those claims relate to our broader theories of energy and mass), I was lead on a semantic journey through a dictionary! On top of this, every staff member I asked about published materials that might detail LRH's research and data-gathering gave me a puzzled look, as if no one comprehended the idea that science proceeds and progresses by way of lab experiments being replicated and falsified!
The above expectations are, admittedly, a bit lolacious in retrospect, given what I know now about Scn (ie, it rejects falsifiable hypotheses in favor of constructs built on wordsmithery). I'm glad that I didn't invest too much money into the whole program before bailing.
Bailing out consisted of me facing three staff members who gave me the hardest sell I've ever had to experience. I finally gave up trying to pry apart the internal inconsistency of the ethics model they were trying to use against me (meaning one can't claim that I'm being unethical by leaving Scn while simultaneously claiming that I am the arbiter of 'what's right for me') and just walked out.
The upshot to this is that I was apparently not declared an SP (probably because I never even got onto the bridge), so my good buddy didn't have to disconnect. We talk about it a little still, with him chalking the whole thing up to KSW and the mis-application of tech by the staff, or inventing other narratives involving me missing a grade or some such. I've given up trying to bring him up to speed on the real debates within Phil of Mind circles in favor of just living and letting live.
Since leaving the church (read: taking a quick dip in the shallow end), I've become fascinated by the overall Scn program as a case study in secrecy cults. The 'tech', as it has been revealed in on-line resources, is apparently a blend of folk-psyche intuitions coupled with eastern religions. That it still attracts new members is fascinating, given the wide-spread debunking of the philosophical commitments of the doctrine. That its business model of having people pay for their own brainwashing is successful is equally so.
And tragic.
Sekh
