Glenda
Crusader
Great thread full of very many accurate explanations drawn from experiences and reflection upon them. Personally having been in 37 years although admittedly not in OSA dealing with some of the true but rotten and anti-social aspects of scientologists' behaviour which have been exposed, there is one aspect that I feel needs more highlighting.
That aspect ties in very well with the 'tool box'and the 'mind manipulation' items. It is the personal ah hah temporary insights and emotional 'highs' which can be experienced while fooling around with different ideas or 'answers' presented and wrestled with to make sense of and the auditing procedures which introvert and or focus the mind in its search for meaning or certainty in life. This will almost always have emotional content which can be very strong and the training education and the auditing are done until such time as an positive emotional feeling or state and or mental positive agreement or conclusion is achieved. These are called WINS (knowledge attained and some level of skill in applying for course materials and or End Phenomena in auditing.
These wins help to corroborate the KSW that scientology works, and Hubbard was onto something good and beneficial. Of course these 'wins' are very often fleeting and often completely detached from reality and exist only in the newly forming 'identity' of the increasingly induced state of follower and puppet of hubbard and his slave inducing 'philosophy'. I am firmly of the belief that this is what the manic megalomaniac hubbard was on purpose to achieve. Power over others at any costs.
It is this produced mental and emotional slave, addicted to and craving more wins, or wins and hope of eventually arriving at a state in which one is all powerful in life(at the top of the ''Bridge to total freedom and having power(at knowing and willing cause over life......." as stated on the 'Classification and gradation chart of scientology' and a STATE ACHIEVED of OTVIII , which in concert with probably all the other points so insightfully and truthfully revealed in earlier posts dries a person to stay on board and see all 'entheta' as distractions and or opposition to be ignored or destroyed.
"WE WERE SAVING THE WORLD" and ourselves as Anna Whitfield so piercingly explained in the BBC 1997 production The Secret Lives of L. Ronald Hubbard.
Well said!
On the road out of the mess, I craved, like a mad addict, what you write about above. Just. Give. Me. A. Win! I'd pace past the scientology CD's in the house and have to fight with myself to not plug one in. I was a big overt/withhold writer (years of self-abuse, lol) and my craving included wanting to shift my reality with a good old-fashioned o/w write-up. Then I'd indulge in "I should do an ethics condition, that might make me feel better..." Then I'd shout at myself to just stop trying to fix myself with the very stuff that was causing the massive disorientation/discomfort. The word "freedom" was attached to nearly every thought. I was batshit crazy for a while there. It was a tough time moving through the cravings stage. My bones actually ached, I sweated and shivered. No shit. I had no idea that I was addicted to a cult until I had to go cold-turkey. I can laugh about it now but at the time....intense!
I blame bad parenting (kidding). Apparently I never crawled. I just got up one day and walked. Big developmental stage missed and a pattern was set to just leap and do stuff. Not a healthy pattern. My leaping out of my addiction to a cult follows that pattern.