One day, I realized it was all bullshit. Now, I’m going to say from the start that this was just my own realization. I’m done telling people what to think or believe about Scientology or LRH. I’m just telling everyone what I came to think, in as abbreviated a form as possible, without intimating that they should believe the same thing, or come to the same conclusion.
Do your own research, come to your own conclusions. Suffice to say that after a lot of research I came to realize that there were only two ways one could resolve all of the contradictions and lies about LRH and Scientology: A. Come to the conclusion that LRH was a super-special individual who quite suddenly arrived at all of the answers and B. There is a long term, planet wide conspiracy that recognized LRH and Scientology as a threat.
I had accepted these two ideas since I was very young. One day the ideas collapsed. It was quite sudden. I remember feeling as if I’d just been turned inside out. I suddenly felt as though I were outside the Truman show, looking in. The Apollo was no longer a semi-sacred ship where the only hope for Scientology (the Sea Org) was trained and put together. It was no longer the vessel where the wall of fire, the true reason for the decline of this sector of the galaxy, was cracked. It was just… a ship. And there was this old guy named L Ron Hubbard who was licensed to captain ships and he took all these people out on this ship and told them to wear uniforms. And later the people went on land and later I was there. And we all wore uniforms and campaign ribbons and buried daggers in the doors of downstat HCOs, and went to sleep worried about the expansion of Scientology and woke up worried about the same. We attacked each day with focused dedication, running down hallways managing organizations and firing missions and weeping at ‘the War is over’, and bursting with pride at the outcome of the Portland crusade. We were absolutely convinced that we were at the hub of the world, the center of the secret of life itself, and knew that we mattered more than anything else ever could.
But try this sometime. If you’re in LA, go to the PAC base. Feel the group agreement of all that Scientology. Now walk five or six blocks away and take a look around. What do you see? Right. No Scientology. Not ‘Scientology is good’ or ‘Scientology is bad’ or even ‘Scientology is controversial.’ NO SCIENTOLOGY. People who don’t care one way or the other and never will. People who will live and die unaffected by the subject, who probably won’t ever think about it except to read the word in a news story. It’s kind of like a scene from a great movie – The Last Emperor – about China’s last emperor. He leaves the walls of the Forbidden City one day and finds that not only is there a whole, buzzing world out there, but it mostly never even thinks about him.
That’s the truth of it, to me. I remember being in CW when the IAS first started making its rounds and all the ‘it came this close’ horror stories they’d tell to get money from people. To hear them talk, you’d think the world really was aware of and focused on Scientology, and in particular that the global conspiracy was after Scientology like nothing else. What I saw, that day the world turned inside out, was that the vast majority of the world is far, far too busy to care. I remember a briefing once for a mission where – I shit you not – the Action Chief leaned forward in the final briefing with a grim stare and said (essentially): ‘this isn’t a small mission. It looks like it, but it’s not. It’s part of an overall strategy that will probably make the difference in pushing things over the top.’ And I remember – I shit you not – the thrill of purpose that went through me. I went to pack and get ready for my plane flight, ready to do my vital part. I remember sitting at the airport, watching all the people, feeling sorry for them because they didn’t know the truth. I completely missed the real truth: I was just a punk kid with delusions of grandeur. Having an SO uniform in my suitcase didn’t make it otherwise.
All the telexes (later Mercs) and missions and stat analysis and danger handlings and evals – it was all directed inward, not outward. It was a gigantic, unending circle jerk that the majority of the world neither knew nor cared about.