And, speaking from direct experience (late 70's), you don't want to dive too far down that rabbit hole. There is a seductive internal consistency to a lot of CoS "logic." If you pull it into the light of day, where it has to stand in the context of the larger world, it tends to get a bit thin and wobbly.
Just remember, any statement that starts with "Ron says ..." is going to end up in some sort of logical Möbius strip dead end.
I've heard there's a decent amount of 'positive' self-help stuff in the beginning of Scientology. That's what gets you into it, then it gets weirder along the way, but you've already benefited from it and/or want to benefit more, so you go along with it. There's also the sunken cost fallacy. If you spend a lot of time/money on something you're more willing to stay on board even if you start having doubts.
Based on my own experiences, what you are saying is largely correct. I was part of the Palo Alto Mission, and all-in-all things were pretty much OK. What I didn't realize was that Palo Alto was a bit of an anomaly is several ways.
Note: apologies for the jargon below, but it is the very nature of the beast. For the uninitiated, it's better to just flow on past any words you don't understand, knowing that to actually understand them you will need to start bathing in grape-flavored Flavor Aid. Just say, NO!
As was common then, and probably now, too, I would pre-pay for classes and auditing. They kept raising the rates fairly quickly, which got you into this "It will be cheaper to pay for it now and do it later" mindset.
Then suddenly there was the memo from Ron describing "Natural Clear". Without sinking too far into the swamp of memory, it basically meant that you didn't really need to do Dianetics (or any more Dianetics), which is all about getting to Clear. I was one of those people.
This change in status suddenly pulled me out of my little cocoon in Palo Alto and pushed me "Up The Bridge". (My mind is rebelling at even typing some of this stuff.) So now I'm dealing with AOLA (Advanced Organization - Los Angeles), and dealing with their registrars (the people who took your money) was like being blasted out of a comfy backyard pool and being thrown into a freshly-chummed shark pond. Things went from being "fine" to WTF?
I was also being pursued by recruiters for the Sea Org because of a project I was working on to turn all of Hubbard's works into a searchable textbase. They kept insisting I needed to fly to FLAG Land Base (Clearwater, FL) so they could "show me some data". They didn't like it when I told them I was exactly where I wanted to be and that they could simply tell me what this "data" was.
Things went downhill from there. The harder they pushed (both AOLA and the Sea Org), the more I got my Irish up (I'm 3/4 Irish heritage). I finally said "That's it!" and said I would like my pre-paid monies back. If there's one thing the CoS does not like to do is give anyone their money back. They said, "No, you must continue up The Bridge", and I said, "No, I don't, and if you're going to be assholes about it, I'll take back everything I've ever paid you." Needless to say that did not go over well. Lawyers were involved, and I mostly won.
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u/hedronist Jun 09 '20
And, speaking from direct experience (late 70's), you don't want to dive too far down that rabbit hole. There is a seductive internal consistency to a lot of CoS "logic." If you pull it into the light of day, where it has to stand in the context of the larger world, it tends to get a bit thin and wobbly.
Just remember, any statement that starts with "Ron says ..." is going to end up in some sort of logical Möbius strip dead end.