From International Viewpoints (IVy) Issue 11 - April 1993
See Home Page at http://www.ivymag.org/


I'm Still a Scientologist!

By Dr Keith Mumby(1), England

For a long time after leaving the Church, I regularly recieved letters
or announcements that someone or other had 'left Scientology'.
They didn't mean they were quitting the organization (most were
already
out of the church); but that they had seemingly given up the
philosophy.
For a time I was saddened by this stream of correspondence, then
hostile
to it; now I am up to amusement.

I wonder if anyone making such a declaration ever really stopped to
think about the implications of their posture. Did they mean they
were no longer a spiritual being? Or that they no longer intented
to call a static by the term thetan? Or that they were a spiritual
being but not a static, perhaps! That the ARC triangle was no longer
'true' for them and didn't exist? In which case, could it
ever have existed for that person? Do they no longer confront when
speaking to somebody? Or use a dictionary when they pass an MU? I
illustrate the kind of questions which came to mind, not to poke fun,
but to give some idea of the bemused thoughts and reflections prompted
by these hurting disillusioned announcements.

It starts with asking why should anyone want to go to the trouble
of mailing friends, acquaintances and even strangers with the fact
they were quitting? Surely this is spreading bad news anyway. If you
want to quit, just quit. But to have to tell everyone else, suggests
to me a mixture of conceit (that anyone else is bothered) and
uncertainty
(as if trying to make it stick by 'going public'). It was
no prerogative of Hubbard's, but is common philosophic knowledge,
that what you resist you get; to assert something is a sure sign of
unflat charge on the button and 'quitting' noisily is indicative,
I think, of being well and truly theta-glued to something.

How can anyone 'give up Scientology?', is my question. I think
you can't, if you ever were what I myself would call a Scientologist.
You can say you would not enter a building belonging to the Church
of Scientology; or you are outraged by some of the more disturbing
revelations about the private life of L. Ron Hubbard; or incredulous
of the end-phenomena claimed for some of the processes; you can say
you don't want to audit or attend any gatherings of people once part
of the Church; you can rant and rave against the shortcomings of what
we knew colloquially as 'The Tech'; but you can't just 'give
up Scientology', at least not without being a shocking intellectual
fraud.

My indignation is really centred around the issue of integrity. These
disaffected individuals must be saying, surely, that they got nothing
from if. In which case, either they were guilty of making false claims
in the first place, or they now find it politic to deny them.
Whichever
it is, surely reflects badly on themselves and not on the philosophy
they now denigrate. If it were me, I would want to keep quiet, rather
than tell the world I was a sham or was drugged intellectually!

It may be convenient, of course, if one has uncomfortable pressures
caused by failing on several dynamics at once and wanting to put the
blame elsewhere. But hardly honest. If Scientology was a great
movement
once, and it was for sure when I joined (1963), then we were right
to be part of it and no Judas' call is needed to now deny or play
down our association with it. In fact, I believe the opposite: if
those of us who knew what it was to be a part of such a movement
aren't
willing to stand up and be counted, there is a real possibility that
it will die or, possibly worse, survive only in its present corrupt
and tormented form. That would be a great tragedy and we  would all
be losers, on every dynamic.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of what happened with the Church in
the early 80s, most people, if they are honest, found in Scientology
some knowledge of life that brought to them a new (or renewed)
lightness,
grace and being. I would go further, at the risk of being more
contentious
and state that it is certainly the best method to date for getting
people out of the hole, and squirreling off variations (perhaps just
to get round copyright etc.) is not as valuable right now as trying
to get it in use the way it was, concentrating on the workable
aspects.
Face it, the recoveries we saw were not an illusion; people were
changing
their lives dramatically for the better. No amount of icon bashing
can really get round that simple truth.

Not that I mean to deny anyone the right to look at other techniques
to further their own gains. Sadly, we have all had to come to terms
with the fact that the road to OT is not properly mapped out and that
wonderful, but hypothetical, condition has remained tantalizingly
beyond our present grasp. But that is hardly grounds for renouncing
the system, is it? What about the rest of the human race, floundering
on the brink of oblivion? We owe it to our fellow man to disseminate
such knowledge as will help, even if you don't believe in the mischief
supposed to have been wreaked by Xenu or that there ever was a
Galactic
Confederation that controls our between-lives area.

But there is also a higher obligation and that is the main issue of
my writing. I believe passionately there is a certain debt to the
man who made it all possible. Many it seems, are unwilling to pay
this debt and find it easier to take sides with the detractors.
Perhaps
this is the main issue, rather than the subject of Scientology; that
Hubbard's star has fallen so far, there are those who would rather
not be associated with his memory or ideas for the very simple reason
that it is irksome to have to defend him.

It can be difficult, of course, to play down some of the extreme
illogicalities or absurdities in one who we hailed as so great and
wise.
But it is possible to do a better job than most are doing to keep
alive and
bright the memory of one who did achieve so much. Frankly, I grow
tired of the Hubbard bashers. Not those cynical desperados of the
press, who couldn't see anything good in a fellow human being, even
if one saved their life. Or the hack 'investigators' like
Miller(2) who have their blighted story before they start and slant
their
researches to prove that only the bad existed in a man now dead and
unable to defend himself. But the former Scientologists who, for a
time (and I would aver, for all time), had their lives changed for
the better and now wish to redraw history to suit their pettiness
of spirit. There are those, even now as the cock crows thrice, who
want to push it all aside and pretend they did not get gains in
auditing.

There is no question in my mind that I am living a vastly fuller
potential
in life than would have been the case if I hadn't crossed Hubbard's
ramshackle Bridge and I am enternally grateful for that. Consciousness
is such a wondrous capability, there can be no greater waste than
a life wholly or in part unlived, as many are doomed to suffer.
Auditing
helps and unquestionably frees up the theta and theta is Life. Are
those who quit telling us they live mean and petty lives rather than
admit that Scientology helped them?

Whatever the weakness of the man,he did a great many good things,
even just one of which would have made him a great genius and
benefactor.
I am thinking of TR's, for example; these remain unsurpassed as drills
for raising levels of human communication. The study tech, which
works.
The data series - brilliant! Word clearing, touch assists, auditing
assists, prepchecking, ruds, life repairs and hidden illiteracy tech.
In my own particular field (allergy and environmental medicine), he
is still respected and often quoted by doctors the world over as the
pioneer of what is now known as thermal chamber depuration (the
Purification
Rundown). All these are valuable and definitive techniques,
non-eclectic,
that is Hubbard devized them, and some one would accord the status
of 'breaktrough' in human knowledge. That's plenty for one
lifetime and clearly signifies an intuitive genius, of a par with
Aristotle, Newton or Einstein.

Yes, there were screw ups. Of royal, or even cosmic proportions. The
so-called ethics tech was a travesty, not so much in concept as in
execution. As we all know, it probably did more than any single thing
to destroy the credibility of the Church and its Founder. There is
no surer way to invite disgrace and censure than to purport to have
inside knowledge on right and wrong and then be seen to get it,
well...
very wrong. Most people find ethical issues upsetting and confusing
enough but would expect someone who does claim to know the truth to
live by the most excruiatingly high standards. This isn't altogether
fair or logical, since the person best qualified to offer advice is
someone who knows the problem from the sticky side outwards. But then,
people aren't rational when it comes to ethics, are they?

The saddest irony is that Hubbard was capable of some of the most
sublime writings on this very vexed topic. Nothing ever written
surpasses
the incisivenesss and relentless logic of the HCO Policy letter of
the 9th July 1980, 'Ethics, Justice and the Dynamics' or its
anguished plea for better, saner future for the race. The wonderful
little 1981 booklet 'The Way to Happiness' has no equal in any
scripture, worldwide, for beauty, simplicity and compassion.
Significantly
couched in the idiom of our time, it alone could build us a better
world. It's such a shame that no one in the Church, or even Hubbard
himself apparently, took these teachings to heart.

Incidentally, it is worth bearing in mind that, according to the
author
of 'Bare-faced Messiah', at the time when both these tracts were
written, Hubbard was suposed to be a broken man, a psychopath on the
run. But then I have always felt that Hubbard, the being, who we
perceived
through his writings, was somehow different from Hubbard the man,
who was a bit spooky when you met him face to face. I urge you to
read these pieces again, and ask yourself how much what has been said
about him by those with a personal interest in attacking him is
believable,
or more importantly, how much it really matters, when a man has these
gifts.

Aren't you really criticizing yourself if you now believe him to have
been such a rotter and swindler? You were presumably 'taken
in' if you have that view. Do you trust your own opinions so little?
Or is it that you haven't dared to think, for such a long time now,
that he was great, the Church was great, the Tech was great, we were
all great? Maybe just a few of us were protected from disillusionment
by being aware of much of Hubbard's bullshitting (oh yes, the evidence
was all there, clear as day, in the red, white and blue, but some
were too uncritical to notice), and took the rough with the very
valuable
smooth.

I am not put off admiring this man, even if he lied, stole,
fornicated,
embezzled and had an overweaning ego that was, in a very real sense,
his downfall. In fact my admiration is increased ten-fold,
that he could have given us so much while operating as such a bizarre
and obviously flawed persona. He saw far beyond the horizons of life
that were extant in the world in which he grew up and many aspects
of the human consciousness today, from Avatar to certain modern
precepts
in psychiatry, exits solely and only because this man followed his
star and wouldn't be turned aside by convention.

Thank God he was peculiar, I say. It even begs the question, can you
be visionary and radical, while behaving 'normally'?


(1)allergist, author.



(2)Russel Miller, Author of the book 'Barefaced Messiah'.Ed.








Tue Jul 11 19:20:36 EDT 2006