What Was It Really, that Took Apart My Family?
DEDICATED WITH SINCEREST APOLOGIES TO THE THOUSANDS WHO HAVE SUFFERED THE PAIN OF SEPARATION, BETRAYAL, PHYSICAL AND EMOTIONAL ABUSE, DAMAGE – AND EVEN DEATH – BROUGHT ABOUT BY THEIR INVOLVEMENT WITH HUBBARD’S CULT.
It was a sad day in December 2012 when I realized that the founder of my “religion” of 18 years was in reality, also the architect of the break-up of my family. That L. Ron Hubbard, himself, was the engineer of the policies we were expected to follow…
I began to write this post in December of 2012, the month that I was in Costa Rica retrieving what was left of my possessions from where I had lived for 8 years, having already sold or got rid of most of what I had owned in order to relocate there in 2004 to be with my new wife. At that time I had even cashed out my teacher retirement in order to donate thousands of dollars to the church.
I am posting this now – one whole year later – having finally gotten up the courage to do so. (No one can say that I did not take the time to confirm the actual truth of the matter.)
As an admirer of an effective technology developed under his direction, I had been a devoted follower of L. Ron Hubbard for 19 years when I finally had this realization.
Knowing that I could be offending a lot of people who still think as I once did – that Hubbard was a “saint” beyond reproach – I long held my tongue.
No more.
It was a sad day for me in December of 2012 that my wife of 8 years – (both of us were Scientologists) – was forced to cut off all communication between us, and even with her two sons (even though one was not a Scientologist and wanted to stay in contact with me) in order for her to remain “in good standing” and continue participating in services. All of them had been my family for 7 years – through good times and bad. It was then that she finally completed the process required of her by the church, known as “DISCONNECTION.”
I had been a volunteer missionary who worked to defend the church (mission) there, using my time and at my own expense, with very little compensation ever received. I spent the prime of my life doing this.
But because I could no longer shut my eyes to the corrupt side of L. Ron Hubbard’s $cientology, I lost everything I had worked for there.
For the past 30 years, $cientology has been run by government-sanctioned mafioso, David Miscavige – a brash and ruthless punk, hand-picked by L. Ron Hubbard himself (well before his death in January 1986) to hire the very best IRS-connected attorneys and re-organize $cientology to “make money… and… make more money…”
On Hubbard’s orders, Miscavige went through all torturous tricks of criminal evasion in order to not lose any of that money to the government tax authority – the IRS. Miscavige was simply at first, carrying out the orders and advices of his mentor, L. Ron Hubbard – but also with his own secret designs beginning to emerge, for assuming power and total control of the religion and its followers.
All this was furthered by a long pattern of religious cloaking which helped to conceal their criminal acts – not only those actions ordered by them against those whom they designated “enemies,” but ongoing criminal acts of inurement (misappropriation of donations violating “non-profit” status) and fraud carried out against their own parishioners.
Despite the fact that David Miscavige took this criminality sanctioned by “religious doctrine” to new extremes, it should be pointed out that it was L. Ron Hubbard who designed, implemented and maintained almost every aspect, rule and policy of the religious group/cult known as $cientology as still practiced in its international organization today.
I lost my family to Hubbard’s cruel, anti-family and anti-life policy known as “Disconnection” which was instituted to protect his monopoly – something he’d once warned against ever happening in Scientology (see an unedited version of the Philadelphia Doctorate Course lecture #20).
I also discovered then in December 2012 – at the same time I was losing my family – that sometime back in 1983, L. Ron Hubbard ordered a policy letter written up that re-instated ‘Disconnection’ as official policy for the $cientology religion, knowing full well the trouble it had brought him with governments in the late 1960’s, when he’d officially canceled the policy, and even promised a government in an official letter that:
“the Board of Directors of the Church of Scientology …have no intention of re-introducing this policy”
and:
“I can see no reason why this policy should ever be re-introduced, as an extensive survey in the English speaking countries found that this practice was not acceptable.” – LRH
(These quotes are from a letter sent to “The Commission of Enquiry into Scientology in New Zealand” on 26 Mar ’69 by L. Ron Hubbard.)
L. Ron Hubbard LIED!
(Not to mention this was going back on the written “Code of REFORM” – from August 1968, that led to the decision for “Cancellation of disconnection as a relief to those suffering from familial suppression.”)
Now, before anyone says that story of the ‘Disconnection’ policy reinstatement is a flimsy basis for pointing at the founder of Scientology, Mr. L. Ron Hubbard himself – for knowingly and willingly breaking up families – like mine – in order to create and maintain an insular cult that he would financially benefit from, I have something to share that makes any challenge to that ‘Disconnection’ reinstatement story, completely unnecessary.
The fact is that completely apart from the revelation by former leaders of the church who had witnessed the official re-instatement of ‘Disconnection’ came from Hubbard himself, I also came to realize in the course of my researches, that Mr. Hubbard himself knowingly and willingly assigned a pregnant woman to the Rehabilitation Project Force, a rather cruel act – and that years earlier he had built his Sea Organization and firmed up his authoritarian command of it by instituting cruel punishments like “overboarding” ministers-in-training (including elderly women trainees) and according to an account written by Alan Walter, forcing a man to push a peanut across a ship’s deck with nose skin bleeding and his wife and kids crying – who had to stand by watching in humiliation (note that there are different accounts that vary from this story told by David Mayo).
Add to all that multiple reports of assigning a 4-yr-old boy to 4 days and nights in the cold, terrifying chain locker of his Apollo ship. (Some reports allege more than one child so assigned – again, as young as four years of age.)
You see, sometime before this ‘Disconnection’ hit me full force, I took a new look through an L. Ron Hubbard book entitled “Scientology Ethics” and at its origins in 1965 Ethics policies, and I finally reached the inevitable conclusion that more and more people alienated from their loved ones by the continued mis-use of ‘Disconnection,’ are bound to reach:
- that L. Ron Hubbard, himself – genius that he was – by these actions and in a long-term failure to come clean, nevertheless undid a whole lot of the good he had once done for people in developing a highly workable technology for “helping people help each other”
- that in 1965 he developed policies, rules and restrictions that – taken as a whole – virtually guarantee that people will be attacked unjustly, cruelly denied help in time of greatest need, and covertly guided into disconnecting from their own friends and family, in order to maintain their “good standing” in his church
- that his 1965 actions and “ethics” policies within a few years had created a paramilitary cult (very little of those policies were ever necessary to protect the actual technology, but instead were crafted to protect the power of his appointed inner cliques – hiding criminal activity and even permitting and condoning criminal activity to do so – which activity has plagued the organization ever since)
Tragically, we find that the very first set of processes (now known as the “Power Processes”) that consistently worked on nearly all persons who received them (many processes had been advertised that way, but these were the first that Hubbard recognized were actually meeting peoples expectations enough to sell with confidence at a premium) became the first of many gross violations of his representations and promises supposedly made to “all mankind” and to Scientologists in his essay entitled, “My Philosophy” – written just weeks before he sequestered these processes for highly limited use.
Power Processes were sequestered by authoritarian decree. Rules and policies without reasonable explanation suddenly declared them, “dangerous” and “too dangerous for auditors to be trusted with them.”
So much for “planetary clearing”!
By keeping these processes from the field and asserting that they were “dangerous” in the hands of those not trained and trusted under his organization, L. Ron Hubbard squirreled away critical portions of a workable mental and spiritual technology (“Power Processing,” and “R6EW” processes to uncover “dramatization”) from mankind, in a bid to build and preserve empire and “make money and… make more money.”
He then – in that same year 1965 – developed and instituted cruel, anti-family policies to protect his planned monopoly and cover up his own crimes and his greed in squirreling away these processes that might actually have accomplished his stated objective of “clearing the planet” (getting the peoples of earth simple, effective tools they might use to overcome the effects of traumatic experiences ). He instead insisted knowingly under false pretenses, that these new processes, discovered with the help of his Saint Hill students, must become and remain, “confidential.”
Above all, it would be vital to understand that ‘Disconnection’ – as a practice of Hubbard’s new 1965 version of $cientology – was not just a policy put into place by one Policy Letter, but was already deeply woven in with malice aforethought, throughout numerous points of an “ethics code” – comprising a “technology” of “ethics” – including technically unworkable and outright harmful “PTS” (Potential Trouble Source) restrictions on auditing (counseling therapy) anyone supposedly connected to an “enemy” a transparent effort to conflate truly psychopathic personalities with anyone he considered an “enemy” for failing to lend him the support he demanded – whether deserved or not.
In other words, a bully who abused his status as technical genius among serious students of the mind and spirit.
In the “ethics codes,” a person in Scientology who is connected to a person or group thought to be hostile to Scientology, is quickly forced to recognize that his/her future in the improvement technology of Scientology auditing actually depends as a technical fact, on demonstrating no connection remaining to whatever person or group has fallen out of favor.
If you see no actual logic to that, I congratulate you. You probably either were not subjected to Hubbard’s pressurized indoctrination, or you too, have suffered the effects of Fair Game or Disconnection.
I well remember playing the endless game as a Public Divisions staffmember, of being presented with someone who really, truly needed help in life and was willing to do anything to get it, being turned away because somebody’s interpretation of Hubbard policy prevented it. And at the time, I did not even think to question or blame the founder as policymaker. No. I rationalized it, and participated (although reluctantly most of the time) in such unnecessary injustice (factually a case of “When Help Becomes Betrayal“).
Because I found real Scientology auditing so helpful, I was blinded to the price I was expected to pay for enjoying personal improvement beyond my highest, previous expectations.
And with that realization, the only real ‘Disconnection’ that I am in need of at this time, is from Hubbard’s organization which, cloaked in religious trappings and protected by religious exemptions, is set up to “utterly ruin” its arbitrarily designated “enemies” (like me) that it creates out of those exercising the free speech and free thought promised in its trampled and neglected, “Creed of the Church” and in its rarely-displayed 1968 (Reform) “Code of a Scientologist.”
Okay, yes. L. Ron Hubbard did also work long and hard to assemble a technology that can be put to use to help people. When done in a safe environment, away from criminal organizations, it can and often does, work wonders. I am not without appreciation for his work – he was demonstrably not idle or lazy in that regard. I have no doubt that at various times in his life L. Ron Hubbard worked his heart out for the very decent purposes he said he did.
And because of that early diligence – and thanks to the tremendous efforts in getting helpful techniques explained to students of the emerging technology – knowing also that those same students repaid him with technical discoveries that helped smash his name into history – I plan to continue working to place that large portion of workable technology which resulted, into the hands of people who truly want to help.
But the facts cannot be ignored that this same person willingly destroyed these good works by selfishly indulging in abuse of power for personal gain and organizational supremacy.
Sadly, many people continue to believe that a lot of the above-mentioned and ongoing crimes were and are, justified because they have a valid stable datum that “the tech works.” And so it is often stated in so many ways, “the ends justified the means.”
I am not only “not so sure,” about that, but looking at the actual current state of the subject? It is a failure and a disaster except as those few who continued its practice un-harrassed but still under threat, made it work.
We are faced with the prospect of unpacking its therapeutic and helpful features in an extremely hostile environment – what with all the damage Hubbard’s policies left in their wake.
So as far as I am concerned, L. Ron Hubbard as author and engineer of this anti-family, anti-life policy – and his mafioso replacement David Miscavige, as the usurper agent of a hostile takeover of Hubbard’s organization complete with a covert, de facto mafia – craftily embedded into an organization claiming “religious protection” – can just keep all of that phony “code of ethics” nonsense…
copyrighted in platinum forever.
IT WAS ABOUT CONTROL:
“‘…if you ever reveal any of this information that I am about to reveal, the consequences will be severe for SCN (Scientology).’
“He then wrote, ‘a person does not blow due [to] Overts or Withholds. He blows only due to ARC BKs (upsets)’.
“‘However, If any of this information ever became public, I would lose all control of the orgs and eventually Scientology as a whole.’ – (Signed) LRH”
– reported by Bill Franks as written on a secret dispatch to Bill Franks and David Mayo by -L. Ron Hubbard, Commodore ~1974
DEDICATED WITH SINCEREST APOLOGIES TO THE THOUSANDS WHO HAVE SUFFERED THE PAIN OF SEPARATION, BETRAYAL, PHYSICAL AND EMOTIONAL ABUSE, DAMAGE – AND EVEN DEATH – BROUGHT ABOUT BY THEIR INVOLVEMENT WITH HUBBARD’S CULT.
*Grateful acknowledgment to L. Ron Hubbard Library for ineffective prohibition in making these fair use quotes known and published.