You are welcome, Chuck. Your excellent feedback outshines the comments by OSA calling “Lucifer’s Bridge” “The most awful book about Scientology”. Whoever wrote that comment knows “NOTHING” about Scientology and is seriously trapped in it.

A potential recruit is told that all Sea Org members get auditing and training for free all the way up to the highest levels of the great chart.

The recruiter emphasizes this although he mouths a lot of “But we’re really in it for the purpose, Kid.”

The kid signs up and goes into his basic training as a Sea Org member. This training inculcates in him a false sense of superiority, that he’s one of the elite of earth, one of the really able and capable ones on a mediocre planet. He buys into this empty flattery, but attendant with all of that is this idea of, “We are so fucking tough we don’t need any sissy first dynamic auditing, because WE are the auditors of the 4th dynamic engram, and if we don’t pull it off…” Blah blah.

I think Hubbard ingeniously understood that the HOPE his staff harbored to someday move up the Grade Chart, the anticipation of it, was more powerful than the actual achievement of it, with all of those possible pesky disappointments of unmatched expectations. So Hubbard encouraged “case gain through competence” and other ideas that kept the guy working and not asking too strenuously for auditing, lest he look like some kind of a weakling who joined up only to get his case handled.

So then, the poor guy works 27 years, with only drips of auditing to keep his HOPE alive, and when that is finally gone, he stays because he knows nothing else.

Well said George. Hubtard never wanted followers who wee educated as they would more easily spot his scam by recognizing the plagiarism of works that he engaged in.

Your book, and your confirming that long rumored Hubbard admission of being Lucifer (whatever was on Hubbard’s mind to try that angle on top of his religion angled “religion” just is so indicative of Hubbard’s deeper complexity nuttiness) you truly give one of the all time historical important anecdotes. (And Lucifer “beingness” on top of Metteya, on top of a generic “messiah” possible go at it, jeepers Hubbard couldn’t get his whole track beingness to line up with his megalomania, LOL.)

Messiah. No.
Lucifer. Yes. oops, No.

in the end, Hubbard was getting chased by that persistent Creston Ranch “body-thetan” or two that he couldn’t shake. Chased into his grave by his own “body-thetan” creative solution to his own madness.

I thankyou so much for your writings, on Marty’s blog when discussion was really good back then, and your and Roger Weller, and also my earlier reading and then email chat with Kima Douglas before she passed, all added up to taking a look at Buddhism (plus Vinay Agarwalla’s years of postings finally added up).

Thanks so much George.

PS: In the “Ron’s Mag” I think Photographer part 2, is the “final” LRH photo he took of himself. It’s the final image on that paperback Ron’s Mag, he shot the photo of his shadow wavering in the bottom of his swimming pool. That shot really touched me.

When on my auditor training, we had to have staff to audit to learn on. They couldn’t let us loose on the HGC paying pcs just yet. But try getting a staff member in session. Their seniors resent that you’re taking them off post or auditing, and they don’t get enough sleep or food to metab so it becomes an exercise in futility.

Thanks!

Dave, like a skunk, has a distinctively foul odor that travels a great distance even after he’s left the area. Personally I prefer squirrels.

Thanks, Chuck. It has been thirty years since my wife and I left Scientology. She never thinks of Hubbard while I still make comparisons. The reason is that I hit the original OT VIII level and got shook to the core. In “Lucifer’s Bridge” I mention Blavatsky. But since that time, I have read her books twice. She was really his mother in the sense of his spiritual ideas. But like a bad son he degraded mom’s precepts. Hope we meet someday. I have been spending a lot of time trying to get my Congressman on board the train to remove Scientology’s tax exemption.
My wife and I are fortunate because Miscavige did not pursue us. They actually gave up when I started laughing over the phone. Like once Lucifer comes out of the closet, you get a new perspective on Scientology. That is why I wrote the book. I still remember being in the course room on the Freewinds. I still remember the exact moment I read Hubbard’s absurd comparison of original Buddhism to original Scientology. At that moment, I found a stupid man who was my inferior.

Thanks for the fascinating perspective George. That sounds spot on to me.

I finished exactly one step on the Bridge to Total Freedom during the entire 25 years I was in the Sea Org. A step that I started in 1975 before I joined the Sea Org and finished in the 90s.

I was on it so long that it was no longer part of the official line-up by the time I got it done. The only reason they finished even that one step was because I started saying I couldn’t do more interrogations because I was in the middle of this action from the 70s.

So what is in that huge stack of folders? Crimes and misdemeanors, peckerdillos, bad thoughts about Dave, imaginary girl friends, excuses. Whatever I could think of when they demanded “What are your crimes?”

Probably just as well, I don’t have to un-think all that weird space opera stuff. Never even knew it existed until I got out.

Some people do get some Scientology in the Sea Org. Either they are professional auditors and make deals with other auditors, or they just don’t take no for an answer. But most of us were not treated like the bovines in the old saying “Don’t bind the mouths of the kine that tread the grain.” (1 Corinthians 9:9,10)