Laughter! I love your humor, Mike 🙂

I wasn’t quite ready for it when he first told me as I just left Scientology and felt a lot of the anger, frustration, confusion, shame, and guilt was still fresh and that was a lot to deal with at the time, this was several years ago.

He said, after a while, you can find humor in some of these things.

I spent a year or so spending sixty hours a week trying to understand what happened and read a lot on psychology, cults, hypnosis and related topics and worked forty hours a week.

The second year I was more settled in and spent forty hours a week on this and over time I have gradually reduced the time so that now eight years in I have entire weeks that go by in which I don’t pursue anything regarding Scientology and focus entirely on other priorities, which would have seemed impossible the first few years after I left Scientology.

I can even go a month or more and realize I am not bringing it up or worried about it.

That’s a shocking change.

That being said, I think I am starting to get the distance to see things better.

As Mike Rinder described in an interview, it’s nice when you start to forget the mottos and slogans that we rattled off endlessly in Scientology!

I still could say lots of them verbatim and knew them by heart for the first four or five years after I left Scientology!

They flipped from being absolutely true in my mind to utter bullshit when I left Scientology and realized they were lies and stolen failed ideas from other practices!

Then I spent a few years listing them and writing about how Hubbard’s actions contradicted his words and how his words contradicted his words and his his words demonstrably contradicted reality. I did that for a few years.

Then I stopped writing so much and really cut down and after the last couple years the need to know those words to have them as infallible truths is gone and now the need to have them as lies to debunk has faded. They are yesterday’s garbage and no longer worth hanging onto.

The thing that I found dark humor in from Mike’s book is the absurd lengths and steadfast devotion to unmitigated cruelty that David Miscavige shows.

Seriously, if you just take the accounts of the abuse David Miscavige handed out over and over to Mike Rinder and many others and filmed little reenactments that are exactly what happened the videos would portray David Miscavige as a pure sociopath and Scientology as utter lunacy!

Think about it! I would love to see these events on film and the quotes from Scientology about being the most ethical group on the planet read at the end ! It would be hilarious!

I am going to lend it to someone tomorrow and after they read it I plan to write a review and several posts related to it.

I was in Scientology for twenty five years and in 2014 left Scientology.

I ended up researching the origin and effects of Scientology in an effort to recover from it and expose it to help others recover and hopefully avoid it.

I have written over five hundred posts online about Scientology and from my blog Mockingbird’s Nest blog on Scientology, ESMB, and Quora I believe my posts now have around a million views, some are reposted by others so that is more views I have no count on.

I have read at this point maybe a hundred books in this effort on subjects from cults to psychology to rhetoric to critical thinking to propaganda techniques to trauma to neuroscience and other subjects.

Among these have been a dozen to two dozen biographies of Scientology members, including a few on Ronald Hubbard himself.

The number of cult bios I have read altogether might be thirty or so.

I have found many to be helpful and informative in different ways.

But I found A Billion Years to be in my opinion the best to explain to a family member what a Scientologist goes through mentally and emotionally and the reality of how cruel and immoral and ruthless the organization is as David Miscavige leads it.

It has so many events that I experienced as a public member and at times staff member or even briefly a Sea Org recruit myself. It fills in the blanks on many aspects of Hubbard’s life, David Miscavige’s rise to power and inhuman cruelty in thousands of acts he carried out.

David Miscavige might be the closest thing to a pure sociopath in the world, he certainly has no lack of evil acts and sadistic and cruel impulses!

I think that the book better than any other I have read lets you see how a good person could be fooled into doing a lot of evil things for a cause if they think the cause is truly good.

I have tried to impart this to outsiders and never quite got it to stick. Now I have a first book on what it’s like to BE a Scientologist and devote decades of your life to the group and devalue your family and abandon your own life and goals for Scientology only to come up empty at some point and initially blame yourself before realizing Scientology was always a fraud.

I am very glad I bought and read this.

It would appear that Ron’s boots are at least 47X too large for the little feller.

Damn Straight!

Fred, I sure do wish I could upvote your post.