*** love that last line.

<3

Right back at you with EVERYTHING you said, Mark,! In part and in particular, “The trick is to persist with looking and questioning…” NOTHING the cult has in its arsenal of make wrong can stand up to that – nothing! The cult is on VERY shaky ground with ANY Still In who is ready, willing and able to “Obnose”! And boy oh boy, does the cult ever know and fear this! Once again, kudos to you, Mark. Your win is a win for all of us here and elsewhere who “seek to live with the truth”. UTRs excepting, and too bad if it sounds immodest, and as flawed as we as individuals and as a group may be in any number of ways, we are still head and shoulders above those Still In who content themselves with merely giving lip service to living with the truth when in fact they are deliberately and continually turning a blind eye to it. They talk a good game; we LIVE it. “Seek to live with the truth” eh? They talk the talk; WE walk the walk!

Yes, it is funny! As much as I detest Hubbard and his dreck now, at that point I latched on to that piece of the dreck(doubt formula) that ultimately severed, ” terminatedly “, my attachment to and belief in it. The way you framed the situation, in scientological terms, is perfect for those still in that group.
Using their language(and being “pan-determined”), I would calmly suggest that they do “obnosis drills” and rigorously apply the “doubt formula”to themselves, the group, its organizations, and its leader. Because scientology policies consist of lies, bait-and-switch, and confusion-generating contradictions, you can ALWAYS,ALWAYS,ALWAYS find a policy, concept, or axiom that JUSTIFIES questioning the status quo; some random examples come to mind: more communication, not less, solves problems; communication is the universal solvent; ARC and KRC triangles; the code of a scientologist; the policy on manners; the doubt formula; the church’s endorsement of the UN human rights declaration…and on and on, ad nauseam. The trick is to persist with looking and questioning, which grates against the scientological conditioning and programming and hypnosis and group pressure that keeps its members from thinking clearly and analytically. It’s, minimally, a tricky and uncomfortable endeavor for those still in…

Mark, thank you for sharing your staff experiences and state of mind. You were not just a public, like me. You were STAFF. You had a great deal “invested” in being right about being on staff. And you probably got tons of corroboration from other staff members about how “right” it was for you to be on staff. And yet – and yet, you still got up the courage to LOOK. And to apply the Doubt Formula to what you saw! As a staff member, facing all that disapproval. Yet you saw the stats and they didn’t tally with the rightness of it all, the stunning LACK of observable “impingingness” (lol) on society at large. So you applied Doubt (in itself almost a crime, don’t you know, to be in DOUBT? Oh, my!) and got yourself OUT. Its a big deal when you’ve invested so much time and effort, to cut your losses and say, “Enough” and yet you did it! You refused to live a lie. You sought to live with the truth! You actually – and this is very funny to me – you actually APPLIED Scientology, to the existing scene, and ironically, the correct application of Hubbard’s principles got you the HELL OUT OF THERE! Ah, the irony! 🙂 🙂 And the truth is, all ANY of the still ins, be they staff or SO or public need to do is simply apply Hubbard’s own tech to what is right in front of their eyes, and they will have no choice but to leave! Funny, no?

Thanks, Peacemaker.

When I was in I resented the Sea Org but felt tremendous sympathy for the staff, whom I considered unappreciated and abused by the Sea Org, as well as, of course overworked and grossly underpaid.

Mostly I felt that housing them for a pittance or for no financial compensation at all was putting IN my exchange with them.

That’s how I felt THEN – that Class V org staff were being taken gross advantage of,

And, of course there was guilt baked into this – MY guilt – because I never signed a staff contract. ‘

I KNEW I would NEVER make it on staff. There was no doubt in my mind, ever, that I could or would succeed on staff, working those hours and then having to moonlight to actually support myself…no way.

Twice I came close to signing a staff contract and twice I backed away. So I felt guilt about that, but not enough guilt to make me sign.

Long story short, housing one staff person or another in my home was my way of (I thought) putting in MY exchange with the staff.

And as for the Sea Org, there was NOOO way I would have ever, ever in a zillion years signed that contract, mostly because, when I was in, I couldn’t stand them (most of them – there were a few that I met that I liked.)

My antipathy to most Sea Org members (on the tone scale it could be pegged as Unexpressed Resentment) was rooted in IGNORANCE – near complete ignorance of how they REALLY lived and what they were actually enduring.

I had no clue. I just thought they were obnoxious personalities (Just naturally obnoxious) who skated by getting fed and clothed and housed while at the same time via their superior rank being permitted to lord it over and otherwise make miserable the hardworking Cl V org staff. My sympathy was ALL with the org staff!

That was my totally skewed view of the SO back in the day!

And I felt guilt about THAT, i.e., disliking them so much. Resenting them was not something that could be expressed! NO ONE went around saying what I was thinking nearly always, which was, “These people REALLY get on my nerves! They are SO annoying! If ONLY they would just…GO AWAY, and let the staff and public get on with things!”…No one, except me, I believed, thought these things. Certainly no one SAID these things!

Anyway, to summarize: compassion for the org staff, and the accompanying guilt about that + dislike of the Sea Org and the accompanying guilt about THAT added up to one staff member or another usually in residence a chez moi 🙂

Happy holidays, Midwest SP😁
Just a little heads-up about that word:

https://www.thefreedictionary.com/wog

Dear Mark – THANK YOU!! Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. I love being a WOG!

Aqua,
Well said!
In hindsight, joining staff was the decision that cranked my cognitive dissonance to maximum tension, obliterated my naiveté, and cranked up the volume of my doubts, questions, and frustrations to a deafening roar.
The year and two months I was a staff member occurred at the tail end of an almost 4 year period of relentless stress and numerous catastrophes, all rooted in my culty delusion. Experiencing the insanity, mendacity, and ruthless manipulation that formed the SOP of “the most ethical group on the planet” on a daily basis finally snapped me out of my scientology sleep-walk. It had to get bad enough, uncomfortable enough, unbearable enough…before I could literally walk away from it, step out of the mind fuck matrix, and question it while physically removing myself from my “staff post”. It was one of the best decisions I have ever made, period. I was soooo pissed off on my last day at the org, and that anger informed my decision to say,” Enough, I can’t do this anymore!” That decision morphed into ” I WON’T do this anymore ” within a few weeks. I went back once to do a half-hearted “O/W write-up”. After more reading and reflecting, I realized that I had to reclaim my self, my life, my privacy, my sanity, my dignity, and my autonomy, and that involved educating myself about the unexamined assumptions, beliefs, and practices that I had bought into. I knew that process did NOT involve returning to ANY scientology group or organization…or any other high-control, woo-based group. Armed with Singer’s and Lifton’s criteria for thought reform, I began my long slog out of the swamp of undue influence, out of the spiritual rape of scientology(it’s an ongoing process, 8 & 1/2 years later)…
You are right: there comes a time when those still in that mire have to actually LOOK at what’s right in front of them. It’s a choice. The factual information about the “church’s” real history(almost 70 years’ worth), its real actions, its real “stats”, is readily available; it just takes a bit of courage and fortitude to, in scientological parlance, actually “apply the doubt formula”. In fact…that is what I would urge any lurker or OSA-bot reading this blog to do: be “self-determined” and actually look at court records, 501(c)(3) tax returns of scientology organizations, online information about David Miscavige’s net worth, and “obnosis” of the viability of scientology orgs, among many other points, and compare what you discover in your independent search to what church publications, organizations, and staff tell you. If the church is actually expanding at the rate COB claims it is, if Clears and OT’s and scientology “fourth dynamic campaigns” are actually “impinging” upon society as claimed, then the corroborating evidence of said should be easily found, copious in quantity, and breath-takingly impressive. You can share it with your fellow scientologists and carry on with COMPLETE CONFIDENCE, knowing that, indeed, ” planetary clearing is just around tge corner…
RIGHT? So…Look. Go ahead. And may you never be the same…

Dear Midwest SP,
I lived in the Lou for about 11 & 1/2 years, before I got involved in scientology. I am very happy to hear that you got out of the cult and that the “church” is circling the drain there. Wishing you and yours a much happier post-cult life!
Cheers!👍🏽✌🏾❤