• Home
  • About Me
  • Mission Statement
  • Welcome Message
  • Open Letter to My Family
  • Donate
  • Contact Me

Mike Rinder's Blog

Something Can Be Done About It

  • All Posts
  • Disconnection
  • Idle Orgs
  • IAS
  • Media
  • Books
  • Fundraising
  • Regraded Being

Through the Bubble – Lili’s Adventures in Scientologyland Part 3

February 27, 2022 By Mike Rinder 8 Comments

 

This is the third installment of the account of a journey into and out of scientology — written by one of our long-term readers. I hope you enjoy her insights, humor and style.

Lili also provided a glossary of terms.

 

Through the Bubble – Lili’s Adventures in Scientologyland

This is my quirky recollection of events. Others may remember things differently. Lingo is italicized on the first mention, capitalized after that. I’ve compressed complexities in the cult to simplify your reading pleasure.

Part Three

The Carrot and the Whip: Scientology Betterment Scheduling and the Ethics Officer

When I first bought my Communication Course, it was referred to as an Enhancement and Betterment activity. I was required to establish my Communication Course schedule ahead of the coming week’s start of course and not deviate from it on pain of death. Or the equivalent. No newbie wanted to be sent to Ethics. The Ethics Officer and the ominous closed door into the inner sanctum of blame and punishment was a rumor that kept my tail pinched firmly between my legs in an effort to avoid a trip through that door.

Unfortunately, I skipped a scheduled Course Time because Summer ate something she shouldn’t have. I didn’t call down to the Scientology Center and tell them I couldn’t attend. It was a fucking emergency. They called the rental and left multiple messages for me while I sat on a hard plastic chair, regretting my oversight in planning my layers. I shivered and worried about Summer back in the bowels of the Vet Clinic. I wondered how much this would cost. I mentally cursed my super healthy mung-bean-sprout eating roommates and wondered which one secretly binged on chocolate and cursed them further for doing such a shit job at hiding their secret shame. Summer survived. Seventy-five dollars poorer, I took her listless, floppy body in my arms, laid her on the passenger seat of my VW Bug and drove her home with care.

The following evening, I showed up to do battle between proper Confront and irrational bodily twitches. I got a one-way ticket to the closed door of the Ethics Officer. My usual, shift blame, dodge attention, or pick-fights-method of getting out of being accountable for my being irresponsible, hit a brick wall. Excuses be damned. I still had to make up the time from my missed (and scheduled and agreed upon) Course Time slot and do Amends.

Amends, groan. It’s not enough to say, I’m sorry I didn’t call and tell you my dog almost died eating one of my roommate’s chocolate bars, so I couldn’t come to study last night. Saying I was distracted and driving with tears running down my face and how that could have ended so badly, also didn’t get me off the hook. Anyone else would have asked if Summer was okay. The Ethics Officer stared at me with that eyeballs-to-eyeballs Communication Course Drill-skill nailed to his very being. I looked away. I maybe cried. This terrifying person, who didn’t buy any of the shit I was shoveling, commanded fear and respect. I straightened my back, what could he do to me? Oh, he could make me read L Ron Hubbard’s words on making agreements and betrayal. My missing a scheduled Course Time and not calling first, was betrayal? Dang.

I had to write up times I’d failed to keep my word. Each instance had to be written in a Time, Form, (whatever the fuck that was) Place, and Event, (what I did,) format. Writing up the Event was kind anticlimactic after all the previous and useless informational drivel-y bits. I’d broken my word more times than an immortal vampire sucked the life out of some luckless victim. I figured three pages ought to do it. But, after three pages of nauseating detail about my untrustworthiness, I now had a new Personal Ruin to fix. People couldn’t count on me. Shit. I sucked. I’d broken my word way more than three pages worth, but I might just have to kill myself, if I dug any deeper. My resolve to make it to the Personal Integrity Course strengthened. I’d wade through leech-infested waters to find my Personal Integrity. And become a better person. I hoped.

I shoved the three hand-written pages across the yawning expanse of the Ethics Officer’s desk while looking at the ground. My puffy red eyes still burned. Pages swished, he breathed heavily, punctuated by a few sighs. I was dying inside, squirming in the uncomfortable metal chair, while he lounged in his fake leather executive chair. They must have gotten a batch discount. Everyone from the Executive Director down to the guy that fixed shit when it broke, had a massive fake wood veneer desk and swiveling, rocking, rolling, armed, puffy, throne chair to ensconce their junk-food eating derrieres in. My handwriting wasn’t that bad. Fer sure, this dude had never taken the Evelyn Wood Speed-Reading Course. Too bad. My back hurt from the slumping. I straightened up. Yeah, that felt better.

Somehow, I made it to the end of the interminable interview. Guess I was the only miscreant on his list that night. Per some L Ron Hubbard formula, I had to, Make Up for The Damage Done. I wasn’t sure if I was making up for the damage done to past people I’d let down, or just making up for missing a scheduled Course Time. I was beyond caring.

He assigned an Amends Project that would allow me to re-apply to join the group or some shit. I emptied waste baskets around the building, did some filing of letters and crap like that in the frigid room of a thousand filing cabinets. And I had to agree to come in for the three hours I’d missed on the following Sunday. Oh, that hurt. At the end of the night, I took my reddened from frostbite fingers and my sorry face back up to the Ethics Officer’s office and he said I was done. He told me to report back to the Course Supervisor, who by the way, didn’t ask why I missed the previous night’s course time. Did no one care about my dog?

I’d learned my lesson. It was easier to just show up sick, or partially maimed, than dodge a scheduled Course Time slot. This enforced discipline straightened my backbone and helped me develop better coping mechanisms for my urge to be impulsive. Take a walk and watch the sunset with the Drummer and meet his new friend? Nope, gotta go on Course, but could you take Summer? Feeling tired after helping in the organic garden at The Oakes? Too bad, gotta go on course.

I don’t resent this aspect of my ‘training.’ I’d have learned to schedule myself and do the necessary, if unpleasant tasks in my life, as I matured into an adult. But I morphed into the responsible-est-eighteen-year-old you ever saw. From a scheduling standpoint, at least. If I said, I’ll meet you at Hendry’s Beach at 10am, I’d actually be there on time. You wouldn’t, because you lacked my Scientology-backbone, you slacker.

 

The Student’s Guide to Acceptable Behavior or Cult Control 101

On top of the eighteenth-century concept of scheduling, there was a list of rules you had to agree to. It was their, Students Guide to Acceptable Behavior. Any violation of this Guide, was a one-way-ticket to Ethics. Groan. One of the things you had to agree to, was, no drugs. That was bad enough if you wanted to take a chill pill, you know, smoke a doobie, but for some Communication Course students, they had to ditch the hard-core funner stuff like cocaine and ecstasy. How do you do a Rave without ecstasy, some would ask. I wasn’t cool enough to get invited to a Rave. And ecstasy was on my no-fly list.

Then I found out that this no-drug policy was in force, from the moment you signed up for a Course, until you died or something. That’s because once you started, you were with us forever, kind of a deal. In other words, no doobie between the self-improvement courses. They wouldn’t take you back six months after the Communications Course, for your Personal Integrity Course, if you had ‘backslid’ to drugs.

Full disclosure, that’s bullshit. If you gave a big enough donation for some project around the building, that was your Amends. And you’d be good to go. But I didn’t understand the rules that the richer Scientology parishioners played by. In their parallel, and frequently ethically-unbalanced universe, their trip to the top of the Bridge to Total Freedom, was smoother than us po’ folk. What the hell is a Bridge-to-Total-Freedom you ask? My first exposure was seeing a big poster of a curvy idealized bridge, while emptying executive’s trash baskets on my first Amends Project. It was so big and so long it covered most of one wall. Must be important. It was colorful, with dreamy shafts of heaven light, overlaid with words like Communication Release, Freedom from Problems, going up to inscrutable acronyms like OT, with Roman numerals after it. It didn’t make any sense on casual viewing, but it was the step-by-step stairway to heaven, er, Scientology’s version of the steps you went through to gain total spiritual freedom.

Back to the Student’s Guide to Acceptable Behavior.  It was a good thing they didn’t show you that shit right off the bat. I probably would have found a better use for those fifty bills. Then there was the whole, no alcohol 24 hours before Course rule. Not that I was this big drinker, but if I had to put in a minimum of fifteen hours a week, in three-hour chunks, a Course Time on Saturday or Sunday was inevitable.

Parties, hereafter would be a very dull affair. There would be my old friends laughing at stuff that wasn’t funny, unless you ‘enhanced’ your perspective.  And I’d be the only un-enhanced one there and have my coat-of-improved-Responsibility on. It’d be like going to one of these parties with my granny. Only granny was me.

Responsibility is wrapped up with blame in Scientology, like an anaconda around a deer carcass. You’re supposed to Take Responsibility for every aspect of your life. But you can never win in high-control groups, because there is always a new summit to Take Responsibility for.

To wind the screw even tighter in the Student’s Guide to Acceptable Behavior, if you smelled pot while at a party, it was an Ethics Offence. Yeah, not going to get busted for that, twice. So, no parties. I was eighteen! But the kids at Scientology had parties. No-alcohol parties. Turns out they were like the parties at my first commune, Peace House in Isla Vista. Loud music, hours of dancing, and deep philosophical convos out on someone’s deck. They were actually, really fun. Soon I blew off my old friends and traded them in for my shiny new Scientology friends.

I belonged somewhere. I had friends with ambition. It was cool to work. It was cool to make money. It was cool to learn to be the professional at everything you turned your hand to, including scrubbing toilets. And to take pride in your skills.

I got a bunch of house-cleaning jobs for five bucks an hour, four-hour minimum. If your house didn’t take four hours, because I was so freakin’ efficient, I still got my twenty bucks. I was a professional house cleaner now. Mom would be so proud. Actually, she was baffled. I wasn’t that neat as a kid, but she wasn’t complaining.

Us Communication Course newbies thought Scientology was some kind of science of the mind shit. No one was telling us what to think about God, the Goddess, Jesus, or any of his wandering disciples. Nope, just Training Drills, rules, ethical behavior, Scientology’s version of Responsibility, and no drugs. That’s where it seemed to be at. What could be wrong with that?

Lili Ryder

 

 

Share this...
Share on facebook
Facebook
Share on pinterest
Pinterest
Share on twitter
Twitter
Share on linkedin
Linkedin

Filed Under: Through the Bubble Tagged With: Lili Ryder, Through the Bubble

Comments

  1. Jere Lull says

    February 28, 2022 at 2:23 pm

    “Student guide to Acceptable Behavior”:
    Like every
    other high-control group Ive encountered, you didn’t get to know the rules until AFTER you’d violated them. The reason seemed to be that we SHOULD have known not to do that because — just because. At the first place I was fired from, I was on my first vacation in 8 years there, calling in to see if there were any problems I could help with. I wasn’t to appear on company property again; they’d send my things, desk contents, etc. to me. It seems the reason I was fired was because I dared to schedule, and take, my “annual”2-weeks’ vacation. The owner wanted me in the office , just in case, as usual.(Oh, and I’d delivered an improvement that the users asked me for my first week on staff.) CAN’T do THAT: deliver an improvement without charging heavily for it! I found out later that the only thing they could do for the next 5 or so years was convert customers off of our system to our competitors’. The company’s still limping along, I saw when I idly google them, but NOT advertising the software I’d been hired to keep up and improve. heir loss.

    Reply
    • Lili R says

      February 28, 2022 at 5:38 pm

      I’m gonna go out on a limb here Jere Lull and hazard a guess that you worked for a Scientologist-run business. Where “making you wrong and me right, even if it bites me in the shorts,” is the correct answer.

      Reply
  2. Jere Lull says

    February 28, 2022 at 1:45 pm

    My first encounter with “ethics” was as a result of being less than a minute “late” for course in my first week of the Pro TRs. Never mind that my car blew an oil line on the trip in and I’d performed a minor miracle with no tools to get there at all. For the next indefinite period of time, I was to show up on time for course to perform ‘amends’. I STILL wouldn’t getting ANY coursework done, but that wasn’t important, I guess. I ALMOST said “stick it” and stayed home to do my college homework instead. What might have happened had I concentrated on a real engineering education instead of Tubby’s quackery can’t be known, but it MIGHT have save me a decade of self-denial, no romance and penury culminating in being thrown off the Flag campus as not even capable of being a proper RPFer and much deep depression.

    Reply
  3. Richard says

    February 28, 2022 at 1:09 pm

    I got a couple of LOLs. I like this one:

    “The following evening, I showed up to do battle between proper Confront and irrational bodily twitches.”

    I always liked it when my auditors weren’t paying attention and had irrational bodily twitches. It made them seem more “human”. (just joking) Apparently DM wants auditors to be rather robotic these days.

    At the scn mission where I started out the Ethics Officer had a big ass poster on the wall behind her desk and chair saying,

    YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR OWN CONDITION

    No sense going into her office whining with any petty complaints. Other than that she was a very nice person.

    The ultimate R-Factor (Reality Factor) behind always being on time presented in scn is “Either you control time or it controls you” which makes sense if you want to be a hardass about it. haha

    Reply
  4. PlanetshipT says

    February 27, 2022 at 3:58 pm

    Thank you Lili. I’m very much enjoying both the content and style of your writing. Please keep it coming! 🙂

    As an outsider Ethics only made sense to me once I realized Ethics = Punishment. When I made that connection I fully agreed that Scns may well be the most ‘Ethical’ people on the planet.

    Reply
  5. otherles says

    February 27, 2022 at 9:58 am

    When Scientologists say they’re the most ethical people on the Earth, they mean it. Der SS also say they’re the good guys, they also mean it. When someone says something, it should be checked.

    Reply
  6. xTeamXenu75to03chuckbeatty says

    February 27, 2022 at 9:47 am

    The Hubbard staff penalties for passing by words misunderstood when studying staff training material are irrationally harsher and average citizens cannot even believe Hubbard was serious.

    Hubbard’s penalty rules are unbelievable to average normal citizens.

    Reason alone to never do the crackpot Hubbard pseudo therapy and exorcism training Scientology/Hubbard sells by “fixed donation” pricing.

    Scientology is quackery which results in no grand improved spiritual behavior of any of their membership ever in the whole history of this crank outfit.

    Public need inform themselves about the OT 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 exorcism levels of upper Scientology. Learn what advanced Scientology is requiring of them if they stay aboard crackpot Scientology to the bitter end of the Hubbard quackery.

    Reply
    • Jere Lull says

      February 28, 2022 at 2:02 pm

      Right Chuck. scn’s ‘ethics’ is so backwards that it’s illegal to tell the TRUTH about scientology’s various compounded scams. AND if you’re accused of some offense, you’re GUILTY, with no ability to prove your innocence. ‘Ethics’ is just like being sent to the principal’s office in school: BOY, are you in for it!

      Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Order now hardback or audiobook

Order an Autographed Copy
Click Here to Donate

Important Articles

Dealing With Scientology Critics - L Ron Hubbard Playbook
The Real Story About Disconnection
To Speak Or Not To Speak
Shelly Miscavige Guarded By Armed PIs
Debbie Cook's New Years Email
On David Miscavige's Behavior
Miscavige's Behavior Part 2
A Letter From Garcia

Important Quotes

If the org slumps during this transition period, don't engage in "fund raising" or "selling postcards" or borrowing money. Just make more income with Scientology. L Ron Hubbard From HCOPL URGENT ORG PROGRAMMING
"We own a tremendous amount of property. We own a tremendous amount of material and so forth, and it keeps growing. But that’s not important. When buildings get important to us, for God sakes, some of you born revolutionists will you please blow up central headquarters". L Ron Hubbard Lecture 31 Dec 1960
"Personal integrity is knowing what you know. What you know is what you know and to have the courage to know and say what you have observed".- LRH from Personal Integrity
"It is necessary to happiness of man, that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists of professing to believe what he does not believe." Thomas Paine
“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” - Martin Luther King
“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.” - Martin Luther King
“There comes a time when silence is betrayal.” - Martin Luther King Jr.
“Communication is the universal solvent” - L Ron Hubbard
“When men yield up the privilege of thinking, the last shadow of liberty quits the horizon.” Thomas Paine
"Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world would do this, it would change the earth." William Faulkner
"The ultimate authority must always rest with the individual's own reason and critical analysis." Dalai Lama

Important Reading

Troublemaker - Leah Remini
Ruthless - Ron Miscavige
Going Clear - Lawrence Wright
Bare Faced Messiah - Russell Miller
Counterfeit Dreams - Jeff Hawkins
Blown For Good - Marc Headley
Abuse at the Top - Amy Scobee
Unbreakable Miss Lovely - Tony Ortega
The Church of Fear - John Sweeney
Fair Game - Steve Cannane
Inside Scientology - Janet Reitman
Jenna Miscavige - Beyond Belief
My Billion Year Contract
Ron the War Hero - Chris Owen

Popular Posts

Scientology Photoshops Audience
Tommy Davis and Jessica Feshbach
Shelly Miscavige- Why She Stays
Disconnection and My Mother
Food for Thought
  • David Miscavige Paranoia
    The Church of Spin
    Correspondent from the Bay Area
    Actors Needed to Play Scientologists
  • Recent Comments

    • xTeamXenu75to03chuckbeatty on “How to Refuse Psychiatry”: “Incredible! Me, I was pre-smoked to believe the “tech” (the Hubbard quackery) was going to make everyone who stuck to…” May 28, 21:36
    • Denny Owen on “How to Refuse Psychiatry”: “Generally, it’s public wifi that’s the culprit. I get the same thing at my library and the local Barnes &…” May 28, 21:35
    • KimmyC on Fair Game Podcast: “Leah Remini’s YT has a playlist of all 80 episodes.” May 28, 21:31
    • xTeamXenu75to03chuckbeatty on “How to Refuse Psychiatry”: “Great letter from James Beebe! He deserves an award. Scientologists hateful of psychiatry never reveal Scientologists’ secret exorcism beliefs. https://www.semissourian.com/story/96469.html…” May 28, 21:29
    • Ammo Alamo on “How to Refuse Psychiatry”: “Mike was there on the Apollo madship guarding the door behind which Hubbard had imprisoned some poor soul in a…” May 28, 20:33
    • Yawn on “How to Refuse Psychiatry”: “It dawned on me reading the entries to this blog post the simplicity of diversionary tactics. This moron of an…” May 28, 20:18
    • Ammo Alamo on “How to Refuse Psychiatry”: “Windows gives me a hazard warning trying to connect to that url: “This site can’t provide a secure connection”” May 28, 19:46
    • Aquamarine on Regraded Being: “Thanks, Yawn. Yes, that’s what they are…”the walking wounded”…Fighting a was set up to be impossible to wind and has…” May 28, 19:21
    • GL on “How to Refuse Psychiatry”: “From 2002, says a lot for Kretchmar – https://www.semissourian.com/story/96469.html These also inspire confidence in his ability and credibility – https://www.linkedin.com/in/randy-kretchmar-a58ba71a…” May 28, 19:17
    • Aquamarine on Regraded Being: “Well said, Yawn. Right on the money in every sense of the word.” May 28, 19:03

    Check out MRinder.com

    Categories

    Archives

    Copyright © 2023 Mike Rinder · WordPress · Log in