metalman wrote:
A piece of Blue sky
What sucked you in and how far did you go before you became disillusioned?
I'd just come out of the navy. I was severely depressed and well, looking for help, these people stopped me on the street and told me they had the answers, I tried out their "Auditing" and felt better, so I went with it.
Over the following months I was doing various courses and paying out big time for their litterature. Eventually this culminated in them offering me a "job" (I use this loosely as a job suggests payment), which I accepted greatfully. I moved out of the family home at their insistance and started to take on more courses and begin my new employment as an SSO - staff section officer. I was to become responsible to training and maintaining standards of excellence within the staff. I was being payed maybe £2 for 56 hours a week, I was told this would increase as my productivity increased, but being new to the job and really being out of my depth that never happened, so I was basically running on what I'd come out of the navy with.
This went on for about 4 months, I was then told I would be going to St Hill in East Greenwich, to recieve training in an effort to boost my productivity and generally help with getting bums on seats. So I went and did several courses, at this point I was offered a chance to join the Sea Org, which is basically the hardcore version of Scientology, it was sold to me on the basis that my time with the navy would serve me well and that it was very similar both in principle and practice, only this time I would, in their words be "helping to raise the conciousness of humanity" and other such balls. I was burning through money at this point like it was going out of fashion, indeed, I was at the stage where my savings were all but exhausted. But I continued with the training.
Then my Grandfather died, he'd had cancer and had been going downhill fast. The thing that snapped me out of it was their reaction to the incident, rather then simpathy as one might expect, they tried to turn it into an oportunity to sell auditing to the rest of the family, indeed quite a bit of pressure was placed on me to do just that. Their other reaction was to ask me, flat out if my family had lied about his death in order to take me away from my studies - something that really sent alarm bells ringing.
So I returned from East Greenwich to Plymouth. The local Org's response was more of the same, but truthfully at this point it was hitting a wall, what had been implied and flat out stated at St Hill had pretty much ended it for me, so I signed off, after debriefing (which included questions such as "what are your crimes") I left the Org and never stepped foot in it again. Some weeks later a couple of the people I had worked with came to me with a bill for £50 for outstanding costs for courses, to their credit they did at least look embarressed to have handed it to me.
But that was it, I was out, I spent the next 2 years unpicking the damage they had done to me mentally and reasserting my own thoughts. Sometimes I still get that pang to go back, but, I realise there is still programming there that I simply never will be able to remove.
I'm told I've been unnoficially declared "SP" or suppressive person, what this means is, is that they are now unable to talk to me and further, if you read their laws, now required to attack, destroy or discredit me under their "fair game" policy, which has since been renamed to other things but the intent is the same. In fact, by even saying this in a public forum I have just painted a large target on my back.
Going to them was my first great mistake, one of many.
My savings at the time of leaving the Navy were £3500. I had 28p in the bank when I left them. Oh and a bunch of books...
