My Life As A Scientologist -Part III

This entry is a continuation of "My Life As A Scientologist."  To view part one, click here.

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The starting package was about $230. This included the book "Dianetics" by L. Ron Hubbard, 20 hours of Audit Counseling, and a workbook that was supposed to be one of their introductory classes that they offered.

**A little background on what these items are:

**Dianetics:

This is a book by L. Ron Hubbard that explains all kinds of made up facts about the brain. Basically LRH's (L. Ron Hubbard) philosophy on everything that happens in your mind is: the first thing to pop into your brain is what is true to you. So if someone asks you a question about your childhood, and the first thing that pops into your brain is an image of someone getting beat up, this was supposed to be an actual memory that you have and are traumatized by. They called this book "Book 1." They always seemed to have a secret code or special abbreviation for everything. It was like you were living in an L. Ron Hubbard Science Fiction Novel.

**Audit Counseling:

This is their form of counseling. It involves getting rid of messages in your brain that are keeping you from living a happy life. These messages in your brain are called "Engrams." Engrams can be a word or a saying that you associate with a certain situation. An example of something that might happen in an auditing session is that you recall a situation where you were knocked unconscious with a baseball bat at a ball game. For whatever reason, being unconscious was a HUGE deal to them. According to LRH, when you are unconscious, this is when your brain is being reprogrammed with messages (OH NO! ENGRAMS!). As you are unconscious on the baseball diamond, someone says, "Don't move him! Give him space!" From then on, anytime you experience a situation that reminds you of that time, you recall everything having to do with it, including those phrases. You might walk by a sporting goods store that has baseball bats displayed in the front window... suddenly you get a headache, you feel like you need space, and you want to be left alone... you need to stand there for a second. This is because (again, according to LRH) you're feeling the pain of the bat on your head and subconsciously hearing the phrases "Don't move" and "Give him space." The way you get rid of these engrams is to locate them in your memories, then say them over and over until you don't feel bad about them anymore. That's it.

**Classes at the DC:

The DC has a classroom for people to take classes, seminars, etc... Everyone who was taking a class was doing something different. They had classes for everything from how to talk to people, to how to handle stress, to just about anything else that happens in your life. Mine was an introductory course that basically just covered many of the things that are taught in Dianetics. At times I heard people practice being assertive. They would repeat the same sayings over and over again until they said them just right.**

I got all signed up, paid my money, and set up my first appointment to do some audit counseling. I was pretty happy to begin fixing my life.

In addition to the counseling and the classes, Molly also had me go to GNC so I could buy an assload of supplements and natural drugs. Scientologists are HUGELY against prescription drugs. I also didn't realize at the time, but they had me taking a useless and possibly unhealthy amount of certain vitamins.

One vitamin I particularly found strange was the Vitamin C. The tablets that they had me buy gave me 600% of my daily vitamin C per pill. They told me to take 9 every day. I'm pretty sure that most of the vitamin C that was put in my body just came out in my urine and had no effect whatsoever.

I told my parents about what I had been doing and they hadn't really heard much about it either. I tried to explain what it was about, and then used the typical defense of Dianetics: "It's some national organization. Nothing to be worried about. John Travolta and Tom Cruise are even Scientologists."

::Click Here For Part IV::