and welcome back to the channel. I'm your host for today, claire headley, and my guest for today is the wonderful mr john atac. Thank you so much for joining me today, john.
Speaker 2:Always a pleasure, Claire.
Speaker 1:And since it's that time of the year, merry Christmas, happy Holidays and the many variations thereof, to whatever. There we go. Happy Hanukkah. I think you mentioned Yuletide earlier and various other. There we go, perfect.
Speaker 2:Have a good time.
Speaker 1:All bases covered, jolly, and here's to an amazing 2025. But once again, we will be talking today about the subject of life after Scientology, our respective journeys. After Scientology, our Respective Journeys. And, for anyone tuning in, if you'd like to leave a comment, I will be giving away five signed copies of Mr John A Tack's book A Piece of Blue Sky. Yay, for anyone interested in learning more.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I want to say that the book was written and I spent six years doing it absolutely was focused, that it was for people who'd been involved in Scientology. I was involved for nine years. There wasn't a moment during that nine years where I doubted L Ron Hubbard or Scientology. I was absolutely into it and I wasn't a staff member, I wasn't the seal, so I wasn't humiliated and abused, which makes me, I think, unique. I've met over 1,000 people who have been involved and nobody has yet told me no, I had a fine time. I had a fine time, and so Hubbard and Scientology, that was all fine.
Speaker 2:Once I got to St Hill, you know, that was a little bit different, that that the organization, the way it was run, the mess it was in um, and lots of lovely people, that that was something that that got me. And you know, I think people outside of of a group tend to think, oh yeah, they're all trying to manipulate you, they're all trying to get you. Well, yeah, they were trying to sell me stuff. That's true, because they got two percent on it, which I didn't know at the time.
Speaker 1:Um, but a two percent commission on the sale that's right, yeah, the registrar's commission.
Speaker 2:But nonetheless I wanted to understand how was it that I had spent nine years and not seen the obvious? And it is obvious Scientology does not lead to the things that Ron Hubbard claims. You won't be outside of your body, you won't have supernatural powers. There's a lot of pretense, but you won't see that actually happening. You won't see cures for cancer, leukemia or people being raised from the dead another claim that Hubbard made on several occasions. These things didn't happen. In fact, in Philadelphia, during the Philadelphia doctorate course in 1952, helen O'Brien, who was the head of the organization at that time and ran the Philadelphia organization and the Hubbard Association of Scientologists, she said that they put a fishbowl on the counter in the reception so that people would throw away their glasses. And she said by the end of the time, you know, they spent months, nobody threw away their glasses. And she said um, by the end of the time, you know, they spent months, nobody threw away their glasses. And I think it. I wanted to understand.
Speaker 2:So how did I become so devoted to this? Why was I so caught up in this? Why did I fend it against other people? Why did I recruit people? People, and to me that meant understanding who Hubbard was and the history of Scientology. And it is incredible that, scientologists, we were all completely ignorant of the past. We didn't know about the Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation in Elizabeth, new Jersey. The Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation in Elizabeth, new Jersey. We didn't, really I didn't know anything about the government inquiries the two in Australia, the Canadian one, the South African one, the Rhodesian one or the UK one and so to understand it, it seemed necessary to go through, pick through that history very carefully, and I wrote a book that was intended for consumption by people who'd experienced Scientology. It's gratifying there are other people who've read it and found it useful. And we talked a few months ago about the possibility of a course for former members, and I kind of balk at this idea of a course. It's like we have a check sheet and a twin on the course.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, we would. Yeah, it was the concept of a workshop.
Speaker 2:I would say I know that's not what you wanted say more than I. Yeah, I know, I know that's not what you wanted, but yes, I just to say that I I think, before doing anything um of that type, it's a good idea to to understand what it is and what it was. Blue sky was written to talk about hubbard and to talk about the organisation. I did not. I very deliberately did not talk about the technology of Scientology. By the time I published the book, which was early in 1990, the first edition. This is the new and much improved one, the non-abridged version. But by the time I published it I'd had five, six years where I no longer believed, and I have elsewhere written about what I think of the technology and why I think the technology is not actually a form of liberation, it's a form of imprisonment, it's a way of creating psychological and often physical slavery, psychological and often physical slavery.
Speaker 2:And they I went through various titles along the way that the book was originally about captain bill robertson and how he left scientology, because captain bill was just the most incredible character and I got to know him pretty well, um, over an eight month period, and he kept trying to talk me back in, you know. So then I kept trying to find out what had gone on, and that book was called the Scientology War Collins Publishers, who were the biggest publisher in the world at the time. They became HarperCollins, and the wife of the managing director, lillian Collins, was a Scientologist but unbeknownst to their publishing board. They looked at this manuscript and wanted to publish it, but it got caught up with a simple fact, which was that publishing a book about Scientology didn't used to make any money because they would sue you. And so the publishers, after three months of saying yes, we'll do this and that was the editor who was most interested in it came back to me and said the reason I really like this book is you haven't got your head out of it yet, so great, so you could see. You know, a cult from the perspective of a cult member.
Speaker 2:I didn't like that at all, but I did realise that. You know how. On from the perspective of a cult member, I didn't like that at all, but I did realise that. You know. How on earth are you going to understand Captain Bill and the independent movement, the Free Zone, all of this stuff, ron's, which I helped to create for my sins? How do you understand that if you don't understand what Scientology is, how do you understand what Scientology is if you don't understand who Hubbard is? And so that meant just an incredible amount of work because, you know, there was no World Wide Web, so if I needed something from a library in Montana I had to write to them, you know, and things would go back and forth, and the Montana Historical Society were incredibly helpful, you know, and allowed me to trace where Hubbard had actually grown up and that his father sorry, his grandfather contrary to his claims, did not own a quarter of Montana.
Speaker 2:He owned 128 acres and he wasn't a cattle baron, he was a veterinarian who kept some horses. A lot of puffed up stories. But it seemed important to really dig into that, to check everything, because we had been told so many stories and the more I studied the life and times of Orrin Hubbard I must publish this at some point. I took 22 of the biographies of Hubbard. I must publish this at some point.
Speaker 2:I took 22 of the biographies of Hubbard, most of them published, the. I used the one from mission into time as the basis and then I added in statements along the way that was my sort of armature. I ended up having a 600 page chronology detailing the man's life. But in the comparative biographies and the one that people probably haven't seen would be Peter Tompkins, who was one of the many people hired to write a biography of Hubbard, who basically went no, you're kidding me, I mean Omar Garrison. They paid him to write a biography of Hubbard who basically went no, you're kidding me, I mean Omar Garrison. They paid him to write it and they paid him even more not to publish it.
Speaker 2:He's paid hundreds of thousands of dollars not to publish this book because of what Jerry Armstrong in particular, and Omar had found out. But I had to go through it with great care and these biographies exemplified the problem, the foundational problem, with Ron Hubbard. Ron Hubbard said honesty is sanity, so I take that to mean that dishonesty is insanity in his own terms.
Speaker 2:He said the road to truth must be trod with true steps and lied his head off. And you can tell this. You don't have to go look at his college records or what anybody else said about him. Look at his own statements about himself and he can't make his mind up what he did. So, for example, becoming a blood brother of the blackfoot piccuni indians, as he calls them. Um, he says there are three accounts that I found. He says he was two years old, four years old or six years old, and you kind of go, a blood brother at the age of two right what an
Speaker 2:incredible man. And then you dig a little deeper and you find that in fact no native american peoples made blood brothers. It's a story that comes from viking, a viking past, of danish past, um, that was adopted by hollywood in around about the 1930s, early 30s, when Hubbard was a young man. And in fact, if anybody wants to go and check this and I'm big on detail and your references if you look to the LA Times in June 1990, I worked with Bob Wilkos and Joel Sapel, the two journalists, for almost five years on those stories and they went and interviewed people from the Blackfoot Pikuni people. So they had the historian of the people who said, no, we never made any blood brothers. And then you had I think he was the kind of deputy of the tribal chieftain who again confirmed.
Speaker 2:But there was this interesting I was in a deposition. You know about this. This is the kind of life we've led, where you get put into these legal proceedings with the lawyers from both sides, sometimes just the lawyer from one side, and it goes on for hours and hours, and hours and they're basically trying to pick at you and find out anything they can grab to discredit you. I'm happy to say, firstly, the deposition was kendrick moxon, who's the head of scientology's litigation, and secondly, that he after two days in dep. He didn't even ask me to sign the deposition. There wasn't a single sentence in it, so it was never affidavited or affirmed. There wasn't a single sentence that he could use.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no. And, by the way, you made me realize in your description of deposition that I think, in my opinion, is one of the closest things in the real world to, in Scientology, a security check or an interrogation, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:And you find yourself in a position where you can't refuse to answer, unlike an ordinary courtroom where your lawyer can stand up and object. It all goes into the record. And trying to explain to the judge who's sitting in on this, they will use this information If they find out. It's like have you ever used psychiatric drugs? It's these kind of questions that have nothing to do with proceeding, which would not be permitted in a courtroom, certainly not in England.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and to prove that point, by the way, england, yeah. And to prove that point, by the way, there are many times that Scientology always insists at least in my experience in videoing and streaming any deposition proceedings, and in many times they've used snippets from those deposition proceedings in their hate propaganda.
Speaker 2:Yeah, which is absolutely against the you know, the spirit of justice or jurisprudence. Completely so, kendrick Moxon, I have been bad. I've taken my friend Richard Woods with me, who's quite large, and I said, just sit to the side of him on the edge of his eye line throughout and just sit there and look at him. Moxon kept wondering if Richard was going to come and thump him. I think Not very impressive for a Scientology operating thetan, really, I must say. But at one point he pushes this letter across the table at me and he says you say that Elron Hubbard was not a blood brother of the Blackfoot Pakuni people, and but on this letter a member of the tribal council has affirmed that he was. And I didn't even look at the letter. I said it's the letter from Tree Many Feathers, isn't it? Tree Many Feathers said he's an eighth blood and what he found out? And by this time Moxon's going. No, no, I didn't ask you that question. I didn't ask you that question.
Speaker 2:And the barrister is sitting in as a judge who has already quietly said to me what a despicable person he thinks Moxon is, having seen the first day of the deposition. Barrister says no, I think Mr Atack should answer as he wishes. And so I said he says no, I think Mr Atack should answer as he wishes. And so I said he was interviewed by the Los Angeles Times. It was published in June 1990. And he said well, I went to the tribal council.
Speaker 2:Oh, having you know Moxon had said he was a member of the tribal council. I said no, he isn't. He said his name's on the. Oh. No, it isn't. I said he's an eighth blood. Therefore he has a legal right to membership.
Speaker 2:He found that there's no such thing as a blood brother. Uh, and so he made run up and posthumously a blood brother. This is not, you know, becoming a blood brother at two, four, six or eight or any other. I found so many times that he contradicted himself as I I say I must publish the 22 parallel accounts that show him. You know, here he wrestled with a polar bear, here he wrestled with a Kodiak bear, here it was a black bear or a brown. You know the details of the story is because he was a fabulist, he was a storyteller. There's a piece in Blue Sky where we found a guy who was a fellow pulp fiction writer, frank Gruber, and he said he sat through a whole evening of stories that Hubbard was telling at a party, and you know Hubbard liked to hold the floor, which I seem to be doing at the moment.
Speaker 1:But it's not the same thing. No, it's not.
Speaker 2:At the end of the evening Hubbard looked at Gruber and said you don't believe me, do you? And Gruber looked up and he said I've been taking notes, ron, and adding up all the time. And Ron, I think was Hubbard, was like 26 or something at this time. If you add up all the time, you're 82 years old for the amount of time you spent in the Amazon rainforest and you know wherever. So that's very difficult when you've got a man who is a born liar.
Speaker 2:Among the documents I have I have Hubbard diaries which I don't think have ever been published. I don't, you know. I put up the 800 pages of the harassment training. We put that on the internet in the mid-90s. I don't know if it's still there, these diaries, because they're too big for my scanner. I've never copied them in any way, but there are three diaries written by Hubbard as a teenager detailing his escapades in China, in Guam and China, and because he would later say that he had studied with gurus in China, with gurus in China, and as these are his only visits to China in his entire life, that must have happened during this.
Speaker 2:And you have these two handwritten Rum Hubbard diaries presented to the court by the Religious Technology Centre in one of its various front groups. So they come from the hubbard archive. Um that, so the provenance is absolute. They were written by hubbard. You read these things and the only mention he makes that you could pin to any kind of guru or mystical training is that he visits a lama seri and his only comment is that the monk's voices sounded like bullfrogs. That's all you get. As for his other claims to have studied with gurus in india, he didn't visit india until the 1950s, when he changed planes at calcutta at one point. Or in Tibet, oh come on. Or Mongolia there's one Scientology book where you have him studying with gurus in Mongolia, right, who knows. But these diaries, as I say, there are three of them detailing two journeys. The third one is typed. The third one is him going back through his own diary and making it better, not so he can publish it, just because that's his nature, you know right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so so you're right. A Hubbard fact versus fiction deep dive would be absolutely fascinating.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I mean I, when you have to understand what it is, where it came from and how it works, and the first thing to take away is the curtain between you and the Wizard of Oz.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:And see the little man with the megaphone. That's Ron Hubbard. That's Ron Hubbard.
Speaker 2:There are so many people in the so-called free zone who believe they've understood that Hubbard was a confidence trickster. They've understood that in fact he enslaved people and damaged them. You know he did tremendous harm to thousands of people. You know this guy who put a child in the chain locker of a ship Right, a filthy, dirty chain locker, pitch black, with rats wandering around A child not yet five years old for three days because the child was being a child Right. And you know that's not permitted in Scientology. This man who had so little feeling for the human beings.
Speaker 2:But there are so many people out there who believe themselves to be independents or freeze owners. What have you? And they think you can make a logical argument from the fact that you've got this utterly selfish, destructive human being. But he gave us a technology that will liberate us spiritually. It doesn't play, and I think the first part of understanding that is to look at his biography, russell Miller's book Barefaced Messiah. It's a great book. It also has possibly the best title that a book has ever had. I remember the day he phoned me up and said I've got it, barefaced Messiah, yes, he phoned me up and said I've got it Barefaced, Messiah, and I'm going yes, absolutely yeah, brilliant book.
Speaker 2:Brilliant title absolutely 100%. Yeah, and he came to me in January 86, in fact, just a few days before Hubbard died, which was on the 24th of that month, and he was working for the Sunday Times. He was the highest-paid journalist in the UK at that time, you know so. He'd written biographies of Hefner and of Getty, you know so. He was the top of the trade and he'd got this. The Sunday Times wanted some articles and the project was to find Ron Hubbard and they'd signed him up to do that and he was thinking about a book and he gave me a check and nobody had done that before.
Speaker 2:I'd had two years of doing anything I could to help people but nobody had paid me for doing it and I liked that. That was good and because I'd had in all, I'd approached 50 publishers with Blue Sky and 11 of them had said they'd love to publish it but they realized there was no profit in it so they weren't going to. In fact, neville Spearman, the head of Neville Spearman Publishers, who published the Mindbenders by Cyril Vosper, former member, wrote to me and I imagine him, sat in his tailor-made Savile Row suit and his pinstripe, this elegant 70-year-old public school, educated, oxford, educated whatever. And he signed the letter of death to the evil cult Death to the evil cult. So I sort of given up on the idea of being published and I, as part of the deal with Russell, I was his researcher, I was his only paid researcher. I worked with him for 18 months, I was his expert witness in court and we won cases here in the US and in Australia, but I didn't think it was going to get published. So I let him have the manuscript to Blue Sky.
Speaker 2:And if you look in the bibliography of Barefaced Messiah, it credits a book by me called Hubbard Through the Looking Glass. And that is the essential point that I want to make here that everything is the reverse of what it claims to be in Scientology. This isn't. It isn't a way of freeing people, liberating people at all, it's a way of entrapping people and it always was right from the start. And he knew it was. The first thing he ever wrote about. Dianetics is a letter in January 1949 to his literary agent, ferry Ackerman, who gave me the letter along with a whole batch of Hubbard letters. Forry was his agent from the 30s right into the 1970s and he did some Scientology. He didn't really particularly like it, but they remained good friends. And here's this letter, which Tony Ortega has put up along the way way, where hubbard is talking about this new technique. He's discovered where you can rape women and they won't even know about it. Wow, that's the first mention of the modern science of mental health oh my gosh, it's freaking, unbelievable.
Speaker 2:Excuse me, of course, yeah, so it. And of course you know we go out there and say, well, look, no, scientology is really dangerous. And people go oh no, people have got to be allowed to do what they want to do. I mean, we're a liberal society, we can't stop people from doing what they want to do. And so these poor cults, they're being oppressed. That you know.
Speaker 2:So you have a whole bunch of social scientists but well, scientists is the wrong word sociologists particularly who, like Gordon J Melton or James Lewis, who have been paid by Scientology. Brian Wilson that's not the Beach Boys one, it's Brian with a Y, who was a professor of sociology at Oxford University, was paid by Scientology and intimidated by Scientology into making statements to support them. So you have this idea that those tiny few of us who dare stand up to this oppressive harassment machine we're the bad guys, you know, because we're taking away people's religious freedom. Not really interested in the religious freedom, I'm interested in the reality and you and Mark were the first people to really get to this that this is modern slavery, right, this is human trafficking that's going on here.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, totally. I mean, I've said many times I take no issue with anybody's belief. Believe whatever it is you want to believe programs you into submission to be controlled and leveraged by them. Those are two separate things, they're two different buckets. I did want to ask you a question.
Speaker 1:Okay, so I've seen many different iterations of people coming out of Scientology. In my case, given that I was born into it, my mother joined the C organization when I was four years old. Scientology really was absolutely never a choice for me. I've always said that the moment when it became a choice, which was the day that I escaped, I chose not to have anything more to do with it. But that was me and Mark was pretty similar, like he, never. It was like. In other words, for us it was never about the belief or the organization, it was just the whole bucket, like just walk away.
Speaker 1:But here's my question, because I've seen many times where people leave Scientology, but they, you know, as in the example you gave with freezoners, they are like well, the technology, I still believe in the technology. I just common in other cults. Or is that unique to Scientology? Is my first question. And then my second question is why do you think that is. I mean, like you said, it's a complete contradiction to realize that you're part of an abusive organization and yet still hold on to the technology as something valuable when look at what it breeds.
Speaker 2:I mean there has to be technology, a series of practices or rituals or initiations. And, yes, I can think of an example of a couple I know of who were members of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, or ISCON ISCON, I mean, come on, guys, started by Swami Akirya Bhaktivedanta Prabhupada, who I think was perfectly genuine. I think he was genuine, but he created a vicious cult because he was imposing monastic Hinduism on people who wanted to sleep more than four hours a night and didn't want to have to write a permission slip before they could have sex. You know these kind of bizarre beliefs. And this couple were deeply involved. The father was from New York, the mother was from Germany, and they became after Prabhupada died and the sect split into a number of factions, which is what tends to happen after the death of a creator, unless there's a powerful bullying figure like Brigham Young from the Mormons or David Miscavige from Scientology, you usually see factioneering. And so they couldn't take the new, new leadership. In fact, two groups in the uk, um. The leader of one of them was beheaded by his second in command, in fact, which is not a story that's often told, because he found out their second, the, the leader of the cult had um been dosing their food with lsd and that was why they were all feeling a bit strange. I should think, oh, wow, I had this incredible experience. I was meditating and my head came off. So these two people no longer felt comfortable with the organization. I met them through their daughter, ooh, 20 years later. Yeah, and they had moved to Ireland and kept practicing the Krishna consciousness form of Hinduism, which is a fairly weak form. I shouldn't say that, actually, because they now run the Hindu society in the UK. They represent the whole Hindu community, the leaders of this peculiar cult. Wow, but they absolutely still believed everything, they still meditated, they still read the Bhagavad Gita at least once a week, religiously, and stayed within it.
Speaker 2:And I think the same. It's something to do with believing. You know, I've worked. I've had the incredible privilege of working closely with Yuval Law, who has been for now 30 years, working on what is belief? Why do we become fixed in our beliefs? Why are some people fervent and other people not? How does this work? And I think he's doing a good job of refining this, but it's something that, yeah, it's absolutely been with me from the moment I left. Why did I believe this so willingly and why did I brush aside any disagreement? And I and I did that. You know, in the same way that I do it now, that I mean I've got a lot more experience now.
Speaker 2:But, um, you know, when I read Christopher Evans cults of unreason because a Scientologist, I didn't realize I wasn't meant to read these things. So I read cults of unreason and hereason, because, as a Scientologist, I didn't realize I wasn't meant to read these things. So I read Cults of Unreason and he said well, there's a point in 1965 where Hubbard becomes bored with Scientology. He goes off to Rhodesia and he's not really interested and all I had to do was look up in the tech volumes and the policy volumes how much Hubbard had produced during that time. And you go well, for somebody who wasn't interested, he was still boring out stuff for us all. He'd just gone off on a long holiday and broke into government offices and his assistant who I interviewed, morley Glazier, went to prison for stealing things on Hubbard's behalf. It's the first Guardian's office, if you like. Before it had even come into existence, he's already trying to subvert governments.
Speaker 1:So you're saying Mary Sue Hubbard was not the only person who took the sentence on behalf of Hubbard and did?
Speaker 2:time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and did time, yeah, over the years. The first one was 1952 when Hubbard had the mailing list to the Wichita Hubbard Dianetic Foundation stolen and the man who did it was a man called James Elliott and on Hubbard's letterhead at the time Hubbard wrote 31 letters to that mailing list, which I have, attacking. Don Purcell, who was the guy who was running the Dianetic Foundation, done everything he possibly could to make life easier for Ron Hubbard. You know. He settled his divorce. He got him out of the um. He was being sued for practicing medicine without a license by the New Jersey Medical Association. He got him out of that suit. He had five bankruptcies because all five foundations had gone bankrupt because he spent money like water. That was one of the phrases I heard most as I interviewed people around Hubbard. He spent money like water. There's a day when he bought a Cadillac from the bankroll in his pocket. He just does the money Now these are the profits from the research foundations and they all went bankrupt and Purcell rescued him from that.
Speaker 2:And then Hubbard said that he wanted to explore reincarnation. You've got him. He talks about it in Science of Survival published in June 51. But he's saying other people are suggesting this and you go. No, you've read Alistair Crowley and that's why you call it past lives, not reincarnation. All this stuff, the magic, magical memory. Crowley calls it and he wanted to introduce it and Purcell said no, you know the sperm dream, that's as far back as you're allowed to go. Conception, you're not allowed to go further than that. And so he stormed off to Phoenix Arizona and created Scientology because he didn't have the word Dianetics anymore.
Speaker 2:But this determination that he had you know, one of the things that surprised me in research broke from him. Nobody stayed. So James Elliott, in 52 steals a mailing list. We know Hubbard had the mailing list because he wrote these letters. But on Hubbard's letterhead from Phoenix Arizona it says James Elliott, business manager. That was the association. So Hubbard's own letterhead has this guy on and he was prosecuted for theft. So he was the same person from beginning to end. He was doing the same things.
Speaker 2:Of course, his son, nibs Hubbard, who for seven years was his deputy, before being the most harassed person in the world, probably even more than Paulette Cooper, who was harassed even more than me. But Paul Nibs, he's there for seven years and a large part of his function and he wrote about this and Helen O'Brien wrote about it too was to physically defend Ron Hubbard from the people who wanted their money back or, you know, were upset with him, and Nibs got in fights with people physically who were distressed. So yeah, I have this. Yeah, coming back to the thing is that we all have a certain degree of fervor. Now, yuval and I, we both go back to the American founder of psychology, william James, one of the founding fathers, also the founder of the British Society for Psychical Research and the American Society for Psychical Research research.
Speaker 2:If there's anybody out there who's got L Ron Hubbard's idea about a psychologist having to be, um, you know, a man from mud believer. Um, james most certainly wasn't, he was a religious man, but he put forward an idea in. He gave a series of lectures in Edinburgh 1901 and there publishes the varietiesigious Experience, which is the first book, first psychological text about religion, and he points out this amazing, simple concept which is we have feelings of knowing, we have feelings of certainty, we are sure that something is right. It's very important if you want to grow up and I fear that most of us don't, but if you want to grow up, to separate evidence from what you would like, wishing, postulating what have you? And James called it noesis he had this word for it.
Speaker 2:Now, the feelings of certainty. The example I've been giving for years of this meant decades is when I was 17. I spent a couple of hours talking with the bible basher, perfectly friendly conversation. I just I, I stopped believing in god when I was 13, just the way it was so. But I was really interested. I'd just reread the gospels and you know, friendly conversation with this guy which terrified the living daylights out of him.
Speaker 1:I'm sure it's got this effect on people sometimes.
Speaker 2:And he backed away from me, walked away two hours on the street, you know, just accosted me in the street to see if I knew the truth about Jesus, or, you know, would I let Jesus into my life or what have you? And my point of view is that I think the teachings of the Gospels, some of them, profoundly wonderful, you know. One of them is consider the tree by the fruit thereof, and I think that's a very good piece of advice. You know it's don't let somebody sell you a pear tree without tasting the pear first. And I, scientology is kind of like that. But this guy, as he backed away from me, said I don't understand the bible, but I know it's all true and there are feelings of knowing. And if we are to become adults, we need to get past this childish idea because we would like something to be. So doesn't mean it is with Scientology.
Speaker 2:A couple of years back I was talking with um Karen de la Caria and she said it. You know it's terrible. You, you say to somebody look, here are the claims that he made. You know, you can cure asthma and you can raise from the dead and all of this stuff. None of them are fulfilled. Here are the things you know.
Speaker 2:Um, when you're a communication release the lowest level of release in scientology you'll be able to communicate freely with anyone on any subject, unless, of course, they've been declared suppressive, unless you're criticizing scientology, unless it's verbal tech, unless it's all of these rules. Um, so there isn't anybody in scientology who's allowed to communicate freely with anyone, including themselves, which is where it starts getting very frightening. And karen said so you go through this with somebody and then then they'll look at you and go but didn't you have any wins? And so there we let's make a little detour. The end phenomena of nearly all scientology processes is a cognition, which is to say, which means a thought in the real world. But Hubbard, he wasn't happy with epiphany, or revelation, or realisation. There weren't enough good words for him, so he called it a cognition, which is a rather dull word really.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:You get that and you get very good indicators. Very good indicators. Now that's illustrated in the Dianetic Picture book with somebody going, yeah, like that, very good indicators. Now, another word for that is euphoria. And when we study the different states of mind that people have, one of them is euphoria, a sense of absolute well-being, or getting high that's another way of saying it that point where you're like, oh, you don't think very well in that state. Let's be honest about it. You want the cool calculation rather than the oh, wow, yeah, how much money do you want that? That kind of approach.
Speaker 1:True, and there's also not much logic in it either, like even in Scientology, being very good indicators. You don't even have to specify what it is, why it is you feel that way, allegedly Like there doesn't.
Speaker 2:In other words, there doesn't have to be a logical reason no, and and we could call it ready for plucking, right, because this is the point with your floating needle, where you will write your success story, which is to reinforce, um, how you feel. And most success stories are wow, ron, thank you so much for the technology. I just realized that Ron was right and not life-changing things, which is what they're meant to be, just feeling high. And then, of course, you're ready for the registrar so you can be sold something else. That's's. That's definitely the state when I started.
Speaker 2:If you're going to keep somebody in a mindset, you have to make them fearful, you have to make them phobic. So if you want to see if somebody's still a jehovah's witness, just say the word armageddon to them, and if they go, ah, you know that it's still in them. And years later, these things remain. So, with a Scientologist, there are so many induced phobias, yes, and I am going to touch one of them right now. I'm not going to talk about brain science, though. Okay, it's a pretty fascinating subject. I mean the idea that your brain is just a kind of switching exchange, like a telephone exchange, and that you know the 200 separate areas of the brain. Who cares about any of that? And the realization, of course, that if you harm one of those brain regions, a person will have lost competence. So they, the spirit, is no longer. You know. If um broker's area in the brain is is afflicted, you'll get broker's aphasia. You won't be able to remember the words for things. But then you know, hubbard's got it down to the idea you got these little gold discs in front of your eyes and there's just you three feet back. Yeah, oh no, so I'm, but I'm not going to do that one. The way I'm going to do is hypnotism. And if you say to anybody pretty much who's been involved in scientology it's hypnotism, they'll go oh no, it isn't. And you go run. Hubbard said, and I wrote a paper called never Believe a Hypnotist, which is a statement made in Science of Survival by Ron Hubbard.
Speaker 2:Never, that means not ever, not once, not under any circumstances believe a hypnotist. Hubbard confesses frequently to his training in hypnotism. Again and again it's in Dianetics. I was surprised when I went through it after leaving to find that he's saying and again, never believe a hypnotist. My paper has the uh, you can see me reading it if you want on my channel, but it is for people who don't need that can actually get it. Just it's on. It's on my website oh nice, I'll link.
Speaker 1:I'll link to that he?
Speaker 2:he just keeps on. He'll say, uh, hypnotism was not used at all in the development of dianetics. This is in dianetics monsoons, momo. You go a few pages further and he says the early work was done with hypnotism. He also also says, at various points it is vital, if you're going to be a good auditor, to understand hypnotism. So for anybody who is alarmed, whose phobia senses have been stimulated by the thought that Scientology is hypnotism, let's ask a question what is hypnotism?
Speaker 2:Hypnotism is a process or procedure that brings about the state of hypnosis. Nowadays the word hypnosis has been conflated and people talk about the hypnotism as being hypnosis. But hypnosis originally, when James Braid in the 1840s came up with the term, is the state that you go into. People talk about trance states, which is not necessarily helpful. They talk about altered states of consciousness Right, but I don't really like those terms. We have different states of consciousness. Which one is the one it's being altered from? There is no. The current psychological term is the default mode setting. It's what people used to call the soul or the self. It's now the default mode setting. Yeah, there is no default mode. There is no state of consciousness, consciousness, which is the right one. I don't think. The fact that we sometimes feel happy, sometimes feel sad, sometimes feel angry, sometimes feel bored, these are different states of consciousness and within this you also have a thing called the imagination. Um, for me, one of the revelations after I left Scientology was going. Imagination and memory are seen on the same screen in the mind. So what we find Scientology doing is getting into the Imaginarium.
Speaker 2:And a definition given by the Oxford Handbook of Hypnotism, which is Oxford University, is that hypnotism is guided imagination. That's all it is. So you say to somebody, let's say you've got the auditor's code, and you say never evaluate for the pre-clear person receiving this stuff, never evaluate for them again to read these books, I'm sorry. So you read this book and you now know how you're supposed to act and what you're supposed to do right. And you're then given this precision instrument, the, the e-meter and it really isn't a precision instrument tests on it.
Speaker 2:I mean a friend of mine, barry Pemberthy, who worked on mending e-meters at St Hill for years. He and the guy he worked with designed a new e-meter and it was very easy what they did. They're kind of. Why are the germanium transistors in this? They're cheap and cruddy. Why aren't we using the good I know we'll build an e-meter that uses the best possible state-of-the-art components, and they did.
Speaker 2:Um, barry eventually marketed it as the ability meter and when I took it, barry said just the, the jewel that we use for the needle to pivot on costs more than all of the components of a Mark V E-meter. Wow. So one night they go to the pub, as people do, and they've left. They finally completed their meter and they've got the same signals bifurcating into a Mark V E-meter, which is pretty much the same circuitry as the current e-meters and their ability meter, and they've got a bar recorder on them both. And they come back from the pub and to their horror they find there are twice as many readings on the Mark V e-meter and they think, oh, we must have done something wrong. So the next time they managed to restrain themselves, they didn't go to the pub and they watched as the signals went in and they realised that 50% of the reads on the Mark V were generated internally.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 2:You can go further than that, which is, of course, the famous rock slam where the needle jerks about all over the place. I can remember seeing those on an E-meter which didn't have any cans plugged in, didn't have any electrodes plugged in, so it had to be self-generated. And in 1980, silver sealing came out so they could take them back, clean the carbon dust out of them which the tone arm creates, and you could pay for it, Right you?
Speaker 1:could get your defective machine. Yeah, on a yearly basis. Yeah, no, I've seen rock slams as well. Rock slams as well, and same. I've had the experience of seeing the e-meter um have the needle rock slam without even anyone holding the cans or even any cans plugged into the device. It's definitely um defective, uh for sure. If I mean, and I I don't, I agree with what you're saying and I don't think in retrospect, retrospect in my path of you know, obviously, finding out what I do and don't believe for myself, on my own terms, like I said, I walked away from it all, but I do. I do believe in the power of belief, as you were talking about earlier. So, for someone who believes that that e-meter is saying what it is that they need to talk about, there's, there's power in that, but it's a hip, it is a hypnotic power, not an actual, uh, valuable tool no, absolutely.
Speaker 2:I've. For a long time I've said expectation, conditions, experience, and this is so easy. There's a thing called the Gansfeld effect. If you stare at something, you will start to see colors moving and things will come vague. What's actually happening? And I am now going to talk about brain science what's actually happening is there's no signal coming in and it's like you're turning up the sensitivity so that the brain starts to respond on it. You know feedback to itself and create these things.
Speaker 2:A very easy way to demonstrate this I mean, it'll happen to anybody staring at things, and I think we've got a chapter that's come out recently in an academic textbook where, for the first time, I've listed the techniques you can use to make somebody believe they're having a transcendent experience. One of them is staring at things because you'll start the process is called filling in. You'll start seeing things. The easiest way to test it on anybody you like is to sit in a completely dark, silent room and, if your brain is functioning properly, within a few minutes you'll start to have the sensation of movement around you. You'll start to hear things because your senses are turning up and up and up and up, and people will. You know Darren Brown, the most famous of hypnotists that this country has ever produced hypnotist that this country's ever produced. You can see him on video talking with a woman who grew up, born into an atheist family and grew up as an atheist. Within 10 minutes of talking to her, talking about 30, you know, within 10 minutes, she feels the presence of God. Now Derren Brown's an an atheist and he is not, and you hear what he says to her and you're going, but he hasn't said anything. What he's done is he's suggested to her things that will get her to have this experience, kind of like, um, you know, watching a horror story or something that you kind of can put that thing in.
Speaker 2:Or if you're giving a talk and this is one I have been known to do and you kind of go, I've just been in this place and these people are telling me about fleas, you know, and you just watch the audience. That's suggestion and it's not a weakness. In fact, it's a competence, it's a power. You can't be a creative person without an imagination. But it's a good idea to be able to differentiate what you have imagined, your feelings of certainty, from actual evidence, tangible things that you can measure, evidence, tangible things that you can measure. And so this relates to the idea of you know, when somebody leaves the group, why do they still believe right, and? And you left? Because you know it's a life experience, lifetime experience for you of being caught in this awful, destructive bullying and and that's the horrible thing about it, isn't it? It's just you're being bullied all the time, yeah, and just, you know, I've only once seen a severe reality adjustment and it was one of the things that prompted me to leave, and it was the former commanding officer of St Hill who was doing it, who was working for me at the time, and he gave my wife a severe reality adjustment because he hadn't sold a painting that week and I was outside the little room where he was screaming his head off at her.
Speaker 2:And the next time I saw him three days later and I was a bit trepidatious because you've been the commanding officer of St Hill. He was a hubbard aide, he was all sorts of important and I'm sort of, what was that you were doing? Because you know you were accusing her of being a suppressive person, saying she wanted to destroy me. And what was all that about? This just doesn't. Where is it written that you do this? What's the policy? And he said because if it isn't written, it isn't true, as Ron Hubbard said. And he said it's not written anywhere. And I said well, why did you do it? And he said because it's what Hubbard did to us on the ship. He was always burning somebody down and that split my link with Scientology somehow, that I kind of went. I'm not willing to follow a teacher who can't control his anger.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:And the idea that there was something purposive about this. He liked hurting people. He was a sadist, you know, and I. So if you do scientology and here's, here's a trick the best you can hope for is that you'll turn into ron hubbard. You'll become self-obsessed, selfish, cruel, inconsiderate, lacking in compassion.
Speaker 2:I, I spent, I got to know otto rose, who was on a five, only five class, 12s, trained by her, but was the only person who did ot8 before 1988, did it in 1971 and, um, he still really believed in it. You know, he was tricking all of his staff all over the world to do scientology while pretending it was something else. He was really pleased when the ability meter came out because he didn't have to put a little bit of tape over the word Hubbard on the dial of his meter because he didn't want anybody to know what he was doing. So he absolutely believed and we would have quite serious conversations and he put forward the idea that the great failing of Scientology is that it erodes compassion. Now, if there is a good in religion and I think there often is then it's that it enhances compassion.
Speaker 1:Right, agreed, and so becoming a selfish monster.
Speaker 2:If you want to do that and you've got half a million dollars, Scientology is the thing for you, Right? If you want to do that and you've got half a million dollars, Scientology is the thing for you, right?
Speaker 2:So I think that a lot of it is wanting to believe. So there's a practice called cult hopping and it shocked me when I first went to the US in 86, because I would talk with people, and I'd talk with hundreds of people one-on-one, and after what seemed to me like a reasonable conversation, it sometimes took a few years but they would go oh, it's hypnotism, it's not really a good thing, and off they would go. Oh, it's hypnotism, it's not really a good thing, and off they'd go. I get to America and I find that the people have they're not in Scientology now, they're in Avatar, which still exists out there, the absolute con artist, harry Palmer, who started it. Or, in fact, there were people who'd got into Avatar, who I met, who then got into Santeria, brazilian voodoo, but it was.
Speaker 2:It's that they had to have something, and then in the end you go well, is this because they're frightened of dying? Is this because you know this is all bound up in some set of? You know, there's got to be karma and there's got to be reincarnation, there's got to be heaven or hell, there's got to be all of the stuff going on. Because what is it we're frightened of. There's a guy called ernst becker, who he wrote a book about this many years ago which, um, my friend, uh, joe zimhart, has used in his practice helping people recover from cults for a long time, where it's like why don't you look at what you're really frightened of, rather than trying to paper over all the cracks and pretend you're going to become a superhuman being or what have you?
Speaker 2:right and that you know. I must say, in my own case, I don't believe in anything supernatural anymore, and all of the dread that I used to feel is gone. I feel perfectly at ease with being alive, very grateful to have consciousness, but as far as I'm concerned, I'm a thread in a tapestry. I'm not going to live forever, or indeed light up the sky with my name. Yeah, that's the teaching.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, you make a really good point because, on wanting to believe, in my case being that I was born into it, born into Scientology, my version of that was not wanting to believe but needing to believe because the entire life structure that I existed in depended on that belief. It's just an interesting thought and concept and I do think it's kind of makes it very clear differences between experiences of an adult getting into Scientology versus, you know, somebody being born into it.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and not just Scientology, of course. You know, if you look at a group, say, like the Plymouth Brethren extreme puritanical Christian group, extreme puritanical Christian group, so you can have generations of these people. I talk with John Collins, who was part of the Branham Pentecostalist group Again, branham, principal member of the ku klux klan um, absolute con artist. And yet people will will take that and they'll become desperate. If you're born into it, it's the way you see the world, right, and that did something that concerned me deeply. You know, in talking, yeah, we've got this term second generation. I don't really like that. Two g's or what have you. I use the term born in. You can be 17 generations. Don't really mind how many generations is. If you're born in, then it's. It's how you view the world.
Speaker 2:I grew up in an anglican christian family, say, at 13 god disappeared from my world. I didn't believe in it. I didn't. I didn't stop believing in magic and the supernatural and that kind of thing and I became a buddhist um year before I got involved with Scientology and I never viewed Scientology as a religion. That seemed to me a joke and I've been studying religion since I was a teenager. I don't see what's religious about it? I really don't. It's a pseudo-religion.
Speaker 2:So I retained Buddhist belief throughout my time in Scientology, and indeed into my 50s. So it was about 35 years that I considered myself. But of course you're Buddhist, you don't believe in God, so you know. But you do have reincarnation and all sorts of magical and supernatural beliefs in the different, some of the different sects. I was involved with Sota Zen zen, which in fact deplores magic, um, but I'm not going to say kind words about them either, because they trained the japanese military for world war ii and taught them how to get rid of their compassion by staring at things for long enough. Yeah, not a good idea really, but no it. For me it was an incredible release escape when I left scientology to go. I don't have to think down these tram lines laid down by ron hubbard anymore, right and that's a kind of being born again, if you like that.
Speaker 2:But it I then saw 80 of people at least grab the next thing. Now I'll believe in that. Now I'll believe in that, and for me it was no. I want to know what the truth is, these interesting delusions that that make us feel comfortable. I want to know what the truth is, even if it's deeply uncomfortable. I want to know what the truth is because I do understand that that's the only thing that's going to be satisfying that and so the need to believe if you've grown up in it.
Speaker 2:Have a friend who had probably the worst abuse story I've ever heard was Scientology.
Speaker 2:She was six years old when she started to be sexually preyed upon by her Scientologist stepfather and when I met her she'd actually joined the Sea Org when she was 16, had five years in the Sea Org and then done a medical degree.
Speaker 2:And the journalist Steve Kinane, who wrote the brilliant book Fair Game about the history of Scientology in Australia, which is just an exceptional piece of work Not because it's about Scientology, it's just an exceptional book and he has such humour in it and such good sense. But he was interviewing me to help him with that book at a time when I was in fact not doing anything for anybody anymore with Scientology. I would work on cases that involve children, and free of charge for the most part, and I would help serious authors and just for the record, I don't consider Janet Reitman a serious author, but she was one of the people who came to me during that time and she wouldn't listen to what was said. So her book has an error per page, 110 pages, 110 errors. She even gives the wrong year of death for hubbard at one point I did 1985 what have you?
Speaker 2:she wasn't going to listen to me.
Speaker 2:Steve canane did, and he came here from australia, the other side of the world, and pleaded with me to talk to to this woman and I said I don't do that anymore.
Speaker 2:I had, in fact, 16 years where I had nothing to do with it, other than friends who had court cases, things that involve children or authors, and I didn't want to be harassed anymore. So, with Janet Reitman, I said you know I'll work for you free of charge. I'll give you access to my archive, which is the largest private archive of scientific material outside the US, and it has all of the relevant material that you'll find in any of the US ones, including the Hubbard archive, in fact, but we won't get into how I got access to that. But I will work with you free of charge. I'll give you access to this, but with the condition that you don't mention my name to anyone. Don't tell anyone that I'm working with you. And she wrote back and said they don't harass people anymore. Oh my goodness, go and look at the websites with my name on them. I consider that a bit harassing.
Speaker 1:Absolutely.
Speaker 2:So I just wasn't, I didn't want it. I'd had 16 years solid of pretty much daily harassment and it was awful. I was on my own. I was not part of any kind of group. You know, Lawrence Waller, Shyam or Bob Penny, the brilliant Bob Penny, whose name should be seriously mentioned and underlined in red, the creator of Factnet, the publisher of Marjorie Wakefield's books and a wonderful man, and Jerry Armstrong, and you know that was about it. I was otherwise helping to defend independence, like the Institute for Research into Metapsychology and I, you know I'd come away from all of that. I stopped that in the beginning of 1996. Steve canane comes along and, um, he says, will I talk to this woman? And I'm like no, no it'll hurt you know I'll.
Speaker 2:I'll hear all of this awful stuff and it will get inside me, and I've done this with hundreds of people. I don't get paid. The satisfaction is that they years later will say, yeah, my life's been great. But most of them just disappear into the ether. You know, I don't even get Christmas cards from the 600 people that I've talked with directly over the years. It's not for that and I don't want to do it anymore. And Steve just looked at me in that way that you know a sad sheepdog can look at you. All right, I'll talk to her. When we talked I thought you know, she obviously has a medical degree, so she'll be about, I don't know, 24 or something. She was 37. And the first thing she said to me, the first significant thing she said in our first conversation, was is reality really an agreement? That's the second generation problem.
Speaker 1:Right 100%.
Speaker 2:And I said if you're the hypnotist, yes, the rest of us, no. Yep, reality exists, whether you like it or not. We are not, as Ron Hubbard says, chanting space particle position, space particle position, space particle position. I've never done that until today. Particle position, space particle position. I've never done that until today. But you know, we've known each other now for 11 years, she and I, and she's a very good friend of mine and a remarkable woman, um, to have survived what she survived and still be a decent, compassionate person, yeah, um, but that opened that up for me. It can become a resentment, that um. Among ex-ontologists, among ex-moonies, I talked with a former mooney who was really hated, steve hassan, because he chose to be a member. He wasn't born into it and you're going. No, nobody chooses you. They come along and say look, you're going to lose all your money, screw up all of your relationships, you're not going to have anywhere to live do you want to join right.
Speaker 1:Do you like to be a slave?
Speaker 2:that's not how it's solved. Nobody chooses and to create those false battles between people who've been abused, rather than looking to the abusers right, um, as of course you're doing with aftermath, to help the people who are coming out, because there's so much of this. Uh, um, did some recording with a documentary maker, uh, carlos cornier, who sadly did not. You know, the documentary wasn't finally made, but he told me about being in the sea organization in Clearwater in Florida and that he was on the rehabilitation project force.
Speaker 2:So he was being treated as absolute scum and not allowed to talk to anybody, having to run between his jobs. Follow your orders immediately, eat table scraps, no mattress to sleep on, you know, the usual religious stuff. And there was a protest, yeah, and one of the protesters spat at him that attitude of mind where people do not realise and it it's hard. But I would have talked with hubbard. I believe in redemption, you know, I'd have visited him in prison and talk with him and, as long as somebody pays my airfares when david miscavige goes to prison, if I could help him in some way, I would, you know.
Speaker 2:Um, you know, I had the privilege of meeting his father and his father loved him despite everything, and his father was a great man wonderful yes I met his brother, ronnie, when I was first in scientology. Well, he seemed pretty quite something too. Quite, quite, uh, quite a smart bloke. So, yeah, hating people and wanting to destroy them because you mistakenly believe that Scientology is the people rather than the teaching.
Speaker 1:Right, that's a good point. Yep, it's an important line to draw, awesome.
Speaker 2:Hate the sin but love the sinner. There you go.
Speaker 1:There you go Exactly. I know it's a very interesting journey to unravel all of this, um, as always, I greatly appreciate your insights, john. Um, it's always a pleasure speaking with you. I, like I said, I will link to um, your website and anything else you'd like me to include, and we will air this interview on both of our channels you'd like me to include, and we will air this interview on both of our channels.
Speaker 2:Excellent, awesome yes, I will talk to you next year yes, yes, have a great christmas or hanukkah or yule or saturday or whatever you want. Really, I mean too late for the winter solstice. I'm afraid you, you either enjoyed it or not, because there you go.
Speaker 1:Yes, and same to you, john. I appreciate it all, right until next time thanks for watching.
Speaker 3:If you'd like to help support the channel, feel free to check out the merch store link in the description. We have hail xen Xenu Xenu is my homeboy and BFG branded mouse pads, shirts, mugs, all sorts of other stuff in there that helps us to bring you new content on a regular basis. You can also pick up a copy of my book Blown for Good Behind the Iron Curtain of Scientology in hardback, kindle and audible versions as well. There's also a link to our podcast and you can get that on Apple, spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you'd like to watch another video, you can click on this link right here, or you can click on this one here, or you can click on the subscribe button right here. Thanks a lot. Lot until next time.