Brainwashing & Mind Control

In the beginning series of books and lectures, Scientology poses itself as a reasonable set of principles people can live by. From ethics to academics, the techniques and strategies for better living, or "tech" in their terms, that are taught are all reasonable things that people can generally agree on.

In most cases, these techniques actually do help people. They have good intensions and people enjoy the materials because of it. But what goes on underneath, the process of unraveling these "truths" in Scientology, is what sucks people in and traps them in their own reasoning mind.

Scientology starts out for most people as a means of self help through therapy. A common method used is the offering of free personality tests, which they go over afterwards to see how Scientology can help improve your trouble areas. They may then pay for a "therapy" session called auditing, where an auditor asks some questions about the person's life and the person responds with what they feel comfortable sharing while connected to a monitor called an e-meter that reads their physical responses.

If the auditor notices the meter jump at a certain question or for a certain response, the auditor may say that that area needs to be looked at again. The auditor will continue the process until the monitor shows an acceptable level. What this process actually does is desensitize the person to whatever problems or issues were surrounding the trouble source until it is no longer noticeable on screen.

The unfortunate part comes when both are combined to create the fundamentals of Scientology.

With the books and lectures, members are not allowed to discuss the content of Scientology with other people. Scientology strongly promotes individual truth, which means that each person is left to reason and deal with the material themselves. A technique they use is to look up in the dictionary any word that contributes to a concept or idea not being understood (a "misunderstood"). Doing so puts the blame solely on them for not understanding the word, and also places the meaning behind things squarely in the hands of individual words rather than their context or global structure. In the end, Scientologists are led to believe that whatever is contained in the materials is true and that if they do not understand or disagree, it is likely due to a misunderstood, which they should find, lookup, and reason with to accept whatever it is they are told.

And with auditing sessions, auditors don't really care about the answer except what effect is seen in the e-meter, leaving the auditee to more or less conduct therapy on themselves while revealing their innermost secrets to their auditor. Auditing is the essential step to achieving higher levels in Scientology.

The procedure for both the material and the auditing sessions really makes the process of being a Scientologist and gaining personal revelation a very solo, individual journey.