How I Feel about Scientology in Portland

The stunning new building for the Church of Scientology of Portland, Oregon.

Recently, you may have caught wind that Scientologists in Portland, Oregon held the grand opening of their new Church building.  It is a massive new building, gorgeous in every way, and intensely purposeful in design.   Definitely check out the photos of the building – it’s impressive.

For me – despite the fact that I live on the opposite side of the country – I feel just as proud as the local Scientologists, and just as hopeful for the future as to what this church will bring.

See, for me, Portland is not just another city, but is where I really came into my own as an individual, as an adult, and as a Scientologist.  There are so many ways that the Church of Scientology played an inextricable part of that growth, that I wanted to share at least a bit of that.

How do you quantify personal growth?

Looking back on my history in Portland (where I lived for around 9 years before heading back Eastward), my time in and around the church was punctuated by a number of fairly significant turning points in my life – all of which were helped along by staff and Scientologists around the Portland church.

• Cutting my Teeth as a Community Volunteer:  It was fitting, I think, that the Executive Director of the Portland Marathon spoke at the Grand Opening of the Church, as it was at the Portland Marathon that I did my first work as a Scientology Volunteer Minister – helping runners as they came across the finish line.

  I’ll never forget my first experience there – watching as a confident runner — thinking he was far and away the victor of the marathon – came running energetically to the finish line.  Little did he know, another runner was flying up behind him, and ended up passing him in the final 10 yards of the race.   That formerly-confident runner collapsed in a heap in my arms – his sweaty body now ice cold and feeling like a cadaver.   Getting him helped into a thermal blanket and brought back up to being functional with fluids and a Locational Assist sticks in my mind as my first real action as a community volunteer where I knew for sure I’d helped someone personally.

  It continued with other volunteer work I did with Portland’s Volunteer Ministers, helping sandbag homes and save a local catholic church during the Willamette Valley Flood of 1996.

  It really was in Portland that I decided that my life needed to be about helping others, as that’s where the real satisfaction lay.

• The Key to Life Course:  For quite some time, on my way through high school and college, I had formed a strange personal conclusion that I was unable to learn anything really technical.  I was OK as a designer, I could tinker with computers, but I was stuck making near-minimum wage doing fairly low-end work.  Then, one summer, I decided to do the Key to Life Course at the Portland Church.  The course picks apart the subject of language and one’s ability to understand things conceptually, and what all that has to do with communication.  It is, in a woefully inadequate word, incredible.  Within months after this course, I had upgraded jobs twice, putting me on a new career path as a systems engineer – a career I’ve enjoyed to this day.

• The Use of Communication in Life: On another note, related to the above, I took two different communication courses at the Church in Portland.  After the more advanced course I had come to what was, for me, a pretty life-changing realization:  That any social or life situation could be resolved using communication alone.    It seems so basic – and not only that, but obvious.  But it was something that I really knew then, for myself — that using communication, one no longer had to “hold grudges” or have to have arguments & fights, or harbor disagreements or any other variation of such.And that, in and of itself, is one of the most cherished points of stability I’ve gained as a Scientologist — that you don’t have to sit around with a problem – it can be handled with communication.

There are so many other angles and facets to why the Portland Church of Scientology is so special to me.  Part of it, also, lies in how much this was a whole-community effort spanning so many years, to bring this new building into existence.

As such, I know that there will be so many more stories like mine borne out of this new Church – which has as its mission the empowerment of others and thus the community.

An Evening in the Scientology Academy

Church of Scientology of Washington D.C., Academy Signage, originally uploaded by tadnkat.

Probably one of my favorite parts about the Scientology religion is that one of the main practices of the religion itself involves one simply studying the basic texts of the religion, and working out for oneself how it applies to one’s life.

I never know what it is I’m going to get out of it when I sit down and study. Last night, it led me to this article which I posted today. Sometimes it’s something entirely unexpected that I come to have an understanding of that ‘s just been bugging me personally. But it’s always quite personal — just me and a book, or in the case today – me and a lecture by Mr. Hubbard. I’m not being told what to think or how to think, but am able to work out for myself how some very basics concepts of life fit together.

Like I said in a question & answer post I gave to a college student – one of the things I like best about being a Scientologist is that it provides a constant & steady path for enhancement – a way to be able to learn about life and turn around and apply that to the normal problems of living. I’m nowhere near perfect as a husband, a daddy, a sys admin, or as a member of my town, but little by little, I’m trying to fix the imperfections I can see I have – and that’s pretty satisfying.

Family and my Decision to be a Scientologist

Scientology Cross on the Founding Church of Scientology, Washington, D.C.

A college anthropology student sent me a question from my Scientology Parent page, as she’s doing some study for her class on how family history & background can lead people to various religions.  As she was studying about Scientology, she was curious how my own family and significant events in my life led me to Scientology.   Her questions were thought-provoking on my part (an angle I’d not yet thought about) so I figured I’d post my answers here.

Question:  How does your family history relate to your quest for meaning in life? How has the history of your family led you to Scientology?

I touched on this when I was answering a similar question for another student here, but I’ll try to tackle both parts of that question.

My mother and father were both Scientologists at the time I was born, both of them becoming involved with the religion about 4 years prior.   Until I was about 9 years old, we lived out on a 10-acre farm in mid-coast Maine, in a town of about 600 people.    Our nearest Scientology organization was in Boston, about 4 hours to the south, so I didn’t spend much time in the Church as I was growing up.    I knew quite well that my parents were Scientologists, though.  My parents quite liberally used Scientology Assists with my sister and I, a practice that instantly made sense to me and which I found helpful.  Other various basic tenets of Scientology found their way into conversations & questions that I’d pose, but it wasn’t until I was about 7 that I think I started to choose my own way on Scientology a bit.

See, I did have a number of friends who went to local churches on Sundays.  They’d attend their Sunday school as well.  I do remember posing questions to my parents and to my friends about why they went to church.   The only reason I could seem to get anyone to tell me was because they were meant to go to church, and that they did that because they were christian.   The reasoning seemed quite circular to me at the time (go to church because you’re christian because you have to go to church) and I wasn’t really tracking – there didn’t seem to be a purpose, and it seemed to my 9-year-old logic to be a great way to waste a Sunday when you could be out building a fort in the woods.

But I did learn that when my parents went to their Scientology church, they explained to me that it was always for a purpose.  They were always there doing a specific course of study or counseling action, one which had real-world benefit and was to help them with something that could be actually articulated (even to a 9-year-old) as a tangible benefit.   I naturally asked if I could take a course too, and enrolled onto a course communication course.  At the end of that communication course, I honestly felt I had learned something – I had figured out how to communicate better, I figured out that I could get my point across clearly, I understood why people didn’t like being interrupted, and that it was enjoyable for both parties when you’d acknowledge when you understood what they said.

And for me, at that point, it did really set the bar for all religion.  For me, my expectation was that, in going to church, one should be going so as to achieve some benefit to one’s life that one actually desires oneself, and not because of some fuzzily-understood moral/social obligation to “go to church”. 

The very next course I took in Scientology had to do with L. Ron Hubbard’s study technology.  And amongst all things, one thing that I learned is that the first barrier to learning anything is the idea that you already know all about it.  And if there’s someone who already “knows it all” it’s a spunky 9-year-old.   But that one stable datum has carried me through a lot of study and efforts to really understand life around me.

An interesting illustration of this:  I recently re-took that selfsame first course in Scientology – the Success Through Communication Course, just recently – doing the course together with my wife.  And the same exact principles that taught a 9 year old the value of actually communicating with parents & friends, was able to re-teach my wife and I how to communicate to each other and to our kids.   I wrote my thoughts on that here.

Question: What were some important milestones in your personal history that led to your choice to become a Scientologist?

Well, as I said above, I think that the key milestone for me which led me to being a Scientologist was where I took my first course – one that I completed at a small Portland, Maine outreach office of the Boston Scientology church.

The other reinforcing aspect I had to this was in watching my parents after taking Scientology services.  They would sometimes go down to the Scientology religious retreat in Clearwater, Florida for counseling services and to study.  Each time, when they came back, there would be this certain, difficult-to-describe, serenity or – really - certainty about their demeanor which indicated to me that they had resolved something personally, or had overcome something personally in their study, something difficult-to-describe which left them better and happier at the end.  It was something that I knew I wanted as well – I wanted to know that I had looked into myself, and found in myself what I wanted to change, and had done what I could to make that better.

At the time, as a kid, the one thing that was real to me was that I wanted to be fast as a student, and I wanted to be happy and motivated.  So, I approached a lot of my studies in Scientology with this in mind.

But later, the more I studied, the more I could see things in myself that were ripe for improvement.  My level of responsibility, my ability to absorb & understand new subjects, my ability to choose my friends and to know when relationships with others were dragging me down – these were all things I learned that I could do something about through Scientology and weren’t just things I needed to “understand I couldn’t change” or “learn to live with”.

But I’d say that by the time I was about 11, I was completely, and by my ownvery conscious decision, a Scientologist.

And, as you can see from my writing, that’s not something I’ve regretted.     Hopefully that answers your questions.

Preserving the Authenticity of my Religion

I personally have quite a bit of respect for all great religions of the world.  I think that by and large, their founders and original proponents were quite enlightened, and had some fairly star-high goals for man – both in terms of morality and enhancing mankind’s ability to interact with one another, as well as high goals for mankind’s inherent spirituality.

Hear-say or Heresy?

There’s been an impediment that (I would say) every religion has had to deal with, however, and that is with respect to the communication and preservation of their exact religious beliefs, scriptures and teachings.  In the earlier days of man, the primary way that beliefs and customs could be passed on generation to generation was in song, in the spoken word, and in some cases – someone was bright enough to write down what it was that they heard into book form.

Unfortunately there is often a wide variance between what the founder of a religion actually said, and what the individual who hears it all verbally takes away from such an experience.

Every religion has this issue to one degree or another.  From the Bhagavad-Gita to the King James edition of the bible, so many enlightened texts have relied in whole or in part on the interpretation of another (or of committees & parliamentary bodies) on what the founder originally taught.

Now please understand, I mean positively no disrespect to any enlightened text which forms the scripture of any religion.  In all cases, having such beliefs written at all has uplifted hundreds of generations, and that can’t be discounted.

Case in Point

My reason for writing this, is I recently finished a study of the Dianetics Professional Course lectures at the Founding Church of Scientology in Washington, DC.

The Dianetics Professional Course lectures were originally known for some decades as a book called “Notes on the Lectures” – a compiled book, taken from the notes of students who were there in the fall of 1950, listening to L. Ron Hubbard give the lecture.  It was assumed for some years that the original taped recordings of the lectures were lost, so this verbal transcription – amounting to what the students understood from the lectures as they were given – were all that remained.

Then, just a few years ago, the original tapes of the lectures were located.  However, due to the fact that the tapes had been sitting in suboptimum storage for over 50 years, it was assumed that they were not going to able to be reproduced for public listening.  However, after a massive effort by Golden Era Productions, the tapes were in fact able to be restored so that all could listen to them.

A fantastic video to watch which gives the details of how much care was put into such, is available to watch on the Scientology website:

Now, I’ve had the opportunity to read the previously-issued Notes on the Lectures book nearly-back-to-back with the actual lectures that Mr. Hubbard gave, and the result is pretty horrifying.  There are some portions of the book where you can fairly well understand which lecture it is that the student note-takers were talking about, as it seemed they were tracking with the lecture.

In other places, though – especially with some of the diagrams they came up with, it seems like they either missed the point entirely, or were making up their own vision of what Mr. Hubbard was talking about.

The actual lectures give the first, best, and most amazing view of the relationship of the properties of affinity, reality (agreement) and communication, and how they relate to a person’s mental health. It’s really quite an amazing study – even if someone studying it wasn’t planning on giving someone a Dianetics session.  I’ll write more of what I got from it on my Scientology parenting site.

But my painful realization, in this case, was not only how wildly off-base the Notes on the Lectures book had been, but it gave me such a respect for entities like Religious Technology Center, and the Chairman of the Board RTC, Mr. David Miscavige, who have as their mission preserving the purity of the Scientology religion.

It made me wonder – how much of what we know of today’s world religions is actually how the founder or spiritual leader taught or said?  How much of it was faithfully passed on with fidelity, and how much was either altered completely or made up whole cloth?  That much, we’ll unfortunately never know.

Featured on the Patheos Blog about Scientology

Patheos Blog on Scientology

I’ve been recently asked to add some guest posts on the Scientology section of the quite excellent Patheos Internet community.  I’d long admired the work of the site, as the folks who run the site seem genuinely interested in fostering an environment where one can learn about the religious beliefs of others whilst offering respect and understanding of what others believe.

Most of what I’ve been posting has appeared elsewhere in some form on my Scientology Parenting site (like the one pictured above on Communication as it relates to parenting), so I’m happy to be able to help.  I definitely count among my friends, folks from all manner of different religious (and non-religious) backgrounds, so I think the goal of the site is a worthy one to support.

I Love My Local Church of Scientology

 

Founding Church of Scientology of Washington, DC, Embassy Building, Night, originally uploaded by tadnkat.

Any of you who are remotely close to me (or who follow my Flickr updates) know that I recently had my second child, a bubbly baby boy. And whilst the story of how he came into the world is a somewhat colorful one (one I’ll record for posterity on my Scientology Parent site), I just wanted to take a few seconds to just say how much I appreciate the support I’ve had from my friends – the staff at the Founding Church of Scientology in Washington, D.C.

It was heartwarming to have such a group of caring, spirited, and genuinely thoughtful folks there at the Church – who at every turn have been thinking with how to make this baby be as trouble-free and as comfortable as possible for my wife and I.

Starting with an incredible Scientology pregnancy assist program which relieved a LOT of stress for my wife, and proceeding through visits at home, and even a box sent to us at the hospital full of goodies for the new baby.

It was just so thoughtful and helpful all along, that it just makes me glad to be a part of the Scientology community here and have friends who actually care about us.

So, thanks again from my wife and I – I really love you guys.

Evaluating Information – Seeing "Both Sides" of the Story

I got a rather loaded question on my earlier post on the Evil John Sweeney which I thought deserves its own forum for discussion.

His question:

I apologize if I’ve been disrepectful, but I do have a serious question for you. As your child grows up, do you want them to restrict information to themselves and others, or would you prefer for them to evaluate all the information and decide for themselves?

Obviously a loaded question, and one I’ve been asked repeatedly on various subjects – whether I wrote something about Scientology, or about drug use, questions of whether or not marijuana is indeed a "gateway drug", questions about religion in general, etc, etc.   On another post I wrote about the dangers of the drug Ecstasy, I was getting flamed by druggies for not presenting "both sides" of the story — something I thought was absurd – sort of like my writing a post about the relative pros and cons of running a baby over with a truck.  Senseless.

Now, to answer the commentator’s  question above, I positively do not want to "restrict information" being given to my children, and of course would want them to be able to evaluate any  information for themselves.  However, I’ll go further than that – as evaluation of information is itself an important subject.  Nobody can truly operate well when they’re being force-fed information to treat as "fact".  As such, one has not only the necessity of being able to freely assimilate and evaluate information, but also in that computation it is intrinsically important for one to be able to take into account the source of the information in said evaluation.

Example: German politician exclaiming that racial integration in Germany is an "unmitigated failure".   Likely you would get a different story if you talked to a Turk living in peace in Germany.

Example: Get the opinion of a Hezbollah radical as to whether or not the Jew deserves to be in Palestine.   A Jew may have a different opinion.

Now, I’m not saying that a Hezbollah radical is incapable of stating or observing an actual fact with respect to Judaism.  But obviously, his data would be suspect with respect to bias, and one would simply need to take that into account when accepting a statement from him.

My reason for wanting to post on this topic is pretty simple.   I’ve had quite a bit of people try to tell me what to think about my religion, using data they’ve located on the Internet as their "reliable source" in terms of a "controversy" about my religious beliefs, or with respect to leadership within the Church of Scientology.

I’m unfortunately a bit sorry for some of these folks, with respect to their ability to observe the source of information and use such to compute whether or not they should believe something they’re reading.   I.e. when trying to find out about Scientology, read a Scientology book.  Don’t ask someone antagonistic about Scientology, as that will likely not give you the real story.  Fine, you can go talk to someone who hates religion and find out what they think.  I’ve done plenty of that.  Look at my comment streams.

But in the end, it’s up to me to be able to formulate my own opinion, and in the end – with my kids – it will be up to them to formulate their own opinions too.   For me, as you can read about here, I made my own decision about Scientology when I was a kid, and I’ll allow my kids to definitely do the same.

Why it’s important to be high on the Tone Scale

In having a look through Science of Survival (arguably one of my favourites of all of the Dianetics & Scientology Basics), it hit me again how utterly important it is for one, as an individual, to be high on the tone scale.

Now, first off, if you’re reading this and don’t know what the Tone Scale is, you should watch this video from the Scientology Video Channel.  It pretty well explains the basics of this.

My point in this, though, and realization from a review of Science of Survival, is really how important it is from the aspect of one’s worth to others and to society, to be high on the tone scale.

See, the tone scale is not just an index of how happy you are.  If you study the Hubbard Chart of Human Evaluation, which the Science of Survival book takes up in great detail, you’ll see that when someone is high on the tone scale, they are also much more trustworthy, much more productive, get more done, have better relationships, do what they say they’re going to do, relay communication appropriately instead of twisting it, are generally  more helpful and great people to have around.

For the last 15 years of my life, I’ve been a technician and System Administrator by trade, stopping only to be a mountain biker, a white-men-can-jump evangelist, a soccer junkie, and a husband.

Now, a system administrator, really, is one who basically make stuff work and keeps stuff working – to tear it all down to a simplicity.  He’s supposed to be able to figure out anything, fix anything, keep everything working all the time, and answer the most preposterous questions posed by end-users.   People try to tell me tech support jokes about the “my cupholder is broken” and “I can’t find the ‘any’ key” type of thing and so forth, but I have had way worse stories first-hand.

But taking just a simple system administrator function, and plot such a person on the tone scale.  If you had someone who was at 1.1 (covert hostility) on the tone scale as your system administrator, per the Hubbard Chart of Human Evaluation, you would have an utter disaster on your hands.  You’d have someone who used their administrator access to run a porno web server on company equipment, someone who would say they fixed something and actually didn’t, someone who would get a beep in the middle of the night that a server was down and then have no faintest responsibility to actually get up and handle it, and someone who would covertly be setting the entire system up to fail in a catestrophic atomic meltdown while saying he was achieving the ultimate in redundancy.

Given a worthwhile cause he’s supporting, a system administrator could be facilitating the communications and speed of interaction of an entire organization, quadrupling their productivity and making them all able to work trouble free in total harmony and coordination.

However, only someone who was an opposite of the aforementioned 1.1 would be able to achieve such a thing.

Impinged-upon constantly as a Sys Admin is by broken machinery, frustrated users, budget constraints, and the crap that’s all over the Internet, it’s easy to get enturbulated and plummet down the tone scale.

That’s precisely why it’s important for even the System Administrator – as detached as it may seem from study in a religious field — to get himself a study of the Scientology Basics, and then sit down and get enough Dianetics Auditing to raise himself up the tone scale to a place where he can achieve the purpose of his job.

How do you make someone curious?

Here’s another one from my Scientology 0-8 book — this time a scale called the “Hide to Curiosity Scale”, excerpted from another Scientology book entitled “Creation of Human Ability“.

This one I found interesting:

I’ve long heard of what’s called the “DEI Scale” which is the scale of

DESIRE

ENFORCE

INHIBIT

…which is used any time one is first talking to someone about something and you find that the first thing you hit with them is a complete inhibition of your communication alltogether.  You might keep talking, and they’ll start to push back at you, and then finally come to a point where they’ll want to speak with you.

There’s a whole bunch of Scientology technology surrounding this, but the part I found interesting was this:  On this particular scale (this is on page 190 of the book) L. Ron Hubbard mentions an expanded version of this scale which is (quoted):

Curiosity

Desire

Enforcement

Inhibition

Ownership

Protection

Hidden

Then, he goes on to say,

“And I have discovered that the road upward through this scale is communication.” — LRH

Interesting to me, to have as a stable datum, that to get someone through this scale — no matter if you’re trying to get them to marry you, or if you’re trying to sell them something, that one just has to continue to be there and communicate.

Single-Valued Logic – The Will of God?

Scientology 0-8

There is another pretty nifty scale and schematic in the Scientology 0-8 book, this one that goes over the Evolution of Logic (it’s on page 152).

Mr. Hubbard diagrams the 4 various kinds of logic there are — which are:

1. Single-valued logic

2. Two-valued logic

3. Three-valued logic

4. Infinity-valued logic

Single-valued logic is just neither right or wrong — it is “the will of God” — which in most people’s estimation is never assigned a survival value or assessment of whether or not it’s good or bad.  Like, “my wife left me – I guess that’s the way of things”.  In the preceding statement, if this is just “the way of things” or “the will of God”, one hasn’t even come up to being able to say that it sucks!

Aristotelian logic (two-valued) would have to assign a “right” or a “wrong” to it.  You could then say it sucks, but then maybe she was a cheat and you shouldn’t have married her to begin with.  How does that then help you classify the situation?

Three-valued logic (right/wrong/maybe) may work for some computing equipment, but again, putting yourself in a “maybe” about your wife leaving you is also not healthy.

This does make it clear why the infinity-valued logic that LRH describes in Dianetics is a more optimum way to think, as there is no absolute right or wrong in a situation like that.  Perhaps it was contrasurvival to have the wife leave, as the kids will now not have a mommy around, etc.  But maybe it has some good points like the lack of enturbulation from having a cheating, individuated woman around.

Anyhow – that scale does make it simpler as to why it is that it’s important to at least see what infinity-valued logic has to do with helping people improve and understand themselves.