What I can’t understand is why the German government even pays attention to Scientology. Instead of banning them, thereby creating a cause célèbre for them and inviting a Falun Gong-type protest road show every time Angela Merkel goes abroad, what they should actually do is make a day-long introductory course in Scientology a requirement for first-year University students.
That’s about how old I was when I found myself walking down the street in Los Angeles one day in May, 1980. I’d just spent the winter working for the railway in northern British Columbia, was about to quit my job and go backpacking to Europe for the summer – it turned out to be a whole year – and was kinda bored waiting for life to get underway.
A woman approached me and asked if I’d like to take a personality test. I said sure, why not? I sat down at a desk out on the street and was handed a very long questionnaire. I’m pretty sure they tell everyone what they told me once the
results came in: I appear to have things pretty much under control, but if I check out the answers here, here, here and here, when things get rough I react in strange ways.
But Scientology can help! Sceptical but curious, I paid $20 to enroll in a day course.
I was led inside a building and down a corridor to a classroom. There, I met some guy who sat me down and asked me to grasp in each hand a wooden handle attached by wires to some meter.
Even though I was barely out of my teens and didn’t know my ass from a hole in the ground, I did know that wood is a poor conductor of electricity. Ah, they explained, the meter will nevertheless pick up whether or not you’re accessing your engrams.
My whatgrams?
Your engrams.
That’s what they call the buried memories of bad things that have happened to us. Through the wonders of Scientology, those memories will be liberated, they told me, and eventually I would become what they call “clear” – free of guilt, worry, phobias, all the negative energy that holds the vast majority of us back from achieving our true potential.
To recover the engrams, I was to close my eyes and recall a time when I felt angry, or anxious, or scared, or whatever he asked. Not just recall, but remember what I was seeing, hearing, touching, smelling and tasting at that time as well.
After a half-hour of this – it was really hard to do – I felt like asking him: I can go on, but why do I have to sit here like a jerk holding onto hunks of wood the whole time?
They also showed me a scratchy cartoon of two figures looking across at one another, the narrator repeating over and over that there are some people we have have affinity for, and we like them, and others we don’t have an affinity for, and we don’t like them. OK…
I don’t recall much of the rest of the day, because after that I sort of went through the motions just to see where this farce would lead, but I do remember the course leader getting into apissy argument with a colleague, which led me to believe that aside from their weird take on life, these people were not much different from the rest of us.
What they don’t tell you is that one only becomes clear if you pay enough money for the vast array of courses it would take to satisfy them that you are indeed clear. And once there, you can pay for more courses to move further up the ladder.
Used to be that once you’d paid tens of thousands of your life savings to these weirdos – and by then it was probably too late to admit to yourself what a fool you’d been – they’d introduce you to Xenu, an alien ruler of the Galactic Confederacy who, 75 million years ago,brought billions of people to Earth in spacecraft resembling Douglas DC-8 airliners, stacked them around volcanoes and blew them up with hydrogen bombs. Their souls then clustered together and stuck to the bodies of the living. The alien souls continue to do this today, and that’s what’s fucking you up.
But now this is all available on Wikipedia, so you have to wonder how they attract new customers recruits.
Because it’s such a great antidote to my Seasonal Affective Disorder, I’ve been doing a lot of silly humour stuff lately. I wasn’t going to tag this as such, but really: Scientology is such complete nonsense, such unadulterated shit, it can only be put in the category of humour, something that any sane individual can only laugh at. Even the flying spaghetti monster makes more sense.
© 2007 lettershometoyou
The banner photograph shows the town of Britannia Beach, BC, Canada, where I grew up. It's home. But I don't live there anymore.
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