http://www.tampabay.com/news/religion/federal-judge-suspends-state-judgment-against-lawyer-in-dispute-with/1119444

I’ll be in LA this weekend – looking forward to seeing all my friends down there.

Thomas Paine

Abraham Lincoln has been quoted as saying “I never tire of reading Tom Paine.”

Neither do I. Paine’s The Age of Reason was of tremendous help to me in moving beyond fixed, negative patterns of thought instilled by the church of Scientology (Miscavology).

I believe the following passage from Age of Reason describes the mindset that is leading church followers down the dwindling moral spiral:

I do not mean by this declaration to condemn those who believe otherwise; they have the same right to their belief as I have to mine. But it is necessary to happiness of man, that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists of professing to believe what he does not believe.

It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime. He takes up the trade of a priest for the sake of gain, and, in order to qualify himself for that trade, he begins with a perjury. Can we conceive anything more destructive to morality than this?

Here is another passage that exposes the dark historical precedence for practices Miscavige has institutionalized in order to capitalize on people’s consciences (realize, this was written more than 200 years ago):

The Idea, always dangerous to Society as it is derogatory to the Almighty,–that priests could forgive sins,– though it seemed to exist no longer, had blunted the feelings of humanity, and callously prepared men for the commission of all crimes.

Paine describes four tricks traditionally used by organized religion in order to control and corrupt people – Mystery, Miracle, Prophecy, and Revelation.  I’ll open for discussion how revelation has been used to herd Scientologists in a later post. But, I’ll complete this book recommendation with a passage on the initial three.  I think you might recognize these devices continually employed in the church of Scientology – most particularly and directly by Miscavige during the events that most occupy his time, public events.

Upon the whole, Mystery, Miracle, and Prophecy, are appendages that belong to fabulous and not to true religion. They are the means by which so many Lo heres! And Lo theres! have been spread about the world and religion been made into a trade. The success of one imposter gave encouragement to another, and the quieting salvo of doing some good by keeping up a pious fraud protected them from remorse.

24 years ago, I agreed to a billion year contract with the Sea Organization. I knew what I thought this meant: I made my decision out of a quest to help my fellow man, help the planet.

I committed my all to this agreement and the contract I signed. For 24 years I worked; I endeavored to assist this group. I made decisions and took actions to forward this group.

Although many times I was troubled I continued on this course.

For me on a personal level this was a wretched existence and one I wish I never did. The group known as the Sea Org was founded by L. Ron Hubbard but is now run by David Miscavige. Although the group professes a humitarian mission to help mankind, in reality it has become and is a ravenous group that takes and then takes more. Like a cloud of locusts it eats and feeds and will leave nothing.

Pity those that remain trapped inside, subjected to the dictates of a madman.

No spirit of goodness or love is allowed; goodness and love does not exist in this group.

However the most beautiful people I have met abound and not because of this group but because they are.

Dan Koon, in his article entitled “A New Model for Scientology” is right — where it can be practised in a self-determined fashion and where the wins and gains and technology are free.

Steve Hall is right in his article “Connecting the Dots” — damn the villain and let’s all enjoy life and make it an even better world and use the technology to help whoever and wherever we can.

In April 1986 I joined on, I owed that group nothing then and I owe them nothing now.

I am my own person, I exist, I create, I live independant of that association.

Moving into the future with all of you.

Chris Guider

I spent five wonderful days with my dear friends Peter and Carrie Cook, who hosted a “Mini-Woodstock” on their property in northern Vermont. It was a reunion of sorts, with over a dozen former Int Base staff joining Peter and Carrie for a long weekend of great music, good food, and touristing it around Vermont. Now I’m back for a few days before heading down to LA for Labor Day Weekend.

Here’s a picture you might get a kick out of – some of the Vermont crowd with our favorite flower – Goldenrod!

First, Miscavige was in the process of  busting Marc Yager off CO CMO INT/WDC Chairman and spent three years attempting to turn the man into a mouse.

Second, Miscavige had nearly all those who remained in Int Managment working on an evolution as massive in content and as destructive in result as Golden Age of Tech.  In his Stalinesque style Miscavige dubbed it New Era of Management. Like GAT, NEM consisted of endless binders of  Miscavige written and/or directed and approved material. Just as GAT forever altered and replaced LRH tech, NEM forever altered and buried LRH admin.

Miscavige had teams of key executives for Upper Middle Management (Int Liaison Office which he had previously dubbed Flag Command Bureaux which was originally back in the day of LRH called the Flag Bureau) and for every Continental management office up at Int Base for months preparing to fire to implement his grand NEM scheme in one, sudden, implant-like fashion.   Those involved in that evolution are well represented here and I am sure can fill in some of the details of their engramic several month Q and A “briefing” period.  If the “trainees” or “Missionaires in briefing” learned anything it was these two lessons that were implanted with an atomic branding iron:

a)  Miscavige and his NEM issues were senior to LRH and his virtual books (in the form of Flag Orders and Central Bureau Orders and OEC) on management.

b) Scientology did not exist at the International Scientology Headquarters.

 Third, the international tech heirarchy was effectively made leaderless by the busting of Ray Mithoff from the post of Senior C/S Int.  Oh,he retained the title, but he was made a mere figurehead (just as Heber had been made as President CSI and Guillaume as ED Int as early as the eighties).  Dan Koon was put on as Snr C/S Int Chief – administrative head of the Snr CS Int Office. Once DM effectively dead agented Ray with all Int tech terminals (including his own Snr CS Int office) Dan was posted elsewhere – and Ray from thereon out was nothing more than a figurehead (Note: Dan had no knowledge and played no part in the Miscavige Op – Dan is the last person in the world who would engage in denigrating a person into oblivion).

Next Miscavige appointed Mark Ingber as CO CMO INT/WDC Chairman.  Through continual barrages of verbal cross orders to not only LRH, but even to his own NEM, plus beatings and invalidation, Miscavige soon destroyed Ingber. 

Miscavige replaced Ingber with Jenny Linsen Devocht.  Through the same methods that he had destroyed Yager and Ingber, sans the beatings, he destroyed Jenny.

Miscavige replaced Linsen with Wendell Reynolds of Int Finance Dictator fame.  But Wendell soon went the route of the other who preceeded him.

By the time Miscavige had made mincemeat of that troika, Yager had graduated the RPF (1999) and he was thrown back into the fire.  By then,  CMO Int and Exec Strata were choked by so many restrictions (such as no evals allowed; no programs that did not push NEM and Golden Age of Tech allowed) that International Management had become a mere functionless title.  To ensure no management would emanate from Int, Miscavige assigned the entire Int Base lower conditions from which they never were allowed to emerge.  Yager was declared SP, as were a number of Interntional managers, as were Mike Rinder (while WDC OSA) and I (while on the post of IG), as were a number of other Int base execs; all ordered by Miscavige, all while we continued to occupy our posts. 

By the year 2000, Scientology Management was dead.

The proof of the pudding is the current scene.  Here it is in a nutshell:

Marc Yager is still holds the title CO CMO INT/WDC Chairman.  But there is no CMO INT nor WDC, with the exception of Angie Blankenship who holds WDC Ideal Orgs. But Angie doesn’t answer to Yager; she reports and answers to Miscavige.  Yager has been reduced to being a preps boy (culling pc folders and ethics folders at Int to find lurid details on the likes of us) for Dan Sherman (LRH Biographer) to write “freedom mags” and the myriad anti-Marty sites OSA has its operatives pretend spontaneously appear.

Yager does not even report to Miscavige, because Miscavige cannot look at him without leaping at him and pummeling him to a pulp every time he is in his sight. So, Jenny Linsen (whose post title is D/CO Production CMO INT) actually forwards and all communication between Miscavige and her nominal senior Yager.

Miscavige bypasses whatever is left between Int Liaison Office (Upper Middle Management) and Continental Liaison Offices and orgs by directly running every CO CMO Cont.  That is right, he receives weekly reports routed directly to COB RTC from each CO CMO.  The reports report on stats for each continent and org (as in Ship, FSO, PAC) where each CMO unit is located.  Miscavige then whips out his dictaphone and rattles off weekly orders to the CO CMO’s on a purely stimulus-response basis.  And that is what he calls management. Anyone with the slightest training or understanding of LRH FO and CBO and HCOPL tech recognizes that I do not exagerate when I say that management has long since died, and there is no such thing as management any more.  There may be bodies at the CSI Management building at Hollywood and Ivar, and there may be bodies in CLOS, but per HCO PL Danger Conditions, Why Organizations Stay Small – with such long term and thorough bypass, they do not in fact exist.

To exacerbate matters Miscavige utterly bypasses Snr CS Int Office, Tech and Qual bureaus Int and Cont, and even tech heirarchies of orgs such a FSSO and FSO and AOs by virtue of running all tech matters through his RTC rep NW.  They too write weekly reports to Miscavige and he replies to each one – when he is not too busy skiing, scuba diving, or attending premieres with celebrity pals.  Most of those reps have never audited a single grade on another person, nor even C/S’d a person up a single grade or level of the Bridge.

RTC at Int is reduced to nothing but service facilities for Miscavige – communicators, secretaries, mail clerks, stewards, maids, chefs, etc – and Warren McShane who handles “Legal”.   Incidentally, some wonder why OSA has become a toothless shadow of a network.  That too is answered by HCO PL, Danger Conditions.  DM and Warren have bypassed them, directly hiring and running an outside intelligence apparatus to “monitor” my “activities.”   And they are incompetent beyond belief.  Meanwhile whenever OSA does through blood, sweat and tears establish an intelligence line in my general vicinity, Miscavige blows it by ordering some knee-jerk (completely stimulus-response)  ”expose” on Marty and Mike; expose’s that are so thoroughly chock-full of embellishment and lies they have zero impact.   And so,  the last thing Miscavige used to be able to rely upon (a network that at least could make people afraid of him) has also been decimated by Miscavige himself.

By the way, since the late nineties the one corporate and ecclesiastical post that could anything about this state of affairs technically has been usurped also by Miscavige. The CO Church of Spiritual Technology (CST, which holds an option to shut down and take over RTC’s function in the event of this level of departure from RTC purpose and function) Russ Bellin had been Miscavige’s project manager for such important matters as the Mark VIII E-meter that has been rotting in a warehouse for five years (and will likely remain there forever), and building unbelievably expensive CD and transcript productions lines (which are largely superfluous in this day of downloadable audio and video).  That all ended a couple of years ago when Miscavige (as is his habit) decided everything Russ did (that had been heavily promoted by Miscavige as being the only competent products on his lines) were all Overt Products (even though Miscavige publicly basks in the glory of them to this day).  Miscavige busted Russ to Int Finance Director, after he found out the previous IFD (Wendell Reynolds) had secretly financed the blow of an Int Staff member (God bless Wendell after all).

Russ got tired of  two years in the hole and this past spring made a break for it.   Unfortunately, his foot kicked the fence on his way over, and he was quickly apprehended and returned by Gold Security.

Miscavige has kept CST in check by a loophole he found in LRH’s estate planning that sought to guard against Miscavige’s type of destrcutive dictatorship.  That is, CST officers and directors must remain in good standing with the mother church CSI in order to qualify for remaining in CST.  DM controls CSI with an iron fist, and the moment anyone in CST shows the slightest sign of stepping out of line, why, Miscavige simply arranges their dismissal from CST into a lower corporation like CSI – as he did with Bellin.

Perhaps all this sheds more light on why I have no hesitancy in pronouncing the church’s death.

This true state of affairs is why I have been directing my attention more and more towards the future.

Worrying about the church, or hoping for its salvage, is a collossal waste of time and energy.

It is dead.

Viktor Fankl survived several Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz.                

Only one out of twenty-eight so imprisoned survived the ordeal.  Frankl closely observed for the common denominator of those few who did survive. He did not find a single physical, physiological, cultural, or religious factor in common. 

Instead, he discovered that those with a strong enough purpose (he calls it a meaning) to carry out were the ones who made it.  There was no common purpose shared among them all.  There was not even a  predominant commonality of purpose.  Some simply  had a purpose to see a loved one again.  Some felt work they had begun prior to incarceration was so important they found a way to endure what for others was certain death.  Frankl himself fell into the latter category, and it so happened that the work he wanted to complete paralleled the observations he wrote about.

I recommend the book for former SO members who survived long-term oppressive conditions; or those wanting to understand what they were subjected to. 

Anyone who survived the Hole and other similar Miscavige tortures will appreciate this short passage demonstrating the sadistic Nazi concentration camp guard menality, and its effects:

Beatings occurred on the slightest provocation, sometimes for no reason at all…

…The most painful part of beatings is the insult which they imply…

…Then he began: “You pig, I have been watching you the whole time! I’ll teach you to work, yet! Wait till you dig dirt with your teeth — you’ll die like an animal!  In two days I’ll finish you off!  You’ve never done a stroke of work in your life. What were you, swine? A businessman?”  I was past caring. But I had to take his threat of killing me seriously, so I straightened up and looked him directly in the eye. “I was a doctor — a specialist.” 

“What?  A doctor?  I bet you got a lot of money out of people.”

“As it happens, I did most of my work for no money at all, in clinics for the poor.”  But, now I had said too much.  He threw himself on me and knocked me down, shouting like a madman. I can no longer remember  what he shouted.

Frankl even aptly answers the oft-repeated questions we hear about former senior executives, such as “why don’t they arise and revolt?”

The prisoner who had lost faith in the future — his future — was doomed. With his loss of belief in the future, he also lost his spiritual hold; he let himself decline and became subject to mental and physical decay.

I recommend the book to anyone feeling he or she lacks a driving, meaningful purpose in life. 

Frankl recommends that everyone find their own meaning.  It is a life giving process that rises folk above the dwindling sprial of do-nothing boredom, monotony, and the deathly lower harmonic of apathy.   Frankl stresses that the meaning-finding process can be assisted, but not directed.  Every individual must find for himself or herself that activity which fullfills his or her destiny. 

There is nothing in the world, I venture to say, tht would so effectively help one to survive even the worst conditions as the knowledge there is a meaning in one’s life.  There is much wisdom in the words of Nietzsche: ‘He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.‘

I could not help noting the parallels between Frankl’s observations and some fundamental prinicples L Ron Hubbard wrote of.   So much so that I would suggest any highly trained auditor could easily come to the conclusion Hubbard had to have read and incorporated Frankl, particularly when one considers Frankl’s book was  first published in 1946.

Today, on the day Moving On Up A Little Higher hit two million visits, I happened to receive the following good news from our friends in Italy. Incidentally, it took just over nine months in service to reach the first million visits, and just under five months to reach the second million. Realize in reading the Italian report that Italy is already the third most active country on this original English language blog, behind only Australia and the United States. And now Gary Baldi informs us his Italian language blog – which largely reflects this one, while also creating an expanding independent Italian field – is in a several month affluence. In the face of suppression, flourish and prosper indeed.

The following two pieces speak volumes as to the health and direction of C of M in Los Angeles.

The first piece indicates that apparently the Valley Org has for some time now out-sourced the subject of Ethics. Instead of putting an Introduction to Scientology Ethics book in folks hands, or even having them do Ethics light with, say, a div 6 course in Ethics, Valley is promoting public to instead pay for some outside consultant to tell them what Ethics is about.

The second piece is a natural progression from the first. Once you stop using books as the first line of dissemination, stop delivering courses, and start promoting some ESTesque interpretations of LRH tech, well you then dwindle down into the types of corny shifts the following piece evidences.