Krishnamurti
and Me

Part 3 - Time in Scientology

        It was examination time again, University ones this time, and I decided to take one day off a week from my intensive study and do nothing. I decided for Saturday, just to "test" out the idea contained in the Sabbath, in which you just don't do anything special (my adapted interpretation, of course). I went in town and walked idly around. It is then that I was approached by a young man who proposed me to pass some psychological test. I accepted without after thoughts because I was used to it. In a small University town, and in a psychological section, you are regularly asked to serve as guinea pigs for all kinds of experiments (memory, etc). The young man, however, wasn't a psychology student. He was a Scientologist.

        My interest in Scientology (Scn) got quickly awakened. I already was looking around to all kinds of spiritual groups, and this one didn't seem as odd as the other ones. It believed in reincarnation and OBEs, like I did. It didn't have some kind of strange meditation practices, but what seemed like a scientific technique, and it also offered me something the others didn't seem to offer: a meaningful mission in life and society, something useful to do. That appealed strongly to me, even more so since I wasn't really interested in any kind of existing job types. and found my studies boring and very limited. It didn't take long before I dropped my studies and joined the young and cheerful local team.

        That's where the story I recount in my other web page starts, moreover. I recount how I got involved in Scn and eventually got out from it. How I got involved in what I now call the "cultic mindset" and how I evolved out from it.

        One of the reasons that attracted me initially to Scn was that it seemed to offer a concrete method to effectively achieve spiritual powers and spiritual states. Theosophy was very nice, but seemed to end in an dead-end. Once you have assimilated the basic elements of its philosophy, what do you *do*? Scn seemed to offer something valuable and effective to do, a potent method to exteriorize and travel around without body. I figured that once I would be able to do that, I would also be able to travel to places like Tibetan monasteries and expand my knowledge of spiritual issues. Part of the reason I thought that Scn effectively achieve these result is because the framework is such that this is constantly and affirmatively repeated, and the original appearance of a religious science, or a scientific religion, gives this impression.

        What I found out, however, was that while there are effectively very strong "techniques" in which you effectively exteriorize, or other techniques that creates very strong spiritual perceptions and states of being, or even effective liberation from emotional distresses, eventually, at the end of the day, it doesn't achieve what it promises. There is always something missing, and, even though your consciousness has been stretched somewhat, you basically remain the same ignorant self you are. Even worse, the cultic mindset of the combined effect of the leader's influence and the group's dynamic get onto you and you run the risk of becoming fanaticized, and many did become fanaticized, just like I was.

        It took me a while, and I guess some luck too, to free myself from the conditioning and limitation I allowed myself to drown into while in the group, but I also learned quite a few things from it, both from the experience and from freeing myself from the experience. I probably learned about as much as I did in the previous years.

        How could I become involved when I was already knowledgeable about K's teachings, you ask? As a matter of fact, believe it or not, K's teaching actually helped me to get involved. It helped me to resolve the theoretical and theological conflict and contradictions between Theosophy and Scientology. K seemed to have himself ridden of the limitations of Theosophy, and, furthermore, I found some striking similarities between some of his teachings and some of Scn's one.

        The similarity was especially the notion that in Scn is called "as-is". This is, I believe, the central notion of Scn, around which its whole technology is built. It is based on the notion, to put it crudely, that what you "view" exactly disappears. This is the reason why the Scn "auditing" sessions bring the patient to view exactly the traumatic incidents of his past, including incident from his past lives. The claim to be effectively able to view one's past lives was, BTW, another of those things that initially attracted me.

        The notion of "as-is" is linked to the other Scn notion that "what you resist, you become". In other words, that resistance was really what was maintaining an undesirable condition in place. This could be an emotional condition, in which you unconsciously resist to a negative picture, for example, but also spiritual, in which you unconsciously resist to things that maintains your awareness level down.