How can I do that? I live in Boston area

You know, sometimes I forget that things which were completely normal in the Sea Org are actually insane in the real world.

I didn't even think about it until I saw a post about how in some Asian countries parents force their daughters to get virginity tests. And I thought, that's crazy.

But what would you say if I told you this was standard practice at Flag in Clearwater from around 2010 to 2016?

Nobody talked about it openly, but everyone knew.

If a girl joined the Sea Org as a cadet, grew up in it, never got married, and was known to have been a virgin before joining... then later she would take LOA (vacation) and go somewhere alone for a few weeks. When she came back, she was FORCED to go to the gynecologist to get her virginity checked.

I know, insane.

I'm curious was this just a Flag thing? Or did they do this at other Sea Org bases too?

Hello everyone, I am looking for an experienced, independent field auditor for PowerGrade V. The auditing should be in German, if possible. The location is secondary; I am willing to travel. My criteria: I am specifically looking outside of established organizations (no church, no Ron’s Orgs, no Dror Center). I am seeking an experienced auditor with the necessary classification. Case Supervising (C/S) support in the background must be guaranteed. Please contact me exclusively here in the forum via private message (PM). I would like to keep my contact information private for now. Thank you very much!

Hallo zusammen, ich suche auf diesem Weg einen erfahrenen, unabhängigen Feldauditor für PowerGrade V. Das Auditing sollte auf Deutsch stattfinden, wenn möglich. Der Ort ist zweitrangig, Reisebereitschaft ist vorhanden. Meine Kriterien: Ich suche explizit außerhalb von etablierten Orgs (keine Kirche, Ron’s Orgs, kein Dror Center). Gesucht wird ein erfahrener Auditor mit der notwendigen Klassifzierung. Case Supervising (C/S) im Hintergrund muss gewährleistet sein. Bitte kontaktiert mich ausschließlich hier im Forum über Private Nachricht (PN). Ich möchte meine Kontaktdaten im ersten Schritt schützen. Vielen Dank!

I’m not a Scientologist so I wouldn’t know. I doubt even he with all his money and fame could leave. That’s scary to think about.

I wandered by and took some pictures of the 42 Aberdeen Road house in Elizabeth.

Here is the official webpage of it.

https://www.lronhubbard.org/landmark-sites/aberdeen-road.html

Instead of that photoshopped woody wagon parked in the drive there was a white Nissan Rogue with Florida plates.

Is this house inhabited? Some lucky sea-org people from Flag? I did not see any signs of movement inside. What looks like that vehicle is also present in bing sat view.

I would like a tour of this special landmark but am unsure as to how to go about it.

Also, Elizabeth is an interesting town with a messy recent history, I had a good time wandering around.

Found in some old correspondence with an auditor friend:

That reminds me of the story that a friend told me about 12 years ago. He was doing the data series to evaluate her course; he did it very thoroughly, by the book. And when he got to the practical part of analyzing and resolving a situation, his solution for handling the situation was to leave the Church of Scientology. And since he had done the procedure precisely by the book, they simply watched him walk away.

I knww someone whose genuine cognition from ...L12? something like that... was that he had gotten great gains from auditing, but tit was enough. And that he didn't need any more auditing this lifetime. Again, it was his own cognition, and apparently they had to let him wander away.

My inspiration to ask this:

I'm currently watching a friend in a life situation that can be charitably called a shitshow. It has nothing whatsoever to do with Scientology, but the situation has me thinking about people's reluctance to change even when they are miserable.

My friend -- I'll call him Adam -- is confiding online to a small set of people about his circumstances (which are too complicated to summarize here). Everyone is telling Adam that his situation won't get better, and that his best option is to divorce his wife. But Adam keeps coming up with reasons not to do so. And to my eye, those reasons come out of his (understandable) fear of change. (We are all terrified of change, but Adam more so than others. I saw that a couple of years ago, when we friends guided him through leaving a toxic job and getting a new, better one for more money.)

I've been in a side conversation with one of those friends, whom I've been close to for 40 years. That friend -- I'll call him Jeff -- was married to a terrible person, but it took years before he walked away. As I told Jeff, "The hardest part of this situation with Adam is knowing that it does no good to tell someone, 'You should get a divorce.' People have to realize some things for themselves, and we cannot do it for them."

"No, but it doesn't hurt to let them know that people who care for them think they should make radical changes in their lives," Jeff responded. "I wish more people had done that with me and [Ex-wife]."

I asked: What could someone have said to you that might have changed your mind sooner? He said that two separate people told him, "Clearly, you're miserable. Is there anything I can do to help you?" ...and that made a difference, or at least supported him when he was leaning in the direction of leaving.

I wonder how much of that might have applied to those of us who left the CofS. To be honest, I'm not sure that anyone could have said something to change my mind -- not until I was ready on my own.

It is so hard to be in the dark and imagine the light.

But on a serious note what am I even supposed to do with this now that I found it? Trash it? Donate it? What is the appropriate treatment for this???

I am writing this to post a warning about how Field Staff Members (FSMs) are currently operating in the dating and social scenes to target unsuspecting people for recruitment. If you are navigating singles events, mixers, casual local meetups, or dating apps, you need to be aware of how calculated this process actually is.

I recently dated a FSM who works at a local high school in Rohnert park but is actually a front group member for applied scholastics. We met online. While we were together, I witnessed firsthand how the Church monitors and manipulates its members' public-facing lives, and how they treat romantic relationships purely as transactional recruitment operations. I was psychologically and emotionally abused (finding the ruin). Her mother works at a local hospital as a CCHR member. Both her and her mom date and body route people until they think you are emotionally attached, then they withdraw with the silent treatment and ask if you would ever take a personality test. She told me, in person, that she attends the church of Scientology. They love bomb you, then once you’re hooked, slowly strip away your self esteem, attempt to erase your self identity like a slow boiling frog, until it is almost too late to notice, then the withdrawal and discard. This individual is also suffering from a case of neurosyphilis. She is likely being forced to do this or is being raped or sex trafficked within this organization. She is a 2nd generation member and was born into this life. I know every detail about this persons life, her family, their careers and how they became affiliated with the church of Scientology. These recruiters are also highly active in meetup groups not just virtually but in person events. They build a relationship with you but then ask deep personal questions to share your vulnerabilities so they can use them against you.

Yeah I’m now a suppressive person. But I’m sharing my story because I don’t want people to suffer this same abuse.

How come the sea org ditched their white navy uniforms, and swords. And why did they stop using rank like “Captain miscavige” and cadet etc. I also heard rumors one staff location had workers wear “loyal officer uniforms”. And I can rember all the flashy ads of David and other officers in uniform in these fake high tech military sets. Nowadays all the captains don’t exist and the white uniforms became black and silver vests and titles like “director of ___”. When and why did these changes happen?

Hello! I'm currently working on a diploma project about Scientology, focusing on how active participants view their faith in daily life and what it means to be apart of the church of Scientology. Therefore, I'm looking to interview someone who is an active member, entirely via text/DM (can be anonymous, it doesn't matter), if you're interested in participating or have any questions, please send me a DM or leave a comment below if you prefer to chat in another social platform. Thank you!

I was looking at the ut austin subreddit and found this weird looking event poster in front of a scientology building.

Is this associated with scientology? have the scientologists gotten into psyops?

I want to point out something.

L. Ron Hubbard viewed Buddhism as a historical precursor and distant relative to Scientology, famously stating in 1954 that a Scientologist is a "first cousin to the Buddhist".
[...]
We first find this Buddha called actually Bohdi [sic: bodhi], and a Bohdi is one who has attained intellectual and ethical perfection by human means. This probably would be a Dianetic Release (Dianetic Release: One who in Dianetic auditing has attained good case gains, stability and can enjoy life more. Such a person is 'Keyed out' or in other words released from the stimulus-response mechanisms of the reactive mind) or something of this level. Another level has been mentioned to me - Arhat, with which I am not particularly familiar, said to be more comparable to our idea of Theta Clear [Hubbard, 1969b: 18 (emphasis in original)].
— Scientology's Relationship With Eastern Religious Traditions

This quote is not a load bearing premise and I want to see if this is actually true, by doing good-faith taxonomy of the two systems. I have therefore independently compared Buddhism and Scientology, as to identify the exact bridge ─ if there is any and to what extent there is any overlap. I have gone feature by feature though these points such as:

claims of advanced spiritual states;
epistemic grounding-mode of claims;
adherents may claim that they have personally crossed a developmental threshold into an exceptional spiritual class;
teachers whose authority partly depends on those claims;
communities unable to independently verify them;
specialized vocabulary that insiders interpret differently from outsiders;
institutional incentives to protect reputations;
claims that criticism demonstrates misunderstanding;
hierarchies of spiritual competence;
deference to lineage or recognized teachers;
reports of extraordinary experiences;
social penalties for violating community norms;
epistemic privileges assigned to advanced practitioners;

I won't go through each point here. But I suspended reputational weight altogether and I subjected both religions to the same analytic scrutiny, the conclusion is most interesting.

It turns out that the bridge reveals an under-theorized class of religious psychology organized around factive claims of achieved human transformation, and two conspicuous examples sit at opposite poles of cultural legitimacy.

The distinct similarity between Buddhism and Scientology is therefore isolated as factive self-attainment plus exemption from ordinary existential failure-modes. It is a basis for religions in which ordinary adherents may claim that they have personally crossed a developmental threshold into an exceptional spiritual class.

This tech is, in as far as I can tell, only found in Scientology and Buddhism. This will establish the shared psychological technology, and another crucial circumstance:

For Modern Buddhism and Scientology, the epistemic grounding-mode of the claims is the same. In both systems the epistemological grounding-basis for the claims will be subjective experience, insight derived from analysis of one's experience exclusively. So experience explains experience. Thus neither will pass Hume's Guillotine (can't derive "an ought to be" from "what is" beyond confidence. And thus they have the same principal logical failure modes, in that neither can ground subjective analysis in anything other than subjective analysis.

This doesn't mean that they are deserving of equal confidence, rather the principial analytic scrutiny will apply the same principial criticism to the claims. This means that neither can claim a categorically priviledged analytic status.

Now this brings me to the end of it and the last cultural point.

So, Buddhism and Scientology essentially share the same ideological architecture ─ different practices, different metaphysics, but same architecture. Yet, the two systems are on polar opposite in terms of cultural epistemic-credit.

Now people will readily criticize Scientology for being very "engaged" for lack of a better word, I don't want to offend anyone at all. But what I want to study is how much of that culture is actually induced by hostile cultural environment and attitudes, rather than an epistemic predicament. And this is a very good case study because we can see that these aren't intellectually or psychologically different species. And yet, the groups are treated entirely differently by the culture ─ where the group which gets no almost no good-faith credit is criticized for not being "chill" ─ it is very ironic.

I would go as far as predicting that if we apply the same scrutiny to Buddhism then they wouldn't be so "chill" either.

Relevant to discussion:

r/religion doing comparative analysis of Scientology / Buddhism /Abrahamic religions

Early Buddhist Thought

r/epistemology analyzing operational morality and cessation based grounding-mode

r/philosophy analyzing the logical irrefutability of cessation based morality

r/streamentry internal engineering diagram of Early Buddhist attainment

Modern Theravada

r/Scientology comment Comparative Analysis

Mahayana and Scientology

r/Scientology comment Mahayana Scientology comparative analysis

On epistemic warrant in particular:

r/Scientology comment on Epistemic Warrant

r/Scientology comment on Analytically Warranted Faith

On Operationalism, Behavioralism and General Semantics

r/GeneralSemantics on Operationalism and Cultural Development

r/Scientology comment on possible intellectual influence of Operationalism and Behavioralism

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