A note on comments to this blog

Thanks for all the comments. I have approved all comments (~150) but two (due to heavy reference to confidential material). The purpose of this blog is to shed lights on the difference between Scientology the philosophy and the Church of Scientology.

My hope is that readers may appreciate the difference. My hope is also that Scientologists may read my blog and start opening their eyes to the human rights abuses perpetrated by the church.

Comments side-tracking the purposes of this blog will not be approved in the future. I want this blog to be effective, not a bickering ground. Just sayin’

Current Sentiments

Viewing the landscape
Nuances abound
The sky is blue
The albatross multicolored

Without intervention
And with no stuck ideas
Ever improving vision
Continually revealing new vistas

Beauty and ugliness appear
Cherishing the beauty
Discarding the ugly
Discarding a church

Looking right through facades
Not critical, simply straight
Seeing what needs to be handled
Following up with action

A church turned prison warden – suffocating freedom
When it should have been the guide
Roads are still there
But the sniper must be gone

There have been lifequakes
More every day
A slow awakening
Some daring to challenge

Bring warmth and compassion
Not the cold matter of force
Love to cuddle
Ease the anger

Pulling together
To set matters straight
The target: Oppression
Freedom must be free

Freedom should not be taken for granted
Freedom should simply be taken

In the news

My story was aired on the main news program on the national TV station (NRK, Lørdagsrevyen). A Youtube video has been posted:

To enable captions, click on the up arrow in the lower right hand corner of the video control bar. A pop-up box will appear. Click on CC.
(thanks to AnonymousNorway for Youtubing and subtitles)

Original links: Video, Article

Watch for an English version in other media – please report if you see anything.

The three major Norwegian newspapers have run my story on leaving the church:

Dagbladet, VG & Aftenposten

My positions

Massive response to me leaving the church. I get lots of communications from Scientologists in good standing, scientologists who have left the church, former scientologists, critics, anons and people who have only heard of Scientology.

I get many questions about my viewpoints on various topics. In the name of efficiency, I will answer many of the questions by stating my positions here:

• I am a Scientologist. I am not a member of the Church of Scientology.
• I have had great gains from Scientology. I am satisfied with all the service I have received. My gains are mine, and those who need to believe that nothing can be good about Scientology are free to satisfy their needs with speculations. I believe Scientology can help people improve their lives, to gain and exercise their free will.
• I believe the international church management is acting suppressive, creating an oppressive organization.
• The church management is lying to the public.
• I believe the church is digging its own grave and in doing so is bringing the Scientology philosophy in disrepute.
• I bear no grudge against the church. I see abuses. I want it handled.
• The Church has worked relentlessly to create an equal sign between itself and the Scientology philosophy. I am working to break that equal sign – to help people differentiate between the two.
• I believe that every Scientologist owe it to himself to honestly look at the current scene of Scientology and the accusations against management. Scientologists should confront opposing views and make up their own mind of what is true for themselves.
• Life is not black or white. Nothing is totally wrong or totally right. Neither claiming Scientology is perfect nor that it is all wrong is particularly sane.
• The philosophy is not perfect. It has its flaws. I pick what works. I disregard what doesn’t work. This is according to Hubbard’s own article “How to study Scientology”.
• L. Ron Hubbard was a man. He had flaws. I do not care. I care about results from applying the philosophy.
• I acknowledge that many helped in creating the philosophy. I believe in Right of Attribution.
• The Church of Scientology must either be reformed or replaced by other means to deliver Scientology technology to anyone who wants to take advantage of Scientology services.
• The original and unaltered public material by Hubbard should be made freely available and easily searchable on the Internet.
• People should be free to use the philosophy or expand upon it as they see fit.
• The church should encourage scientific research projects to document gains from applying the technology.
• People should be free to think and express their thoughts. People should be free to practice the philosophy or religion of their choice.
• Enforced disconnection is wrong.
• Enforced donations is wrong.
• Donations for no exchange is rip off.
• A Church of Scientology needs to be transparent to be viable.
• The Church of Scientology needs an effective disinfectant; Truth and Honesty™.
• I am allergic to Argumentum ad Hominem. Trying to kill an argument by discrediting the messenger is like teckling the man instead of the ball in soccer – resulting in a yellow or red card. Trying to silence a critic by character assasination is stupid. The same with trying to discredit the Scientology philosophy by pointing out flaws in L. Ron Hubbard.
• Anonymous is an interesting concept. It is valuable to have an arena where people are free to express their thoughts without the fear of repercussions. As long as one does not hurt others, I believe anonicity is a creative and positive concept.
• I believe that my self-determinism and my honor are more important than my immediate life (The Code of Honor by LRH, point #9).
• I believe in mutual respect and tolerance. My purpose is to help others. I thrive when others succeed.

My viewpoints are constantly evolving. This is part of the quest called living. My positions will be updated in the future as needed.

The system is broken… or the system is broken

Given that the tech is working, the system must be broken.

This is a conclusion that stems from talking to several Scientologist in the past week.

Let me do a simple logical breakdown of this statement:

I am an OT VIII. I have gone through all the hoops, the confessionals, the checks and exams with the very thorough quality assurance system that is used within the church. I have been deemed squeaky clean as I have passed all checkpoints up the Bridge to Total Freedom.

I have had tremendous gains along the way.

Still I am here telling the world that the system is broken. I tell about human rights abuses, lies and manipulations in the system known as the Church of Scientology.

So, either I am right about the system being broken, or I am wrong about the system being broken. If the latter is true and the church is busy discrediting me, it must be because the church thinks we have an OT VIII that has gone off the rails. If that is the case, then the system with all the checkpoints up the Bridge is broken.

Either way, the system is broken.

This logical breakdown could be represented in a simple WOIM list:

[?The tech is working as intended]; OR:
    Geir is right about the system is being broken
        The system is broken
    Geir is wrong about the system being broken
        He is an OT VIII having been thoroughly checked by the system
        The system is broken

This is the logical conundrum that Scientologists I talk to are facing and struggling with. Many are inventing reasons why I could possibly say bad things about the church – like I couldn’t really have achieved OT VIII or I must have evil intentions or anything that could make the logical conundrum go away.

Obviously there is another option – that Geir is simply wrong – and one could leave it at that. I leave it to the reader to amend the WOIM list to accommodate for this third option. In this case I believe the system would be borken 😉

Edit (based on a good comment by “As-is”): When I say “the system is broken”, it is analogous to “the car is broken”. I make no claims about the design being wrong in this post, only the the practice in the church (referred to here as “the system”).

OTs: Unite!

During my two weeks as a free Scientologist, I have had a constant flow of e-mails from Sientologists – both ex and current members.

I receive supporting e-mails from OTs who see the abounding outpoints. Several OT VIIIs write me or leave comments on my blog.

It’s time to unite and get the situation handled – for good. Time to stop the human rights violations. I ask every OT that are willing to observe and handle the abuses to write me an e-mail. I will treat each e-mail with care and confidentiality. Together we will figure out how to turn the tide of Scientology.

Let’s kick off Project Freedom.

My e-mail address: g_@_ise_ne.com (remove the underscores)

When I met David Miscavige

It was a turning point. It was the start of the end for me in the Church of Scientology. Within a few minutes of him shouting “Where’s the guy from Oslo?“, I would see the leader of my church break a whole pile of policies. Fortunately I did not fall into the trap of justifying all that I saw. I would not try to make the obvious outpoints into something normal or good. With steel enforced personal integrity from doing OT VIII, I was not excusing any observations.

Only two weeks after I attested to the highest OT level yet released, I was back aboard the Freewinds attending the annual Maiden Voyage events. Last time I attended was back in 2001. It was exciting to meet all the international executives back then. I talked to Guillaume Lesevre, Marc Yager, Mike Rinder, Janet Light and Ray Mithoff. I remember very well the excellent interview I had with the Senior C/S International. Ray was a very pleasant person. But in 2006 they were all gone. This time it was a pure Miscavige show.

It was on the night of the photo shoots where my church would show cracks in its foundation. I was standing outside the Heritage restaurant with two fellow OT VIII’s from Sweden. All the OT VIII’s were appointed OT Ambassadors and were to be photographed together with Miscavige, country by country. There were only two OT Ambassadors from Sweden and only me from the land of Santa. The swedes tried to include me in a virtual group of “Scandinavians”, but I naturally declined. The union between Sweden and Norway had been broken 101 years ago. Nope, I was representing my own country. It would be DM and me in the photo.

The swedes were first and just as they were to enter the doors to the restaurant, they said they would tell the Chairman of the Board that I should be the next Executive Director of the CoS Oslo, the Oslo Org. They had taken responsibility for Stockholm as the executives of that Org. Now they figured it was my turn to boom Olso Org. I laughed and told them to knock it off.

My turn to enter the restaurant. I couldn’t have been standing there for more than a few minutes before I could hear his voice loud and clear: “Where’s the guy from Oslo?” I responded “Here, sir“, and with no delay he was about to shake my hand when he said “So you’re the new ED of Oslo Org. Congratulations!“. I was puzzled and said “No sir, that is not my game.“. He pushed on “But what could be a better game?“. I tried to explain. He pushed on. He wanted me to accept the position right there and then. Seeing he wouldn’t get a product he simply turned around and walked out of the room. I was confused and thought “What was that?“. I had been running a recruitment company for ten years in the 1990’s. I had seen many recruitment cycles over the years. Now this must have been the worst ever seen.

During just a few minutes, the Chairman of the Board of the Religious Technology Center, a post supposedly not involved in any management of the Church of Scientology had tried to;

1. Dismiss the current ED of Oslo Org without notice – a guy he knew nothing about (during the short conversation he told me he never heard anything from Oslo and he knew nothing about what was happening there).
2. Put a guy he had never before seen on post as the new ED merely because of another person’s hint at how good it would be to recruit me.
3. Bypass something like 15 people in the command line from him to the ED of Oslo Org.

I remember thinking “This must violate a whole volume of policies from L. Ron Hubbard.” I was befuddled by this. It really made no sense that the leader of my church would be this erratic. He didn’t strike me as a competent manager. It was just weired.

When he got back 5 minutes after breaking off the conversation, he was looking sharply at me and said “I’m keeping an eye on you – you’re the next ED of Oslo Org!“. “Note that!” he demanded of one of his junior who in turn replied “I’m tracking you, sir!” as she wrote something in a notebook.

I got back to Oslo and several staff members were very excited to hear from their senior that COB had ordered me to take the ED post. They told me they expected me to follow through on his order. I was nowhere near the thought of joining staff. I had just had my stable data shaken, and I was about to find out what the rest of the ice berg looked like.

The real two year research with 1,5 hours of Internet reading and forum lurking as daily average didn’t start until the summer next year. It got priority when the Director of Special Affairs of Oslo Org asked if I could check something for him on the Internet. He told me that some journalist was about to write some fiction about David Miscavige beating his staff. It turned out it was not so fictitious after all. I checked and cross checked, fact checked and analyzed. When Tommy Davis seriously botched his rebuttal of the SP Times articles, I knew it was over for me as a member. I spent a couple of weeks to write down my conclusions. The rest is on this blog.

David Miscavige: You cannot escape honest observations.

Group think

The group think of the Church of Scientology in Oslo has cemented to a few points regarding me leaving the church.

They agree that I should have handled the wrongdoings I have written about from within the church. They also agree that I should not have gone public with my conclusions. Finally they seem to take my departure personally – they are personally hurt by this.

It makes it easier to answer these points here than to answer each individual who has agreed with the group on this. I will do a Q and A here (excuse my inside pun):

1. Q: Why didn’t you try to handle this from inside the church?
   A: It is impossible to handle the issues I see from within the church when the suppression comes from the very top. A concerned Scientologist comes to the same conclusion.
2. Q: Why did you go public with your conclusion?
   A: Partly because the Doubt formula dictates: Join or remain in or befriend the one which progresses toward the greatest good for the greatest number of dynamics and announce the fact publicly to both sides.” And also because this is the most effective way forward when my purpose is to show the public at large that Scientology is not equal to the Church of Scientology.
3. Q: Why are you doing this to us – can’t you see that so many of us are well-intentioned people working hard for the greater good?
   A: I highly commend the large majority of great people working very hard to help others with Scientology. I could compare my move out of the CoS with a person deciding to move from North Korea. He would recognize that the country is populated well north of 99% with excellent people – but the regime is suppressive, making the country an oppressive place to live.

On differentiation

In the spirit of differentiation, I would like to express my allergy towards Argumentum ad Hominem – the soccer player tackling the opponent instead of the ball. It follows church policy to discredit the source of an argument to take out the argument itself. It actually doesn’t kill the argument – it only derails the discussion. Most people will still have the argument hanging around as unanswered.

The church is now busy discrediting Marty Rathbun and Mike Rinder to kill the arguments against David Miscavige. But pointing out the flaws of any of them does not address the argument that Miscavige is beating his staff or using session data to discredit others etc. The church is likewise actively trying to discredit me to kill the data in my Doubt write-up. In soccer, the penalty for an unintentional tackle of the opponent is a free kick. An intentional tackle is a yellow card. Two yellow cards or an ugly intentional tackle leads to a red card and an early shower. If we were playing soccer now, church management would be playing poker with red cards by now.

I am impervious to Argumentum ad Hominem. Both ways.

When a critic tries to discredit L. Ron Hubbard in an effort to discredit the gains and philosophy of Scientology, I think that is equally stupid. I for once fully realize that LRH was only a human with his share of flaws. But that has no bearing for me on my own observations of the gains I see in me or others. None at all.

In fact, I believe my gains have been reinforced because I have been observing the results themselves rather than people – whether the public, Org staff, Sea Org members or LRH. My gains are mine regardless of Who’s Who.

The Good

Having covered both the bad and the ugly in previous posts, I think it is time time to cover the good. I will give the reader a summary of some of my gains in Scientology.

Many critics instantly rejects any gains in Scientology, perhaps because they do not fit with their fixed ideas and because it rocks their elected stable data. I urge any critic to read without the finger twitching on the auto-reject button.

The following list are gains I cannot logically ascribe to anything other than the Scientology services I have received:

• I was a shy nerd terrified of reading aloud at school. After two years in Scientology and with the help of the Communication Course and the Pro TRs I started and hosted the second most popular radio show in Norway called Midnight Magick (it was role-playing on the air). I am still a nerd but certainly not shy.
• I was never artistic until I started my auditing. On the OT levels creativity surfaced to the point where I found myself creating 3D digital art, music, poetry and short stories. Yes, I did role-playing before, but the surge in creativity on OT 1 to 3 was manifold in less than half a year.
• I have reached a calm plateau where emotions doesn’t hassle me. Emotions are strong, but positive. I used to be quite nervous or worrying about stuff that may happen. Now life is a game and I’m enjoying it immensely. Even the storm I am in now is an interesting game to me.
• I had a serious hit in my interest for natural sciences when I was 16. My interest for astrophysics and particle physics dropped out of view (I was living this stuff from 12 to 16). The Method 1 word clearing completely restored my interest for the sciences and more. I got geekier than ever and later I got into collecting calculators to explore the mathematics behind the natural sciences. This is now my official insanity.
• I had a pretty good personal integrity before I came into Scientology, and it grew steadily as I got up the levels of auditing. But it was OT VIII that made me unbearable in the eyes of the church (a church staff: “I am sure Geir would rather be declared suppressive than do something against his will“). I feel very much aligned with The Code of Honor – especially point #9: “Your self determinism and your honor are more important than your immediate life.“
• Before the Upper Indoc TRs I would not handle upsets in others (I would duck). After training on TRs 6-9 I handle upsets, quarrels and disputes quite effectively. I am usually very calm about it.
• I’ve regained the kid in me through Scientology 🙂

These are just a small portion of my gains with Scientology. I hope it will help shed some light on the difference between the Scientology philosophy and the gains I have had, and the Church of Scientology and its problems described in my earlier blog posts.