I’m reading the book Scientology, a New Slant on Life, for the first time in 30 years. This book, by L. Ron Hubbard, was recently re-released, with typographical and other errors cleaned up; all the basic books of Scientology were gone through carefully, compared closely against the original author’s manuscripts so as to make them exactly correct as they were originally written, and reissued. It was big news for Scientologists. Over the years many typographical errors had crept into the published books. I had found some differences myself between versions of the books published in England and those published in the US, so it was good to see these resolved. I’ve read through most of the newly released books and I’m just finishing up the last ones.

This particular book is full of useful info. In the chapter about handling confusions of the workaday world (a phrase which invokes in me some nostalgia for the simplicity of the 1950′s work culture in America), Hubbard says:

Confusion is uncertainty. Confusion is stupidity. Confusion is insecurity. When you think of uncertainty, stupidity and insecurity, think of confusion and you’ll have it down pat.

What, then is certainty? Lack of confusion. What, then is intelligence? Ability to handle confusion. What, then, is security? The ability to go through or around or to bring order to confusion. Certainty, intelligence and security are lack of or ability to handle confusion.

He also gives the handling for confusion, which is very simple.

I’ve never looked at intelligence that way, as being the “ability to handle confusion.”

———

When I was young, my step-father was a man of above-average intelligence, who prided himself on having gone to college on the GI Bill after serving in Korea. He practically worshiped the books he had collected; a small library of texts on all manner of his interests, mostly classics of English literature, but he was also an amateur geologist so had various college-level texts on that subject. He subscribed to Scientific American and struggled through its articles every month when it arrived. He had confused, to some degree, education with intelligence. He had moderate amounts of both.

Looking at him with this new definition of intelligence, I’d have to say he was also pretty good at handling confusions.

When I was about 12, on his day off, he brought me with him to the plywood factory where he was a foreman, and I noticed that there was a very large puddle of water on one of the big concrete work floors where the men were walking back and forth, and where the forklift was stacking up plywood. It was a safety hazard to have all that water where it wasn’t supposed to be. This puddle had been around for months; it wasn’t drying up or going away. I heard him talking about it with the on-duty foreman. So I spent a few minutes while he was busy, simply looking at the many pipes that ran up and over the workspace. Some pipes held live steam, some held hot or cold water, some were for the fire-suppression sprinklers, and some were electrical conduits that just encased wires to protect them. It was all very dirty, with years of accumulated sawdust and grime covering pretty much everything. It was a jumble and not easy to trace what was what. (On a ship it would have been color-coded with arrows painted to indicate direction of flow, but this was a 1960′s era plywood plant, which had been built “fast and dirty”.)

The puddle centered around a water faucet that didn’t drip most of the time, but would occasionally gush water. The faucet appeared to NOT be leaking. If you turned the main water valve on, and turned that faucet off, nothing came out. If you turned it on, and the main water valve for the system was also turned on, water would run out of it. I’d seen my step-father standing there with the other foremen in front of that faucet, scratching their heads, trying to trace the pipes and see where the leak was coming from. The problem was that when the MAIN water valve was turned OFF, it would sometimes gush water from it anyway, for no apparent reason.

It was a confusion.

The pipe for that faucet went up and over a wall, and came down outside some distance away where there was another faucet the workmen used when they went off-shift to clean their boots and gloves and wash up before going home. I went outside and opened that faucet, and it started sucking air into it. Ah, the pipe was acting as siphon between the two faucets!

I went back inside and sure enough, the main water valve was turned off, but the inside faucet was turned on and was now leaking. I went back outside and shut off the outer faucet. Went back inside and observed — no leak. As long as the faucet outside was turned off, no air could get into the system and it didn’t let the water in the siphon run down into the shop floor. Every day, when the workmen were all outside cleaning up at end of shift, they turned on the main water valve, then the outside faucet, which filled the pipe again.

I explained what I had figured out to my step-dad, who ran the same checks on the pipes himself, smacked his forehead, and explained it to the other foreman. If they just kept both faucets turned off when not actually being used, it would never leak.

That incident at the plywood plant points up the strained relationship with my step-dad. He saw the books I read; I devoured his own library, and the local County library, skipped a grade in school, and had the highest Minnesota Multiphasic standardized tests of any kid in Oregon.

He wasn’t jealous or envious of his step-son’s intelligence, but he was very wary of it. I think it made him uncomfortable; he had been used to being the brightest light in the room.

If he’d been just a little brighter, he’d have figured out how to help me graduate from high school at age 14, and how to get into a good college. But we were both stumped by that one. The educational system at that time didn’t seem to allow it.

Not that being intelligent got me any favors at that tender age — I was bullied mercilessly at school, being a year younger than everyone else; the result of skipping a grade. The teachers and principal also rode me hard, figuring anything less than perfect scores meant I was slacking off, which was to some degree true.

When young, I was a sponge — I could read practically anything, soak up any material they threw at me and spit it back at them on any test. It helped that I had an eidetic memory and could “see” with my mind’s eye the text on any pages I’d studied. I lost that ability for a while when they forced a primitive form of “speed reading” on me, but I got it back later.

But that wasn’t what made me FEEL intelligent — it was the ability to handle confusion. Which was an ability I had in abundance at that young age, but which ability the rest of my education only dulled with false data, through creating uncertainty, and by instilling insecurity.

By the end of one year of college I had gone from someone with complete certainty on what I knew (and didn’t know) and near-perfect SAT scores, to being someone spinning with confusion. It took a couple of years to get my certainty back, but I did. I spent the next year as a ship’s carpenter, making things with my hands. It was honest work, and helped me focus on the real world.

For me, my purpose in getting an education was to be able to handle the confusions of life. And for me, college merely created more confusions — it didn’t help at all with the basic problems of a serious young man: how to find the right mate, how to raise a family, how to succeed at a job, or even more basic, how to actually talk to people. To find answers to those questions, to gain the skills so I could handle those confusions, I had to look elsewhere.

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Today is the 61st anniversary of the publication of Dianetics, the Modern Science of Mental Health, by L. Ron Hubbard.

When I first picked up a copy of Dianetics on display at the Greyhound Bus terminal in Medford, Oregon, in the summer of 1968, I read the back panel of the book and rejected outright its claims of that it could bring sanity to those using its techniques. My exact thought at the time was: “If what this book claims is true, then the world would be different than what I have seen. There would be lots of sane, able people somewhere, and I am pretty sure there aren’t any.” I put the book back on the rack and bought Dune, by Frank Herbert, instead. I devoured that book on the three-day bus trip to El Paso, Texas.

I was fleeing to my sister’s residence in the Texas wastes just this side of the US border near Socorro, Mexico. I say “fleeing” because I could no longer stand to watch my mother destroying her 5th marriage (one of her best) with alcohol and a very poor choice of friends. I recognized that she was dramatizing something — her decisions and actions seemed to come from a kind of insanity that manifested when she was drinking or under any pressure. My current step-father was pressuring her to have another (6th) child so he would have a son of his own, and she had health problems that made her very hesitant to do so. She figured it would kill her, because her 5th child nearly did. I refused to be my stepfather’s “son” (or call him “Dad”) out of loyalty to the memory of my own dead father, and because my stepfather didn’t seem to care about any of his stepchildren, including me. I think every time I called him “Bill” it drove a spike in our relationship. Once I departed on that bus at 16, I never spoke to him again.

Bill couldn’t stand to see my mom being a bartender or waiting tables. It presented as some kind of failure on his part to him and he railed in vain to keep her in the house watching his baby girl day and night. Mom was driven to “have fun” as she put it, and wanted money for her cigarettes and beer, both of which Bill was dead against. His penny-pinching created a rift between them — it rankled her that he never cut back on his magazine subscriptions or buying his own jazz LP albums. She bore a grudge to her dying day.

What started out as a lovey-dovey perpetual honeymoon between them became a running series of arguments, fists put through the sheet-rock walls, broken-down doors, police at the door, and restraining orders. Right after I left, Bill moved back in with his parents. I lost track of my mom and younger sisters for a couple of years. When I next saw her, she was working on husband number six (Buster), and that ended with her escaping from his drunken shooting spree (he shot and killed their dog) through the snow with my younger sisters in the dead of night to a neighbor’s house, with her house burning to the ground behind her. Not well, in other words.

So, I learned that people really do dramatize (put into words and actions) their own insanities. And they bring out the insanity of others through their own dramatizations.

It wasn’t until I actually picked up a copy of Dianetics and read it in 1973, that I learned what it was they were dramatizing in thought and deed.

Put simply: Words. Words (and other sounds and actions) received and recorded while one is in pain and to some degree unconscious.

Dianetics doesn’t just explain how it happens, it gives workable techniques for getting rid of the insanities one accumulates over the course of a long and eventful life.

I’ve received a lot of Dianetics counseling over the years. I’ve seen it work on me and others to bring sanity and happiness where there was drama and misery. Why DOES someone get married and divorced again and again? Why DOES someone take refuge in a bottle? Why DOES someone marry a lowlife home-wrecking insane criminal? Why do people act against their own self-interest, and that of their family or group?

I found answers to those and many more questions in the book. I re-read it again recently and realized once again what a brilliant book it is.

The world HAS changed (for me and many others) because of Dianetics. That brash know-it-all 16-year old who rejected it out-of-hand came to understand that Dianetics works on one person at a time, not on “humanity”, but one-on-one. Finding the sources of insanity takes time and patience and a skilled counselor, but the end result makes a real difference in one’s outlook and future activity. Just reading the book makes a difference.

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I just finished reading “All Clear” by Connie Willis, which is some brilliant science fiction. It’s about some time travelers stuck in London during the Blitz (1940-41) and unable to return to their own time.

Toward the end of the book, she has a lovely paragraph about people doing the thing that they want to do, despite the cost to them for doing it:

“To do something for someone or something you loved–England or Shakespeare or a dog or the Hodbins or history–wasn’t a sacrifice at all. Even if it cost you your freedom, your life, your youth.”

I spent nearly ten years as a staff member of the Church of Scientology, the whole decade of my 20′s. During that time, I sometimes wondered if it were the best way to spend my youth — shouldn’t I be out making a fortune, or writing books, or just sailing around the world or something? But in fact, I did love what I was doing. Some of it was drudgery (endless hours filing and typing) and some of it was wonderful (the day the FDA gave us back our e-Meters and books from their raid of the 60′s). It was an awesome game with many barriers and many purposes, worthy opponents (the IRS then, and psychiatry always) and a complex set of rules (church policy).

Connie’s quote above sums up my feelings about it very nicely. I’m adding it to my “quotes” page.

When I see people like Marty Rathbun attacking the religion (Scientology) to which they used to belong, I realize that they really haven’t “got” this point, or the integrity to stand by their convictions. They “regret” what they did, the time they spent doing it, to help Scientology prosper and succeed. Regret is an awful thing — it is the effort to turn back time, which just won’t turn back.

One of my favorite quotes from the founder of Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard, is this one from The Code of Honor:

“Never regret yesterday. Life is in you today and you make your tomorrow…..

Be true to your own goals.”

As a side note, I received a Kindle a few days ago as a birthday present from my gal — and All Clear may be the last paper book I read for a while. Books are cheaper when you buy them through Kindle, for one thing, and it’s just so handy to be able to stick it in my coat pocket when I go somewhere. Can’t do that with most of the books I read because they are just too big! And I like being able to listen to music on it, too — and surf the internet, if I need to, while reading, to research something. It has a couple of great dictionaries on it, complete with derivations, and instant access to them so you can look up any word you don’t recognize or understand the meaning of, as soon as you come across it in the text. The Kindle is a brilliant little machine — and I find it easy to actually read on it.

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Forty years ago, I was a shy and withdrawn young man, and couldn’t start a conversation to save my life. In my first year of college, living on my own, doing some soul-searching and trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life, I made a bunch of lists of things:

Homes I’d lived in so far at the ripe age of 18: 52

Schools I’d attended: 17

People I had known: Several hundred — I listed them out with their memorable traits. One I remember still: “Jim Leahy – teacher, communicated well, even though he had a lisp from a cleft palate.”

Which of the people that I knew, would I want to be, or model myself to be like? Only a handful. What did those people have in common? It took me a while to figure THAT out, but it was simple and I knew I had the right answer when I determined that “They could communicate easily.”

I determined to read up on everything in the public library on the subject of communication. To my great disappointment, there was NOTHING there that would help me learn how to communicate easily.

I determined to figure it out myself, if that was the only way to do it. So I started interviewing people who could communicate easily to ask them how they did it, what tips or tricks they had that would help someone communicate who didn’t find it easy. I told them I was writing a book on the subject of communication, and many people did talk with me willingly and shared their thoughts on the subject. Initiating these interviews was for me a trembling, stammering, hemming and hawing process that took all my resolve; it was so far outside my comfort zone I must have looked like a deer in the headlights to these very kind people, some of whom actually consented.

A few months into this project, I came upon a couple of young women in the college cafeteria; they were passing out fliers for something. I ignored it, because they were communicating with each other so beautifully! They also had an 18-month old child with them, with whom they were communicating very well. The child was happy. The two women were happy, calm, confident. So I summoned all my courage and approached them on the subject of an interview for my book. They declined, which stunned me, but they pointed to the flier I had ignored and said, “There’s a free introductory lecture about Scientology on Thursday nights at 7:30 PM. And we have a communication course you should ask about. We’ve done it. That’s why we can communicate well.” With which they dismissed me politely and left. So I read the flier and there was one thing on it that really resonated with me: “A man is only as alive as he can communicate.”

“Yes,” I said, “yes, that’s very true. I could have written that.” If someone understood that much truth along that line, then maybe they also understood HOW to communicate. So, although I was a devout atheist, and although I loathed organized religions, I bicycled to the free lecture that Thursday night (I didn’t get much out of it, but it seemed harmless enough) and signed up for their communication course by giving them $25 of my hard-earned cash. I also bought a book on the subject of communication that they were selling, for another $10. Total investment: $35.

I read the book in one sitting. (Titled, “Dianetics ’55″, it was a summary of the research L. Ron Hubbard had done into the subject of communication up to 1955.) “This book,” I thought, “should be in every library. I don’t know who this L. Ron Hubbard guy is, but he’s dead-on about communication.”

The communication course I signed up for took me three months to complete, on a schedule where I attended course every weekday evening. I put 150 hours into it, which works out to have cost me not quite 17 cents an hour. They don’t normally take that long – about 10 hours of course time is usually sufficient nowadays. But I milked it for all it was worth because I was having so much fun and going through such phenomenal personal changes.

And at the end of the course, where I DID learn the skills for easy communication with just about anyone, my life was turned around. I was no longer shy and withdrawn. I got along with other people well. I started conversations with wild abandon. I went from having no friends to having dozens of them, many of whom, 40 years later, are still my friends today. And I *still* start conversations with wild abandon. I have more friends than I can list (and not just Facebook friends, real people with whom I regularly communicate by phone, email, yes Facebook, and in person).

Here’s a beautiful little video about the necessity of learning communication skills, and what life is like when you don’t know the basic skills of communication. This short, simple video resonated with me, because that was exactly what life was like for me before taking the communication course.

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Another one bites the dust: the City of Hamburg, Germany, is closing down its Anti-Scientology task force. They cite economic hardship as the reason. One could also deduce that a decade of human rights violations and a total failure to accomplish anything had something to do with closing it down.

The driving force of that task force, Ursula Caberta, took a $75,000 bribe a few years back from an anti-Scientologist and was fined 7,500 Euros in 2002 for that corruption. She’s now going to work in the city’s Interior Ministry. As one of my sarcastic friends put it: “There she will presumably still fret and pace over the grave public dangers of Scientologists’ work in literacy centers, drug-abuse prevention and rehab programs, morality campaigns, prisoner reform work, and Volunteer Ministers’ help to disaster victims.”

So Germany is one small step closer to coming off of the US State Department’s list of countries that persecute minority religions. They have a few miles to walk down that road.

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What a snake Mr. Anderson Cooper turns out to be. Worse even than that old fossil Dan Rather:

Anderson Cooper lies about “slave camp”

Anderson Cooper lies about “a beating every day”

Anderson Cooper couldn’t investigate his own ass with both hands in his back pockets

Just more proof that if the facts don’t fit the slant of an article or news show, then the facts are omitted.

It makes me glad that people are leaving CNN viewship in droves. With crap like this from Anderson Cooper, it’s no wonder.

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One of my favorite e-newsletters is the one put out by Mark Alexander, which used to be called The Federalist and is now called The Patriot Post. He digs up some great quotes from history and this one struck a chord with me:

“Truth does not become more true by virtue of the fact that the entire world agrees with it, nor less so even if the whole world disagrees with it.” –Jewish philosopher Maimonides (AD 1135-1204)

As a long-time Scientologist I have seen a lot of false and malicious chatter about my religion online over the years. Everything from the “Scientology diet” (there is no such thing) to crazy rumors about Tom Cruise and little Suri being indoctrinated in some kind of Scientology school for toddlers (there is no such thing).

The truth:

• When one is doing the Purification program, sweating out toxins in the sauna, there are some guidelines for healthy eating while you’re on it. Somehow this gets twisted into “The Scientology Diet” by those with an axe to grind.
• There are schools that use the Study Technology, but they aren’t teaching what any Scientologist would recognize as Scientology in those shools. First they are teaching students how to study, true, and that non-religious technology of how to study is used in successful schools all over the world. But WHAT the students will study in little Suri’s school is whatever their regular curriculum is for little kids. Learning how to read and write, one would expect, with healthy doses of play time throughout the day. Here’s a good example of a school that teaches its students how to study, and then goes on to actually teach them a great curriculum, and where its students do very well in standardized testing.

My point is something I learned a long time ago in studying a basic Scientology book by L. Ron Hubbard: “What is true for you is what you have observed yourself. And when you lose that you have lost everything.”

Another thing I learned long ago from Hubbard was this: “There are two ways men ordinarily accept things, neither of them very good. One is to accept a statement because Authority says it is true and must be accepted, and the other is by preponderance of agreement amongst other people.”

Which is why Scientologists often say, “Think for yourself.”

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I am reading “The Compleated Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin”, which was compiled and published by Mark Skousen, Ph.D. The book is fascinating and picks up where Ben Franklin’s own autobiography left off in 1757, when he was just 51 years old and before all the events of the American Revolution. Franklin wrote many thousands of letters and documents, and Skousen put them together and came up with this “compleated” autobiography, which is in Franklin’s own words, but with many footnotes and explanations. As I say, it is fascinating.

Ben Franklin worked diligently in England to try to prevent Parlaiment from passing the Stamp Act, which was Parlaiment’s attempt to wring income from the colonies, to cover their expenses in defending it during the French & Indian wars. A rumor spread in American newspapers that Franklin had been instrumental in writing the Stamp Act, which was intensely unpopular. “No taxation without representation” was one motto of the revolution, and the Stamp Act was the Act that implemented that “taxation without representation”.

So Franklin had been unjustly accused of having written the very Act he was trying to stop through every means possible.

This section early in the book has often been quoted and misquoted:

Enemies Do a Man Some Good

“As to the reports that spread to my disadvantage during the Stamp Act affair, I gave myself as little concern about them as possible. I have often met with such treatment from people that I was all the while endeavouring to serve. At other times I have been extoll’d extravagantly when I have had little or no merit. These are the operations of nature. It sometimes is cloudy, it rains, it hails; again ’tis clear and pleasant, and the sun shines on us. Take one thing with another, and the world is a pretty good sort of world; and ’tis our duty to make the best of it and be thankful. One’s true happiness depends more one one’s own judgement of one’s self, on a consciousness of rectitude in action and intention, and on the approbation of those few who judge impartially, than upon the applause of the unthinking, undiscerning multitude, who are apt to cry “hosanna” today, and tomorrow, “crucify him.”

I thank God that I have enjoyed a greater share of health, strenth and activity than is common with people of my years. As to the abuses I have met with, I number them among my honours. One cannot behave so as to obtain the esteem of the wise and good without drawing on one’s self at the same time the envy and malice of the foolish and wicked, and the latter is testimony of the former. The best men have always had their share of this treatment, and the more of it in proportion to their different and greater degrees of merit. A man has therefore some reason to be asham’d of himself when he meets with none of it. And the world is not be condemn’d in the lump because some bad people live in it. Their number is not great, the hurt they do is but small, as real good characters always finally surmount and are established, notwithstanding attempts to keep them down. And in the mean time such enemies do a man some good, while they think they are doing him harm, by fortifying the character they would destroy; for when he sees how readily imaginary faults and crimes are laid to his charge, he must be more apprehensive of the danger of committing real ones…”

When I look at the current feeble attempts by Anonymous to stop the Church of Scientology, I see these truths elucidated by Franklin in action. Real Scientologists are fortified in their character by exposure to the lies and harrasment of the creeps in Anonymous.

For example, it explains “the envy and malice of the foolish and wicked” bloggers and commenters who are ready to villify John Travolta because his son Jett died of injuries sustained when he had a seizure in the bathroom, because they deliberately misunderstand the nature of John’s faith, Scientology. The truth, that Jett Travolta’s anti-seizure meds were causing organ failure, so they took him off of them, is masked by lies that John’s blind faith in Scientology would cause him to neglect his parental duties to see that the health needs of his son were met.

I’ve met John Travolta several times (although I doubt he would remember me). I had a chance to talk with him for a few minutes about ten years ago, while we smoked cigars outside of a party in the Hollywood hills. My thumbnail assessment: he’s an intelligent man and a responsible man, trying to use his celebrity and wealth responsibly to get done projects that he wants to do.

The great thing about the internet is that you can find all kinds of data on it.

That’s also the worst thing about it, because there is no Google filter you can set for stupid, wicked, or envious slander and lies.

That’s a filter one has to supply, oneself.

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Here’s part of a statement issued by the Church of Scientology relating to the U.S. Department of Justice announcing last week the filing of federal criminal charges against Dmitriy Guzner of New Jersey, a member of the cyber-terrorist group known as Anonymous

“Since January, 2008 Anonymous has been responsible for 3.6 million harassing emails and 141 million malicious hits against Church websites, as well as 41 death threats, 56 bomb and arson threats, 103 threats of other violence and 40 incidents of vandalism against Church of Scientology staff, executives, parishioners and/or facilities. A documentary describing these acts of violence can be seen at www.anonymous-exposed.org.”

If you want to see what Anonymous has been busy doing while pretending to be a bunch of harmless pranksters and recruiting people who should know better into their ranks, click that link above.

Let’s not forget the purpose of Anonymous, as they so proudly put on the Fox News site when they hacked it a while back:

“We are the face of chaos– We ruin the lives of other people simply because we can — Hundreds die in a plane crash. We laugh. The nation mourns over school shooting, we laugh. We’re the embodiment of humanity with no remorse, no caring, no love, or no sense of morality.”

And let’s not forget that it when the hacker cracked into Sarah Palin’s email account at Yahoo a few weeks ago, he was doing so as part of Anonymous (despite their claims to the contrary, that’s fairly obvious.)

A bunch of vicious little dweebs, Anonymous, out to get their lulz (“jollies”) at the expense of anyone they can. When they gather they always seem to carry signs defaming my religion — here’s what they really mean:

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My old friend Fred Hare — whom I’ve known for more than 35 years, has put up a terrific little website here called “Real Self-Help“. It’s a place where people can find out about Scientology without any of the bias and lies posted about it on various hate sites online. Funny thing — you can look up just about any religion online and find hate sites. Mennonites? You bet. Catholics? Yep. Baptists? Uh-huh. Muslims? Yeah. Buddhists? Yup.

So don’t be misled by the hate sites out there — if you’ve ever been curious about Scientology the best thing to do is to read one of its basic books, such as “Problems of Work“, which will help anyone do a better job on the job. Or “Self Analysis“, a book that will convince just about anyone who actually does any of the things in the book that they are able to remember a lot more than they think they can. If you have memory problems (assuming they are not caused by medical problems or actual brain damage) a few hours of Self Analysis will restore your faith in your own memory.

Fred Hare held a senior executive position in the Church of Scientology back in 1971 when I met him. He was one of the best executives under which I ever worked. It was obvious that he cared about his staff, and he worked to make sure they understood exactly what they were supposed to be doing. It was a fun and exciting experience working for him, and I learned a lot of tools that have stood me in good stead since then. He had an avunclar management style that served him well.

His website focuses on “start, change, stop”, one of the fundamental tenets of Scientology. Those who learn how to apply that basic tool are able to complete things — they get more done that someone who maunders through life only starting things and never finishing them, or only changing things and never starting or stopping them, or only stopping things and never creating (starting) or changing (managing) them. There’s a lot more info about “start, change, stop” in the book “Problems of Work.” It also contains some other simple tools for making work more enjoyable and ways to stay alert and more productive on the job.

Scientology is not some pie-in-the-sky feel-good new-age psuedo-religion. It’s an applied religious philosophy, with the emphasis on applied. It has tools anyone can understand and use to live a better life. That it also teaches we are immortal spiritual beings who are basically good, and helps people to realize what that means and how to live up to their own spiritual potential, makes it a religion.

I bought and read a book many years ago that changed my life — by teaching me about communication, which was my biggest problem. I was shy and depressed because I could not seem to actually talk to anyone, and had a very hard time listening to others. That Scientology book and a $25 course on communication I took from Scientology center in Portland, Oregon, completely turned my life around. I went from extremely unhappy to very stably happy in a matter of a couple months of hard work on the course, drilling the parts of communication with other students until I really had them down cold. That communication skill gained made all the difference to me, proved the workability of the tools of Scientology to me, and started me down a road of self-discovery that took me from being an atheist with no concept of spirituatlity, to being willing to trust myself as a spiritual being and helped me forge a closer connection to the Supreme Being.

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