I realized the nothingness with which I had filled my life
Former member of the destructive group Scientology, founded by Ronald Hubbard
“I came across Scientology in the eighties, in Milan. I was 30 years old, separated and with a son. I had a job, but I was unsatisfied and restless. Apart from my marriage, my life seemed to me a failure. One day a publicity leaflet inviting me to ‘know yourself’ came into my hands. I went to take a test with 200 questions. At the end, they told me that I was unstable and unhappy because I could not express my full potential.”
Thus begins the ten-year adventure that Francesca spent in Scientology. A group that in some countries of the world enjoys recognition as a new religion and exemption from taxes. Celebrities such as John Travolta collaborate with it. She has now revealed it to the Italian daily “Avvenire.”
Francesca left Scientology some time ago. She recounts the experience with serenity. “After twenty lessons on the ‘anatomy of the human mind,’ people came up to me who told me how Scientology had changed
their lives for the better, and they invited me to take more courses. I learned that I was a ‘thetan,’ an acting and conscious being, but that because of my ‘aberrations’ (that is, the traumas of my life) I was trapped in a body and had lost awareness. My existence was made up of an endless chain of previous lives, in which I had kept on losing awareness. Now, however, thanks to Scientology, I could get out of this spiral and attain total freedom. This prospect of freedom, of mastery over reality, fascinated me. Moreover, to practice Scientology was not to embrace a belief blindly but to follow a scientific method successfully tested by many. The fact that it was not a faith but a science gave me security.”
Francesca was told that improvement would come to her through a series of grades on the Bridge, or Road to happiness. Each grade means a new course and new money that has to be paid to the organization. “There is a technique
for everything and a cost for each technique, a cost that goes up as one advances along the Bridge.”
After a few months, Francesca decides that this is the most important thing in her life; she leaves her job and entrusts her son to a relative. She enters the Scientology organization, where they make her work 12 or 15 hours a
day for very little money. She does not worry, because she has her severance money and besides, she thinks, “before long I will be so capable and free that I will be able to do whatever I want.”
But things do not go as she had thought. When she reaches the condition of “clear” (a level of awareness and freedom capable of making the person autonomous), she experiences a great joy that lasts only a short time: “in reality it seemed to me that I was exactly at the starting point. I told myself that at the higher levels I would solve my problems, but one always keeps going forward and the Bridge never ends.”
At that moment she was to go to Copenhagen to get through the OT3 level, called the “wall of fire.” “I worked very hard to reach my OT3 level, although more and more it seemed to me science fiction and not science. But I was accustomed to thinking little and trusting totally in Hubbard’s writings. I returned home, and I will not forget that trip, because I began to have mental disturbances that I had never had before: a feeling of suffocation, panic, an inability to keep control of my consciousness. I have since learned that others had similar disturbances upon finishing OT3.”
On arriving in Italy, she felt more and more out of touch with reality: “I thought I would be free, and instead I found myself incapable of solving the most trivial matters of my daily life. Meanwhile, after five years, the severance money had run out and I could not take charge of my son. I decided to leave, but it was not easy. They made accusations of every kind against me, attempts to make me confess things I had not done, the threat (for me a very grave one) of never again being able to practice Scientology for all eternity (they were thus denying me eternal life). They even told me that everything I had said in the ‘auditing’ sessions (a kind of confession before a rudimentary lie detector called the ‘E-meter’) would be published. Meanwhile, they would phone me very amiably, telling me that I was so wonderful that precisely now I could not leave. I went away for some time to a hidden place because I felt harassed.”
Francesca’s conclusion is eloquent: “One enters Scientology in order to achieve self-fulfillment, and one becomes completely dependent on this ‘science.’ To enter the advanced organization, I had signed a contract for two billion years: I was completely out of touch with reality. The night I turned 40, I realized the nothingness with which I had filled my life. And my son, and my work? With a terror mingled with joy, I understood that I had to start everything over from the beginning”
Source: ZENIT.org – MILAN, April 7.
