Blog: Scientology's Bridge to Nowhere: Part 2 - 2017-09-07

Scientology's Bridge to Nowhere: Part 2 September 7, 2017, Chris Shelton, Critical Thinker at Large

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This is the second part of my breakdown of Scientology's Bridge to Total Freedom, otherwise known as the Grade Chart. This is L. Ron Hubbard's step-by-step guide to spiritual freedom and personal immortality, or at least that's what he said it is. What it actually represents is a one-size-fits-all guide to an increasingly more expensive series of training and counselling services which result in a person having spent hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars to end up pretty much exactly where they started. I don't mean that no one ever gets anything from doing Scientology services. That would not be true. What I mean is that Scientologists these days are literally being made to re-do Bridge steps they've already paid for and completed, sometimes more than once.

In my own case, I was officially involved with Scientology for 27 years. I received thousands of hours of auditing and training. I made it to the state of Clear in the early 1990s but didn't really move much on the Grade Chart after that. The day I left the Sea Org at the end of 2012, I was told that I had been sent back down to the bottom of the Bridge because it turns out I had not standardly completed any of the steps I'd done. In other words, every auditing service I'd received had somehow been so badly performed on me that it was impossible for me to really be Clear or even be done with my Grades or the Objectives or the Purification Rundown. So my next step would be to re-start the whole thing with the Purification Rundown.

I was not alone in this. Almost every Scientologist who had attained the state of Clear was told that a review had been done and it turned out they were not really Clear so they had to re-do many of the actions they'd already done to get back to Clear, at their own expense, of course. Then it turned out that everyone's Objectives hadn't been done right and people were sent wholesale back down to that step at the bottom of the Grade Chart. Then it turned out that actually, it wasn't just the Objectives but the Purification Rundown that was also not done right so everyone had to re-do that.