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I was led into a building, up the stairs and into a small room, where three or four other victims were busy completing some piece of paperwork. I was sat down and handed a four page questionnaire by someone and told, “Please complete this personal assessment, and answer honestly as we will be able to help you better the more truthful you are.” I set to work on the questions in the eerie silence of my fellow street abductees. I was in the twilight zone. I tried desperately to answer each question in a positive way but my sombre mood dictated otherwise. There were questions about what I would do in certain situations. For example:- What would you do if you got to the checkout in the supermarket and found out that you didn’t have enough money to pay for that extra tin of baked beans? Would you… a) Apologise profusely and put back the beans. b) Ask the next person in the queue for the outstanding balance to cover the cost of the beans. c) Feel impossibly embarrassed and instantly be rendered a mute for the rest of your life. d) Take the tin of beans and repeatedly bash you brains in with them until you fall over dead. e) Complain at the price of beans these days until red in the face shouting at the checkout girl until she calls for the manager. When they arrive you pour the tin of beans over their head and proceed to strangle them to death. I tried to answer the questions as best I could, the outcome designed to put me into a type of category of person. Was I a doer who gets things done? I teller who tells others to do things, or, was I a dole-lite, a work-shy good for nothing two bit FOP dreamer who walked around with illusions of grandeur. I don’t think I actually finished all the questions. In reality I think they gave me about ten minutes to complete all the questions, although it felt like a lot longer. My multiple choices were taken away to be fed into a computer which housed the mind of L Ron Hubboard, whom I later found out was a kind of Godfather figure in the organisation. I was seated in a chair and told to wait. Soon enough the woman who had taken me off the street appeared with a computer print out. She looked forlorn. She sat down beside me and gently said, “Nic dear, you need urgent help.” I looked at her, and then at the computer graph on the paper. If it had been upside down I would have been laughing but it wasn’t. I was, by all purposes, FINISHED. To put it in her words I was an anti social unemotional nervous loner with a penchant for wild fantasies, suffering from low self esteem and personal hatred for the world at large. “Err, well, I’ve just had a bad day today”, I said. “But it wasn’t all bad Nic”, she said sympathetically. “We can help you.” At that particular moment, like a switch that was flicked, I noticed that right in front of us was a cabinet, and in it were all manner of literary gems from the pen of someone called L Ron Hubbard. That’s when I knew there was something terribly wrong. It was then that I was introduced to the world of Scientology. How I could re-programme my behavioural patterns through something called Auditing. Which as far as I understood, involved sitting in a dark room with a strange man, answering certain life questions while holding a electronic device recorded levels of anxiety in the body. I wanted no part in it. The only trouble was I was far too damn polite to just get up and walk out of there. I suppose that’s why I had been picked walking along the street. Oh there goes a passive gullible with purchasing potential. “Why don’t you come to our open seminar this weekend?” my mentor asked. I said I might, then proceeded to get up and leave. But that would’ve been too easy, she then directed me to the glass cabinet that had been placed conspicuously in front of me, containing the inevitable merchandise. L Ron had been a busy bee it appeared. He had authored several large tombs, and then some. Several large works with a hefty price tag for any dole-lite graced the display. Titles such as “The Purification Rundown”, “Clear Body Clear Mind” , “The Deterioration Of Liberty”, “I’ll Audit You, Sunshine!” and “The New Gospels Of Big Ron.” |
