ello, my name is "Dege" Didear, and here is a little bit about myself:

     I’ve been a Scientologist since 1971, when I ran into Scientology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I had spent the preceding few years satisfying myself that while there were a lot of places and areas that pretended to have workable answers to human problems – Harvard College, psychology and psychiatry, Western religions, Eastern religions, hard science, drug gurus, political “activism” of various stripes – none of these seemed actually to be delivering on their promises, or even to have much concept of how to go about it.

     I wanted something more out of life than most people seemed willing to settle for, although I wasn’t really sure exactly what that was. Furthermore, I had a fair number of plain old garden-variety human problems: I smoked so many cigarettes I couldn’t walk two blocks without huffing and puffing, couldn’t hold a job because I couldn’t find one I honestly cared about, had never had a decent relationship with a woman and had no idea how to go about it.

     When I found Scientology, I thought it was the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. I was amazed to find that what I had always dreamed of actually existed: a systematic, rational way to handle problems, to expand as an individual, to help other people, and to be happy doing it. Needless to say, I ran around telling everybody I knew – and many I didn’t know – about this incredible thing, the magic thing people have searched for from the beginning of time. I discovered to my surprise how many people don’t want happiness, or are afraid to reach for it, but there were also many who did.

     Today, I’m a teacher at the Delphian School in Oregon, which is a private, high-standards boarding school that uses L. Ron Hubbard’s study methods in conjunction with traditional educational subjects. We graduate kids who are bright, ethical, well-grounded in the basics, and who can apply what they’ve learned – quite a rewarding game. I love the kids and find it hard to imagine life without them.

     Prior to moving up here at the end of 1991, my wife and I owned and operated a successful office supply business in Pasadena, California, where we originally started with $100 and a rudimentary knowledge of some of Hubbard’s work on organization and administration. Old-timers in the business never understood how we got so far so fast on so little.

     My wife Rosemary and I will celebrate our 25th anniversary next August. We are crazy about our two beautiful daughters and, even after 25 years, about each other. And we love our home. From the living room windows of our hillside apartment in a Delphian campus dorm, we overlook the Willamette River and many miles of lush, green patchwork farms, with both the Coast Range and Cascade mountains as distant backdrop. Through these same windows on winter mornings, the eastern horizon glows red, backlighting the great bulk of Mt. Hood in one window and Mt. Jefferson in another. We keep binoculars on the windowsill to observe the deer, elk, pheasants and coyotes that visit the field just below us.

     Our hobbies these days are sedate but satisfying: we ride bikes on some of the many less-traveled back roads of Oregon; either by bike or on foot, we explore the countryside, small towns, woods and beaches; we love movies, old and new, and coffee shops; and – in addition to my continuing adventures in Scientology – in my spare time I study history, economics, political philosophy and literature. All in all, my life is a far cry from that of the dissatisfied hippie who wandered into a Scientology mission twenty-seven years ago, just in case there might be something, somewhere that delivered what it promised.