My success: What a topic – there have been so many! Maybe it would be easiest just to list a few.
Smoking: One of my biggest problems before Scientology, this was the one that took the longest to handle. At one point I was up to over three packs a day, having frequent respiratory illnesses, uninterested in even going outdoors because I didn’t have the physical stamina. This eventually resolved through a combination of Dianetic and Scientology auditing that specifically addressed nicotine as a drug, and by the application of Scientology ethics procedures. I haven’t smoked in over twenty years.
Women: At one point in college, I had become so nervous of the opposite sex that I was afraid to even talk to girls, much less ask one for a date. All of my relationships with women wound up disastrously. This was handled in large part by a communication course, the first Scientology training I ever did, as well as by the mere fact of Scientology (because I had discovered that there was hope for better things). Within two months of starting my training, I had cemented my relationship with my lifelong partner Rosemary. Even so, we used to have plenty of rocky times, but we always resolved our difficulties – with Scientology, naturally. Since then we’ve both improved a lot. These days even an argument is a rare event.
Self-confidence: In college I was so introverted that I almost never spoke up in class, even when I thought I had something important to say. I was incredibly nervous about public speaking. Scientology started handling this from Day One on the first communications course, and it got better and better very quickly. I had a remarkable success along this line from the Key to Life course, which also addresses some fundamental aspects of communication. After the course I was inspired to join a Toastmaster’s Club, which demands that you deliver frequent, highly polished professional speeches – sometimes impromptu – in front of a demanding audience whose members rate your performance. Although this would once have been an inconceivable ordeal, I found to my delight that not only could I do it, but I was great at it. I was voted Best Speaker a number of times; more importantly, I discovered a talent that gives me an immense amount of satisfaction.
Family: For forty years I had a family member who seemed to bitterly dislike me and who constantly attacked me, either directly to my face or behind my back to others. It finally got to the point where, in self-defense, I refused to even communicate with her for a couple of years. But then I did the Scientology Life Orientation Course, where one day I realized at last what the problem was and what Scientology technique would handle it. I called her from a payphone across the street, and within half an hour I had turned my old enemy into a warm and supportive friend. For the last seven years of her life, she remained so. This still seems to me nothing short of a miracle.
Personal relationships: I once felt cut off from other people. I used to have a vivid recurring fantasy of being imprisoned in a cage on a dark, lonely plain, seeing from time to time other people passing along a road in the remote distance, but being unable to attract anyone’s attention; alternatively, the picture would shift to that of a brightly lit cottage window, with people laughing and warm, celebrating inside by a roaring fire while I stood outside in the snow, beating in helpless futility against the panes, but making no sound. Yes, it was melodramatic!
All that changed forever, however, when in 1974 at L. Ron Hubbard’s old estate in England, I achieved the state of Clear. It was such an abrupt change of viewpoint that for twenty-four hours my body was almost unfamiliar. I was unable even to talk – but I certainly wasn’t unable to feel emotions and to perceive in a way I had never dreamed possible. Colors, forms and sounds were brighter and sharper. Most of all, my perceptions of people were unimaginably intense. I knew for the first time what it meant to truly love people, wholeheartedly and without reservation, and I learned that people see you exactly as you see them. No, I couldn’t talk, but that didn’t keep me from laughing with joy and returning all the hugs from the many people who were seeing me for the first time as I really am.
