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had listened to when I was a student.
The RPF went against everything I had imagined Scientology to be and
I couldn't even begin to reconcile the contradiction. Here I was, a
prisoner and what had I been guilty of? I felt that there must be
something very wrong with me to have gotten into such a mess.
I went through one hopeless day after another, cleaning the toilets,
drenched in sweat and chlorine and at night trying to get something
accomplished in my auditing program, always to no avail. One day, a Sea
Org officer remarked to me that I was not even worth the $5 (RPFers only
got half pay) and I agreed.
I started to feel like my sanity was slipping away, what little
there was left of it. I can remember one day walking down the stairs to
Lower Hold Number One and getting a sensation like I was going to
totally disappear -- like I was going to experience a complete spiritual
death. It's very difficult to describe. I felt like I was going to be
completely annihilated.
One day I completely broke down. I went down into the lower hold
where the RPF classroom was and sobbed uncontrollably. I cried like I
had never cried before. It felt like I was never going to stop.
Later, when I finally managed to stop, I went above decks and just
sat, looking out at the water. I thought about how much of my identity
had been tied up in being a good auditor. I felt like I was nothing if I
couldn't produce as a Scientologist. I just sat there and gazed out at
the sea.
The next day my grief came back. I went through several days where I
couldn't stop crying. I can remember one day scrubbing the floor of one
of the bathrooms as hard as I could but no amount of scrubbing could
cleanse me. I felt as if I were being raped. I was in a deep state of
mourning for a loss I couldn't define.
Sometimes a person's emotions are way ahead of what can be thought
or verbalized. This was the case with me at the time; my feelings were
giving me signals, but I was unable to listen to them. In retrospect, I
came to realize that on an emotional level I knew that Scientology was a
sham. I had no words to describe my loss at the time and there was no
one to help me see what was happening. All I knew was that I felt worse
than I had ever felt in my life.
What I really needed was someone to jump start my mind so I could
start thinking again and get in touch with what my feelings were trying
to tell me, which was, "Scientology is a sham. Get out of there, now!
You have been lied to and are now in a trap. This is what you gave up
your education, your family and your friends for. The illusion is
shattered. Now there is nothing left for you here in Scientology."
It was the biggest loss I had ever experienced in my life -- a loss
of my innocence,
a loss of trust and a loss of a dream that I thought had become a
reality.
So I continued on the RPF, doing my labor and in tears most of the
time.
I made one final attempt to assert myself. One day I was standing
watch as Quartermaster, logging people on and off the ship. This was a
duty that RPFers were often assigned to do. One day I had been on watch
all morning and someone was supposed to relieve me so I could have
lunch, but no one showed up. Finally, I went below decks to the aft
lounge to see what happened to my relief person. A Sea Org officer was
having lunch with some other RPFers and he refused to help me. I just
exploded. My anger had very little to do with what was actually going on
-- I just felt I had to make one last attempt to assert myself.
I said, "To hell with all of you, I'm going to have my lunch!" at
which point the Sea Org officer said, "That's it! You're assigned to the
RPF's RPF."
And so it came to pass that I was assigned to the RPF's RPF. I spent
very long days down in the engine room, cleaning foul smelling muck out
of the bilges and then painting them. I was assigned a Condition of
Enemy and to get out of it I had to write up the formula, which was
"Find out who you really are."
I wrote up the formula and submitted it to the Ethics Officer, but
he wouldn't accept what I had written. I didn't know what he wanted me
to write.
For days, I struggled to find the answer, as I was cleaning the
bilges. At that point, I really didn't know. If I had known who I really
was, I would have let them throw me out and gotten as far away from the
ship and everyone aboard as I could.
Years later when I read Lifton's studies of the Communist Chinese, I
realized that my struggle to write up the Condition of Enemy formula was
very much like the struggle the prisoners must have gone through to
write up confessions that were "sincere" enough to satisfy their
captors. In both cases, it wasn't enough just to physically imprison the
person; the person had to agree to and participate in their mental
imprisonment as well, and if the statements written up weren't deemed as
sincere, the person had to rewrite the statement until it satisfied the
people in charge.
The Ethics Officer kept rejecting my formula. This went on for five