Scientology – the billion-year contract

There are some crackpot things that some who portray themselves as being knowledgeable of the processes of life will put their followers through.

As explained in The soul's journey, our personalities are one level in a hierarchy of consciousness, but each is a limited construct of the soul to explore some aspects their understanding on their path of expanding their own consciousness and understanding. It is the nature of those limitations that they cannot possibly fully know or understand what the soul knows and understands. They are like children of their soul, growing and learning the ways of life.

In modern societies, children are not expected to understand the full implications of any contract they might sign, and so those contracts are not binding. Yet in Scientology, people are expected to commit to a billion years of servitude to that organisation without possibly knowing what that really means. However, the propaganda they are fed incessantly while growing up instills a fear that breaking that contract eternally damns them. The notion that that commitment or the punishment are so monumentous is just patently so absurd for anyone to be expected to accept.

Scientology is the extreme of what many religions have gone to to persuade their followers to forego their free will and accept the religion's doctrines unconditionally. We see this in Christianity in the story of Adam and Eve, where having the free will to choose to partake of the apple, representing knowledge, is seen instead as choosing evil and rejecting the will of god. This demonisation of free will is the first step in trying to control people so much that they don't question what the organisations behind their religions want of them.

This is where religions, and many corporations who use propaganda to swamp us so we forget we have choices, become enemies of personal and societal evolution. For spiritual growth, we have to make choices of our own free will, so efforts to stifle that free will are working against our growth and learning and thus how much we can cooperate with our souls.

From a personal perspective, such propaganda is an opportunity for us to choose a better path for ourselves rather than be distracted so that we can be exploited. When we use our free will to choose what serves us better, we become stronger and more independent. We need to do that so we can become a centre of creative will, and thus contribute to the life of the planet. For those who want to control us, our free will is an impediment to us being controlled, which is why the propaganda needs to be persistent and pervasive.

Those who truly want to help us be free do not seek to stop us using our free will. They will want us to be fully aware of what the consequences of our choices are, at least in as much we can understand of them. They will understand if we make other choices than what they may recommend, as they understand that that is our taking control of our own lives and what we want to do with our lives. They understand that is how we grow, because it is in seeing the consequences of our choices that we learn to make better choices.

As children, we need some safety net so that we can make choices without too many drastic consequences, As adults, we are then subject to the full consequences of our choices, but that does not mean that we should be all-wise and strong enough to withstand the onslaught of those who marshal the resources at their disposal to sabotage our lives by preventing us being able to access much of what our societies can help us with. This is where we have to collectively engineer our societies to help all of us, rather than the few who want to control us by restricting the options we can choose from.

What we believe is up to us, and should not be subject to such levels of coercion that we cannot make choices using our free will. It is when we use those beliefs to control other people that we should rightly be subject to scrutiny from our societies. We are still trying to find out how to run our societies to maximise our individual exercise of our free will while not preventing others from doing so, all while some are zealously trying to sabotage that process.

Those organisations that take that sabotage to the point of isolating those they have control over so that they cannot use their free will, either by the level of propaganda, or restrictions on what information and people they have access to who might present ideas that would undermine that control, should be restricted and even dismantled. Unfortunately, many of those organisations have substantial influence over those who are supposed to look after our interests, either by extensive historical ties, monetary influence, or threats.

We firstly have to stop those organisations that are excessive in their control, but also start a program of education to let people have an idea what has been going on, while also advancing an alternative that posits a more equitable means of having beliefs that doesn't involve using such methods of control. We have been subject to such levels of propaganda that we often don't have a view of what alternatives we could have that don't involve such abuse. The idea of free will needs to be promoted, but not as a celebration of selfishness. We need free will to be truly free.