How a Scientology recruiter gets kicked out of a country

As promised during a recent Group Therapy podcast, Bruce Hines explains how he ended up getting kicked out of Switzerland…

Scientology organizations are always trying to get new people. Centers in various cities around the world offer ‘services’ to the public in the form of training and auditing. One could argue whether these activities fall under the usual definitions of ‘services’ in regular English, or whether they are actually of service. Both people new to Scientology and those who have already purchased a service or book would be ‘on lines’ at a ‘Mission’ (offering mainly introductory services) or ‘Org’ (offering those same introductory services plus some higher-level ones). The people taking these services who are not ‘staff members’ are generally referred to as ‘public Scientologists.’

In the arcane ‘management technology’ of Scientology, organizations are divided into seven or nine ‘divisions.’ To make something already overly complicated even more complicated, the ones with nine have divisions 6a, 6b, and 6c, rather than just division 6. Public Scientologists who have already bought a major service are the business of division 4 (where the training or auditing are delivered and division 2 (where they get sold more stuff). New public are the business of division 6.

Sorry for the forgoing blather. Those who have been in Scientology would already know most of it. I think it might help never-ins understand what I am about to describe.

We have to go back all the way to 1975. Boy, time flies! It’s hard for me to imagine that these events took place over 49 years ago. Sigh.

In April of 1975, I was discharged (honorably, mind you) from the U.S. Army in Stuttgart and immediately joined staff in a Scientology Mission in Heilbronn, Germany. I got sent to Copenhagen for training for a couple of months, then to South Tyrol in northern Italy (where the mission was offering ‘holiday courses’), then back to Heilbronn for a few weeks, and then to Bern, Switzerland.

I really like Switzerland. The landscape is especially beautiful. Stunning mountains, picturesque green valleys, big lakes, and pleasing architecture. I’ve been back to various places in that country several times. Everything always seems very neat and clean and well cared for. When flying in I got the impression that the airport was situated within a large golf course.

At that time there was another Scientology Mission in Bern. It was expanding rapidly, having grown to 35 staff members in the first year of its existence. Interestingly, most of the centers in the German-speaking areas of Europe started growing then, and there was general expansion of Scientology in that part of the world for about 20 years. After that the organizations began to shrink. Today, Scientology is a fraction of what it was. A similar pattern occurred in most countries internationally.

The head of our mission in Heilbronn knew the top guy in Bern. They had talked and came up with a plan to send a staff member from Heilbronn to Bern to learn about their success there. That person would be me, as the only other staff members in Heilbronn were the head guy and his wife. So off I went to Switzerland.

There were a few reasons the mission in Bern was so successful. They had an energetic and charismatic leader. He had found very nice premises in an upscale, mainly residential part of Bern. He was good at organizing and getting other people to do things. He had found some good salespeople (‘registrars’ or ‘reges’). Some people seem to be suited for or drawn to sales.

A primary reason for the growth was their division 6. This activity was located in a separate set of offices that had been rented in the city center on a busy street, far from the main part of the mission. It was a veritable beehive. The first, key step was to get a non-Scientologist from the street and through the door. This is what I was sent there to learn.

The system they used sounds too simple to be as effective as it was. I saw it with my own eyes. It utilized a common practice in Scientology referred to as ‘body routing.’ The way it works is that a staff member approaches a stranger on the street, talks to them, and then convinces them to go into the Scientology establishment. The public person’s body gets ‘routed’ into the organization.

This practice is often spectacularly unsuccessful, especially in more recent years. I don’t think it is done much anymore. But back in the mid-1970s in Bern, it worked surprisingly well. The dupes, er unsuspecting public people, were then greeted by other staff members who tried to sell them an introductory service or book. Plus, they usually got their name, address, and phone number.

Over the years, different approaches have been tried. The person might be gotten to watch a film, or get a ‘stress test,’ or watch short promotional videos, or given an introductory talk (sales pitch). A common one is to get the new person to fill out an ‘Oxford Capacity Analysis,’ which was the method used in Bern.

Much has been written about this ‘analysis.’ It has nothing at all to do with Oxford University or even the city of Oxford in England. I think that name was used just to make it seem legitimate and impressive. I used to grade these tests when I was in New York. While the test and grading procedure are too complicated to go into here, the results are weighted to indicate that the prospect is in bad shape as a person and not doing well in life. An experienced sales person then ‘evaluates’ the outcome and tries to convince the person that some introductory course, relatively low in cost, can help them out of their miserable state. Those evaluators have a whole methodology they follow.

There were a couple of body routers in Bern who were quite good at getting new people in the door. Their approach was quite simple — they walked up to a person walking along the sidewalk, asked them, “Have you taken a personality test?”, waited for them to say they hadn’t, then said, “Come with me,” and then turned and walked towards the Scientology place, expecting the person to follow. Often it worked.

Part of the rationale behind this method involves Hubbard’s strange theories about control. In general, people should be willing to control other people and also be willing to be controlled. That sounds like a good thing for thought reform, right? One is supposed to learn now to control other people in the ‘Upper Indoctrination Training Routines,’ generally referred to as TRs 6 - 9 or the Upper Indocs. These include the famous one where a person yells at an ashtray (in TR 8). A key part of these drills, supposedly, is learning to use one’s intention as something that can influence another person.

The training of those body routers included lots of drilling on those TRs. The idea was that when they would say to the person with enough intention, “Come with me,” the prospect would automatically want to obey. Supposedly intention is something created by the person that then flows into or appears in another person. Can that be?

Does someone who is persuasive have some kind of influence like that? I don’t know for sure. But developing this ability to intend something to happen is what leads to their so-called ‘OT abilities.’ Like intending to get a parking space and then getting one. It is one of the big carrots that keep Scientologists moving ‘up the Bridge.’

Anyway, I ended up being in Bern for over a month. My training there included lots of drilling on those TRs. I also studied about and practiced using emotions to to make another person responsive. Also too involved to cover in this writing, the ‘Emotional Tone Scale’ is another important subject in Scientology. It includes the idea that you should assume a certain emotion when communicating to someone else that is based on their emotional state at the time. Then they will be more receptive to what you are saying.

To this end, I spent hours doing another common ‘drill’ in Scientology. This consisted of going out around town pretending to be doing a survey. I would approach a stranger while holding a clipboard with paper and pen. I’d ask certain questions and get them to reply. In the process I was supposed to identify the person’s true emotion, not their social facade. Once I felt I could do this, I was instructed to adopt an emotion either slightly above or below the person’s and observe the effect. The theory was that emotions occur on a scale arranged from low to high. Ideally, one’s communication should be given in an emotion a bit above that of the recipient.

I had to do this with at least one hundred people out on the streets of Bern, keeping a written record of each one. This went on over a period of days. Finally I was deemed ready to go out and try to body route new people into the Mission’s division 6 in downtown Bern.

I didn’t seem to be very good at it. I wasn’t able to get people to follow me into the Scientology premises. I’ve wondered if it was the language. While I was pretty fluent in German, that which is spoken in Switzerland is quite a bit different. Also, my German accent wasn’t perfect and it would have been clear that I was some kind of foreigner.

Also, probably my clothes gave me away. I hadn’t been out of the army for long and I dressed like an American, not like a typical Swiss person. Still, I was blaming myself for not having good enough intention or the right emotional tone.

On about the third day of trying to improve my body routing, I approached a man and gave him my little spiel. He ended up body routing me, not the other way around. He showed me identification and informed me that I needed to go with him. He was an official of the Swiss employment bureau, or whatever it was called. He took me to an office where I was questioned. I was asked what I was doing in Bern, had to show my passport, etc.

It was decided that I was trying to work in Switzerland without a permit. I didn’t know anything about the employment laws there. They didn’t seem to buy that I was visiting a local church to do religious training. While I don’t know for sure, I can imagine that some locals might have complained about a strange guy approaching people on the street.

I was told in no uncertain terms that I had to leave the country within 24 hours. They had my name and passport number, and knew I was connected to the Scientology place. They gave me a piece of paper, some official document, that I had to give to border agents when I left the country. I suppose it could have been worse. I wasn’t put in jail or further detained.

I went to the mission and explained what happened. I guess the Scientology folks there didn’t want to risk causing friction with the government by protesting the action or something. Bern is the capital city of Switzerland with the federal government being a significant presence. I then packed my things, got a train ticket back to Germany, and departed the next morning.

When the train got to the border, it stopped and some uniformed guys came through checking passports and other papers. I gave the document to the official who was checking my passport. He looked at it and immediately recognized it. He took it and informed me that I had completed the task I was supposed to carry out.

Well, so much for my division 6 training! Presumably I would have gone on to learn about test evaluation and sales techniques. We never got something like that operation in Bern going in Heilbronn. The only end result was that I got expelled from Switzerland.

— Bruce Hines

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Stephen Ridley is everywhere

Back in March, your Proprietor was interviewed for a two-part podcast called Endless Threads. Hosts Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson were digging into a man named Stephen Ridley that we had mentioned a couple of times here at the Bunker.

Ridley is an English Scientologist and Grant Cardone fan who operates an online business that purports to turn anyone into a concert pianist for a $5,000 buy-in, and Ridley’s ubiquitous online ads were raising a lot of eyebrows. Were the classes legit? Was Ridley actually recruiting people for Scientology?

Now, several YouTubers have discovered Ridley and we’re suddenly getting sent videos about Ridley left and right. But we thought we’d post the links to the two episodes of the podcast that was first to the story in March. (Episode one. episode two.)

We think that podcast did a good job of investigating the story, and it included a fair interview with Ridley himself.

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Chris Shelton is going Straight Up and Vertical

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Source Code: Actual things founder L. Ron Hubbard said on this date in history

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Overheard in the Freezone: Indie Hubbardism, one thought at a time

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