Definitely better to read after you have a thorough grounding in Scientology and some of the top names so that you can recognize who she is talking about throughout.

excellent book. I love hearing people's stories. especially when they have led highly unconventional lives. I loved listening to her experiences first hand.

I didn't really know much about Scientology before I picked up this book. There's a recruitment centre here that I've passed by hundreds of times over the years, and I've always been curious, but the information I've found has been pretty spotty, mostly focusing on Tom Cruise's own particular brand of weirdness.

This book is one woman's account of growing up in this religion/cult/church/system. Hill lays bare the myriad and complex ways its members are brainwashed and kept in line through her own day to day experiences. This is definitely an insider's view, and if you are at all curious, definitely worth the read.

The information in this book was fascinating and kept me reading. The writing, however, was not in a style that I found very easy to follow (particularly figuring out the timeline) for quite a bit of the book (childhood into mid-teems). I found myself having to re-read sections to understand what was being said, getting distracted by phrasing, and trying to figure out how old she was during certain events (as it seemed to jump around a bit at the beginning). It picked up nicely for about the final third of the book and I was able to read straight through that part quickly. Seems a little strange since there seems to have been a helper/ghostwriter, so I would've expected the book to flow a little better. But still worth the read for the story it tells!

Not the best edited & a little confusing at times but very interesting.

In the book 'Beyond Belief' Jenna Miscavage Hill describes in detail how the Scientology Church worked. Her descriptions of the church actually fits every line of the list on how to run a mind-control cult, using the proven indoctrination methods of authoritarian regimes, prisons, religious cults and military units the world over.

She discusses what happened to her in which she was made to accept the teaching of Scientology from early childhood to her adult life. The only thing benign about what Jenna describes in her book is her innocent acceptance of what she was suffering.

Like North Koreans, she had no idea of what the outside world was like, as she grew up being moved from Church compound to church compound. She almost never met 'Wogs' - people who were not Scientologists. Instead she was forced to back-breaking days of hard labor and continuous classroom study in mind-numbing repetition of Hubbard's 'religious' Scientology writings. The design of her and the other children's lives, separated from their parents for years, struck me the same as descriptions of reeducation camps in Communist countries.

Scientology 'school' studies were of little use beyond learning how to read and write. The subjects studied were bizarre ritualistic instructions and memorizations - which seemed to me to be either entirely OCD verbal and physical rituals, or Arkham Asylum busy work.

In my lifetime, there have been so many cults - many many many cults. Thousands of people join them, giving up all of their worldly goods, giving up their children, disappearing in special compounds where they don't see their families or children for years, giving up their marriage exclusivity, constantly being moved about one step ahead of the authorities, working 16 hour days at hard labor and no pay, and studying 'little red books' which tend to run to hundreds of pages of bizarre gobblegook rantings about some sort of apocalypse (I've read a lot). Peculiar church or temple rituals involve secret sayings, chanted precious leader quotation memorizations, hand signs and membership costume clothing.

All cults do these things because it is the most effective way to destroy a person's sense of individuality. Group think is quickly imposed, as it is a powerful force on human minds. Insane punishments over trivial and inane missteps or normal behaviors is common, which are approved by the total membership. Parents of cults have been known to prostitute their 9-year-old daughters to the Messiah of their cult, considering it a great honor.

Ron Hubbard, the founding member of Scientology, said he was a full member of the Blackfoot Indian tribe of Montana. He said he was a nuclear physicist. He said he was severely disabled by his military service. All of this is untrue.

There are statements from witnesses, including from his own son, which noted that Hubbard was an extreme drug user. He loved in particular pills which cause delusions. He was also a popular science fiction author, with 19 of his books having been on the New York Times Bestseller list. I read many of his books as a teenager. I thought they were exciting books.

One of his exciting stories is as follows: Once upon a time, a space alien called Xenu killed millions of other aliens, called Thetans. Xenu then relocated the Thetan survivors to Earth. Xenu put the Thetans into DC-8's and flew them near Earth's volcanoes. The planes blew up. Today, souls of the Thetans are haunting humans.

At some point, Hubbard decided this invented story of his (he was a science fiction writer) was real, or maybe he saw a better way than writing novels to make a living when he noticed rich Westerners were piling into India to study New Age Buddhism/Hinduism with gurus in the 1970's. Mother Earth/Gaia/New Age/Groking books were 1970's bestsellers (particular by fellow science fiction writers Ray Bradbury and Robert Heinlein) and other brand new 1970's New Age religions were overwhelming Hollywood movie stars and American youth culture.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Age

Communes were started by believers of New Age religions. College students all over the United States were meditating and medicating with LSD as required by various New Age Jewish/Buddhist mystical sects. The serial killer Charles Manson began a New Age cult.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beatles_in_India

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manson_Family

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_new_religious_movements

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippie

Quoted:

"Sutcliffe described the "typical" participant in the New Age milieu as being "a religious individualist, mixing and matching cultural resources in an animated spiritual quest". Susan Lee Brown noted that in the U.S., the movement was first embraced by the baby boomer generation (those born between 1946 and 1964), "through which it was incubated and transmitted to other parts of American society". Heelas asserted that the movement was "strongly associated" with members of the middle and upper-middle classes of Western society. He added that within that broad demographic, the movement had nevertheless attracted a diverse clientele. He typified the typical New Ager as someone who was well-educated yet disenchanted with mainstream society, thus arguing that the movement catered to those who believe that modernity is in crisis. He suggested that the movement appealed to many former practitioners of the 1960s counter-culture because while they came to feel that they were unable to change society, they were nonetheless interested in changing the self. He believed that many individuals had been "culturally primed for what the New Age has to offer", with the New Age attracting "expressive" people who were already comfortable with the ideals and outlooks of the movement's self-spirituality focus. It could be particularly appealing because the New Age suited the needs of the individual, whereas traditional religious options that are available primarily catered for the needs of a community. He believed that although the adoption of New Age beliefs and practices by some fitted the model of religious conversion, others who adopted some of its practices could not easily be considered to have converted to the religion" ----from Wikipedia.

This was the cultural environment of American baby boomers in the 1970's, my culture too, and it is also the culture in which Hubbard was living. Maybe he believed in some of it, maybe he had a drug delusion, or maybe he made a drunken barfly bet with a friend that American people were so besotted with New Age mysticism and religion he could start one too by following well-established principles known by all organized religions.

So, Hubbard created Scientology to help people control the Thetan souls he believed (maybe not) that we all carry inside us from incarnation to incarnation, ruining our lives with inner chaos and misery. A clue to Hubbard's intentions and beliefs might be in that the Thetan story originally was revealed only after believers had spent thousands and thousands of dollars for seminars to learn self-controlling meditation methodologies and specially created Scientology religious practices. Members were rewarded eventually with being told inner-circle secrets, such as the Thetan invasion, known only to big-spending scientology members. Disallusioned ex-members have gone public, so, now we know, gentle readers. I think perhaps Scientology has moved away from its creation fiction, and it now concentrates on loyalty-creating methods such as sternly enforcing its rigid New Age religious practices, as told in 'Beyond Belief: My Secret Life Inside Scientology and My Harrowing Escape'.

I have my own encounter with Scientology to relate, gentle reader, before Tom Cruise, before Scientology was wealthy and a major corporation. I learned about Scientology before they made the Thetan origin story secret.

I was shopping in downtown Seattle with a girlfriend in the early 1970's. This very nice guy pulled us into an upstairs floor in a two-story commercial building which housed a pharmacy on the lower floor. The staircase to the upper floor was inside the pharmacy going up into the center of the building. I liked the wooden steps because they smelled nice of fresh cut wood - this all served to imprint the memory into my mind. But the entire situation was unusual, dear reader, so it wasn't only about the odd staircase.

The building was named 'The Small Triangle' because of its wedged shape, squeezed into a corner of an intersection in the middle of Seattle's major department store area at the time. Upstairs the peculiar organization which apparently had temporarily rented the upper floor had poster advertisements pasted all over on walls. On sandwich boards and the posters was the proclamation that we needed the book 'Dianetics' which they were giving away free if we listened to a presentation. I'm a book lover, so I sat down near a battered desk. There was a device sitting in the corner with a label on it that said E-Meter. I asked him what the machine was for. That is when he openly discussed the Thetans and their forces within us. The talk was about 15 minutes. I left with my free copy of Dianetics. It had a drawing of an exploding volcano on the cover. All of the posters on the walls had exploding volcanoes, too.

I think I was 19 years old. I read about half of the book. It really was very interesting, but I already had subscriptions to Cosmopolitan Magazine and Redbook, and it seemed full of the same Buddhist/Hindu/Hippie/New Age psychobabble I was reading in magazines and seeing in TV shows, like 'The Mod Squad' https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mod_Squad. This WAS the 1970's, as I previously mentioned. I'd been reading thousands of counterculture New Age media adaptations in articles since I was 16 (and taking the quizzes about what kind of personality I was). Dianetics fit into the New Age mythodology perfectly, common and everywhere in American culture.

As I left the building, a hippy-styled man on the street handed me a colored paper (purple) which invited me to attend meetings teaching the levels of understanding (?!?) reached through Dianetics. He asked me if I wanted to attend a meeting, but it cost money - I think $25 a session. I was earning $400 a month, so I said no.

It stuck in my mind because it was so weird. The room in which I was talked to took up the entire wedge of the building, and the floor had construction dust all over, with drywalled windowed walls, with little cheap tables set up and folding chairs, where there were several of us being individually introduced to Scientology. Although at no time was the word religion mentioned (instead, it was something like a 'dynamic exciting new psychology method which will unlock the fires of your inner potential', or something) I was reminded of Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses by the way they all dressed exactly alike in white shirts and dark pants and short hair, except for the street man who was grabbing people. In the 1970's we wore tee-shirts, bell bottomed jeans, peasant dresses and had long shaggy hair and neck beads. The leftie middle-class were wearing Nehru jackets and sandals. No one wore white shirts and black pants except Mormons - and Scientologists.

Later, a Wienerschnitzel rented the same space, and I often went there for lunch with my girlfriends, telling them about the weird book giveaway I had experienced there. The upstairs had been completely decorated by Wienerschnitzel. Great food, by the way.

Five years later, I met a follower of 'The Way'. He was a very sweet married father of two babies. He told me 'The Way' changed his life. It was a Christian denomination. I saw the book 'Dianetics' in his living room and told him I had attended a Scientology recruitment center. He crossed himself and told me it was a satanic religion. Then he gave me a religious presentation trying to get me to go to a church meeting of 'The Way'. It was some sort of Korean church, but instead of Hubbard, they idolized a Korean messiah, who was THE man promised in the Second Coming. Actually, I couldn't make up my mind which was weirdest of the two theologies.

People believe anything if wrapped up in religious trappings and stylings.

Maybe you have heard of the following recent cults: Bhagwan Shree Rahneesh in Oregon, Children of God in California, Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God in Uganda, Aum Shinrikyo in Japan, Order of the Solar Temple in Geneva, Branch Davidians in Texas, Heaven's Gate in California, the Manson Family in California, and the People's Temple which ended up in Guyana. I got this list from The How Stuff Works website here: http://people.howstuffworks.com/cult.htm

I was alive during all of the decades these religious churches were exposed and I remember the news stories everywhere. Yet, they keep on coming, and people keep on joining, despite the widely dispersed information of how they operate. Jenna Hill's book on coming of age within Scientology describes many of the same techniques and tactics, yet people still adore, defend and protect this church. Adult members STILL gladly abandon their children to distant isolated Scientology compounds.

I already know the book will be useless in discouraging 'believers', which is why the legal difficulty in closing these cults down. The enthralled members continue to join these religions and fight everyone who try to get them and their children to leave.

I recommend this book to interested readers.