Alone Time

Or Lack of It

This post is in reference to the April 17, 2025 poll. Be sure to get your votes in on this week’s poll.

Alone time, what a silly thought. Anyone who has ever been in Sea Org understands this phrase. That was something I had to learn the really hard way in Sea Org.

Growing up, my happy place was curled up in a sunbeam in a chair with my face in a book. Sure I had friends, I ran and played and did all the happy childhood things a kid growing up in the 50s and 60s did, but if I needed to recharge, just build my soul, I could happily lose myself for hours in a good book. I started reading before I started school and it has been my lifelong escape from the stresses of life.

Sea Org was a rude awakening for me in this respect. There is no such thing as alone time. You eat with others, sleep communally, learn to get dressed in front of others, use common bathrooms and even shower in an open plan shower. There is no place to hide. No place to think. No place to take a minute to yourself. No place to just be you for a minute.

If you are studying, there is someone watching you do this. When you are getting “spiritual counseling,” you are with someone else. Not once are you allowed to be by yourself with your own thoughts.

Even Hubbard’s locational – a simple process meant to make you more comfortable with your surroundings is not a solo activity. Someone else does this to you.

Now you are saying – “what about solo auditing?” What about it? Sure you take an emeter and ask yourself the questions Hubbard told you to ask yourself. Then you take the worksheets from those sessions to someone else, the case supervisor, to judge if you did the session properly.

It is actually that way the minute you get into Scientology. You are twinned with someone. People are watching your progress. If you take a bathroom break, you’d better make it fast. But, until you become a member of the supposed elite society, the Sea Organization, there is no way they can maintain complete control over you. You still maintain some semblance of freedom in your personal life until you sign away that freedom when you commit yourself to The Billion Year Contract.

There was a comment made today on Tony Ortega’s Substack by another ex Sea Organization member that covers it in a nutshell:

When I got out, for a time I was repairing computers. I visited several actual monasterial facilities, notably the Sisters of Mercy and the Poor Clares. They were all living like royalty compared to the Sea Org.

Once a person enters Sea Organization, they are told they are the elite of the elite. In stark contrast, they are relegated to the bottom rung of society and treated worse than any prisoner or person in a monastery. Yet they are supposed to be the ones leading the charge to save the planet. The bottom line is that the higher you get in Scientology, the less there is left of the real you.

It is scary how easy it was for me and my fellow true believers to simply surrender ourselves to nonstop scrutiny. We understood our incoming and outgoing mail was censored, we had no personal mailing address. We had no telephone number. Those of us with passports surrendered them for safekeeping.

And then, every day in lockstep, we showed up and pretended to be happy, to enjoy what we were doing, to even have a clue what we were doing. I don’t remember thinking it was unfair or wanting more. I don’t remember feeling deprived of money or food or sleep. But I had a really hard time not getting to read for pleasure.

I know we couldn’t be left alone with our thoughts because we would begin to wonder why we were allowing ourselves to be treated this way. If we had time to think, we would have understood that Scientology was not ever designed to make the able more able. The longer we stayed, the less able we became.

But we did so as a group. Because alone, we would have figured it out.