Scientology is an implant
Jon Atack

Yes, indeed, Scientology is a system of implanting and the "cognitions" are predetermined by the processes. But it is a fairly complex system of implanting which follows the rules as laid out by all of the authorities - Jolly West, Lifton, Singer, Schein, Ofshe, Hassan and Cialdini. Using Schein's model - Unfreezing the existing values; Changing those values; Refreezing the new values - we see that Dianetics propels the subject into age regression where he or she will have to invent memories because we don't actually have the capacity for remembering that Hubbard claimed (the failure of the only experiment made by Hubbard into recovering memories is noted in Science of Survival, but take a look at the notes published at the time if you can). This is False Memory Syndrome (see Ofshe and Watters Making Monsters on recovered memory). Then into past lives for the creation of more False Memories and the reconstruction of the person. The content of the implants is the teaching of Hubbard (including space opera).

In auditing having been given the suggestions by Hubbard about engrams, implanting et al people start to run them in session. Service facsimiles and the teachings on spirit possession (body thetans) compound this. In the TRs intense hypnotic states are achieved resulting in dissociation and the beginning of the construction of a cloned pseudo-identity (see Hassan Combatting Cult Mind Control and Singer & Lalich Cults in Our Midst). TRs are properly role-play drilling, where a new communication behaviour is instilled. Such hypnotic phenomena as hallucination are commonplace due to immobility and visual fixation. Scientologists retreat into TRs when challenged, re-inducing the flat, emotionless, unresponsive state (thought stopping). Through Tone Scale drilling, people learn to pretend emotions. The downside is that they can lose spontaneity by doing so. They can lose the capacity for natural emotions, or become confused about what their real emotions are. TRs also teach people to hide real feelings.

With the CCHs, mimcry is used. The four basic forms of hypnosis or trance induction or heightening of suggestibility seem to be repetition, fixation, paradox (or confusion) and mimicry. On the objectives, people have dizzy, dissociated feelings. Hubbard even said that on OpPro by Dup if the preclear says he feels as if he is "floating" to end off because s/he is "exterior". This spatial dissociation is a common fact know to all hypnotists (and Hubbard of course claimed great expertise as a hypnotist - see my own paper Never believe a hypnotist). Psychiatrists call it "depersonalization". Oddly enough, large doses of vitamin B-6 can also create this state. Don't try it, you'll end up in the funny farm.

Alongside all this runs the loaded language. Scientology has 1,000 pages of redefined and newly invented words (or neologisms if you want to get technical). This language redefines reality for the victim just as Korzybski said it would ("the map is not the territory - the word is not the thing itself). Margaret Singer quite rightly praises George Orwell for his analysis of language in 1984 in her excellent Cults in Our Midst. The appendix on Newspeak is particularly revealing. Hubbard called Orwells 1984 "wonderful ... the palest shadow of what a world would be like under the rule of the secret use of Scientology" in PDC lecture 20 (transcript p.49).

Hubbard engaged greatly in doublethink. So words reverse in meaning (reasonable, for example) and the individual comes to think within the language - to map reality using Hubbard ideas. This is partly why Scientologists don't recover unaided. They have been cognitively restructured.

I strongly recommend that anyone who has been involved in Dianetics or Scientology considers these ideas, not just in the shorthand form given here, but through the work of the authors cited in the text.