Transcript of Part Two

Ed: And then one day, I was riding with a friend of mine, we were just eating lunch. And I could tell he was having a hard time telling me this because he had been part of the Church, too. He said, "Ed, you know, there's something you really need to see. I got some information. It came from the Internet about the Church of Scientology and I think that this is really important for you to read." And it was amazing that when he said that, my feeling and my communication to him was, "You know, I really don't want to see that." Now, isn't that interesting? He had information that he felt was important for me to see. And he felt it was truthful but I was of the mindset that I can't look at anything that might be something that might even attempt to change my mind about what I was doing.

Tera: And this is despite the challenges we were having with the Church.

Ed: Yeah. I mean, we were attacked!

Tera: And still we were…we went into hock for him to do the L's, which he had absolutely no case gain on. He actually got worse. And…to the tune of $50,000!

Ed: Yeah. That was my new life.
Tera: Yeah. This was his new life and then…

Ed: I want my old life back! (laughs)

Tera: And then I was actually removed from course on my, I was on Level 1. So, because I was connected, I had…basically the guy on the multilevel marketing was not in charge of it. He was in our up line. He was not the owner of this business. He was a sponsor, twelve levels above us.

Ed: But she got basically body routed.

Tera: I got body routed out of the course room and told that I need to disconnect from this guy who I don't even talk to personally. He's just in our up line because he is apparently suppressive. He has never even been in the Church. And then, you know, then we're being labeled enemies because we are in this multilevel marketing group and we are still loyal to the Church. Now, that's pretty bizarre.

Ed: Yeah.

Tera: Here, we're still not willing to take a look that there might be possibly something that we do need to look at. And that is even despite the fact that we would observe out point after out point after out point and violations of policies that would be violated by management or staff members. And it would be rationalized continuously in my head even as a staff member.

Ed: But, you know, we kind of got ahead of ourselves. We should just make it clear what actually occurred in our lives as a result of all of this: going into hock, and me getting my new life and my stable OT abilities. We began to fall behind on our bills. Now, this is in early 1995. I got off the L's, I think it was September of '94. And just shortly thereafter, we began to fall behind on our bills and behind on our rent.

Tera: Six months.

Ed: We were six months behind on our bills in early 1995. We fell behind on our mortgage six months. We, you know, I wasn't actually handling the bills because it was too enturbulating. I wanted to stay in the practice and Tera was the one who took all the phone calls, put the…stayed the creditors off, held them off, you know, threw a bone now and then to kind of keep them off our backs. And I remember when things started to really come apart for us and that…

Tera: Let me explain something. This is to give you some specific examples of the stress level. There would be times, we'll just see a flash of, like, headlights. There was one evening, headlights drove up our driveway and it was only to drive up and back out and go the other direction. But Ed hops up, panics, thinking it's the water man or the gas man to turn it off because we were so behind on the bills. I had this guy knock on our door at midnight, we're already in bed…

Ed: Sunday night, yes.

Tera: Sunday night at midnight knocking on my door to take my van away. Or, to pay right then and there.

Ed: Now, I'm a chiropractor (laughs) so…

Tera: Right. And then, Ed goes to the office one morning only to find this gentleman from the IRS putting locks and chains on his door. And so, I mean, there were some very hairy moments of stress and then, I took all the bills, which I had never handled before, to try and keep all the enturbulation off his plate so that he could put his focus and attention on production and making things go. And so, now all this enturbulation is on me trying to handle the screaming creditors, the threats…

Ed: Well, during that time, we were three years behind, actually. We had gotten so behind-this is further up the track-on our taxes as a result of Scientology donations that we had liens on our bank accounts. We had a lien on our house. And we had to make a decision about how are we going to live. How are we going to do this? Really, bankruptcy for us was not an option that we wanted to take. We talked to many, many different attorneys about this and I just didn't feel like we needed to do that. We did need to, technically speaking, but that we could really live with that and doing that to the people who had trusted us with their money. So, what we did as a solution for this was, I said, "Tera, we just can't keep the house." You know, here we had this house. We had equity in it. But we did have equity, we borrowed against it so it was all leveraged out. And I said, "You know, we're going to have to lose the house. We're just going to have to leave. We can't stay here. We've got to just regroup." All the equipment that I had previously paid for and that I borrowed against, I had to lose all the equipment. We actually, within one week's time, moved my office, had our equipment repo-ed, lost our house and moved into a Suburban Inn with our three children and one of them was just an infant. He had just been born. And you know, we had our bank accounts levied by the IRS, which I managed to get us out of that somehow. And maybe that was the OT ability, I talked to the IRS agent and she took the pressure off. That was what I got from L-12.

Tera: (Laughing) And the Prosperity Rundown.

Ed: Yeah, and the Prosperity Rundown. So, here we were, penniless. And we were living in a Suburban Inn with our children and I am this chiropractor in town. I had to make an arrangement with a friend of mine who was in town, same town as me, to go in to his office and we managed to work this out. And I went in and started practicing in his office the very next day. I couldn't afford to miss one day of production.
Tera: Yeah.

Ed: Because we were, at times, hard pressed to afford to eat during that period of time…

Tera: Yeah.

Ed: …to put gas in our cars. We were wearing clothes that were four and five years old. Our children, we're buying their clothes at Goodwill. I had a $2.00 blazer that my wife bought me so I could look good when I was out speaking about the benefits of chiropractic. So, we…

Tera: Another thing that is interesting and I'm sure there's going to be…maybe there's going to be some Scientologists watching this video right now. And I know that the viewpoint is…and we've had this idea, this feeling…that something is wrong with us. We would never look at the idea or the fact that it could be possibly be an inkling that something is wrong with the Church or the way that they are delivering the technology. Or maybe there's an alteration in what the tech used to be. But we would always introvert and look, well, we've got all these overts or we're just bad or, you know? Of course, you were the introvert on what's wrong with me? And we did do that because generally, when you are a good person, you do that. And so, we were totally, at that point in time, going through all that, we were still trying to make the Church right.

Ed: Yeah. And…

Tera: And that's wrong!

Ed: Right. And that's the way it worked. That's what we did. That was how we operated because we certainly didn't want to be a victim. I mean, you know, nobody wants to be a victim. But we had not acknowledged that, you know, we had been truly…we had been victimized by this suppressive element in our lives that was taking all of our money, all of our time, all of our attention and putting us in a position where we were running that on our customers and our clients just to survive. But anyway, what happened as a result, we moved out of the Suburban Lodge and we had to move in with my parents. We couldn't afford to stay outside and pay rent anywhere. We couldn't afford anything. We were so far behind. So we moved in with my parents. Now, here I was a 35 year old doctor who had been in practice, at that time, for eight years. And I'm living with my parents again. So, you can imagine…

Tera: With his family.

Ed: Yeah. With my wife and my three children. We had discussed buying a mobile home and living in a mobile home trailer in a trailer park. My dad said, "Well, hey, why don't you build out an apartment in our basement and you guys just stay here until you can get everything together." Now, they really didn't know what was going on with us. We had kind of snowed it over, gave them the old Scientology acceptable truth that, hey, you know, we just hit some rough times here and this is just, you know, something that happens in business…

Tera: Made bad investments.

Ed: …made bad investments and, yeah, acceptable truth, you know?

Tera: Yadda, yadda, yadda.

Ed: So, we told them all about that and said, "Can we just stay here until we get our financial lives together?" Now that was back in 1997.

Tera: Now, I just want to let you know and experience some of the stress level of that. Because here we were, living in their home, sharing the office…he and I slept in the office room where they have a trundle bed and my three kids were in it in the bedroom in their home. And of course, I started working at the office too, to try and help turn things around. So, I would get up in the morning, try to make breakfast for my kids. And I can remember being turned around facing the stove, flipping pancakes as I'm crying. And then I would wipe my tears, turn around with a smile and serve my pancakes to the kids.

Ed: We're happy Scientologists! (laughs)

Tera: We're happy. And then I, you know, at any moment, I had to myself, I was a wreck! But any moment I was among the family, I had to just smile. And that was so stressful. To go to work, tend to the kids, clean her house because I felt like I needed to keep some exchange in. And then at about…at the time the kids would go down to bed, 8:30, 9:00, we would go down to the basement and be putting up walls, painting…it was very stressful! It was a constant having to produce to keep the family happy, keep my in-laws happy by trying to keep their home clean because the babysitter I had hired didn't always keep the place clean. So, I would have to come home, clean up her house, then do dinner, get the kids into bed, then go downstairs and paint for several hours and we'd start again.

Ed: And I know some of you might be saying, "Oh," you know, "play the little violins for the poor chiropractor and his wife who made the stupid decisions." But, you know, you've got to understand. I mean, we're intelligent people. We've been around. You know, I went through eight years of college, you know. And this is not something that just is a stupid thing to do but it's one of those things that just was so subtle and insidious that we fell into this trap. And we lost everything. We literally lost every thing that we had. And our credit, which was triple AAA, I mean, plus, plus, plus-we could buy anything we wanted on credit if we wanted to. And that was gone, I mean, absolutely gone! We had judgments. I would meet the sheriff on the way out the driveway with the kids taking them to school. You know, and here comes the sheriff driving up giving me another judgment or another, you know, serving me to appear in court. And we were being sued left and right. The sheriff would come into the office with patients there and serve me!

Tera: (laughs) That would be embarrassing!

Ed: Well, it happened. It happened several times.

Tera: It was, I know!

Ed: You know, and we kind of got to the point where we had everybody snowed into thinking, well, you know, "we just…we had to make some decisions and we decided we wanted to live in the country." And live out with, you know, while we built our house. Well, that was five years ago! And we're sitting in the basement now, still. We still live in my parents' basement. I'm now, I'm, you know, still trying to get the practice together. It's going better, believe me, it's taking time. Things are going better but we're still living in the basement. We have borrowed furniture. This furniture we're sitting on…Actually, this furniture we're sitting on we bought about eight years ago. I have a table, kitchen table, a dinette set that, when I was in college I actually found sitting by the dumpster and I said, "Hey, that looks good." I was in my second year of college. So, I painted it and hey, that's our dining room table. Now, we've got chairs that have holes in them that we have pads over that we sit on at the table to eat. If you lean one way though, (laughs) they might collapse.

Tera: But the veneer is nice. It looks nice. I painted it nice. But…

Ed: Oh, sure. Oh, we would love to give somebody a tour of our home here. We've made the best of things. Although I will say this that it's very, very interesting what happened to open my eyes. And I'll pick up where I left off. My buddy was telling me about this information on the Internet that he had seen. And I wasn't willing to look at it. Well, about four or five weeks later, I just said, "You know, the hell with this. I'm a Scientologist, surely I can evaluate data. I can look at information, decide if it's true. And hey, if it's true, it's true! What's the difference? If the Church is everything it's supposed to be, the truth is going to come out in the end." So, I started looking at this information. Now, I didn't tell my wife. I didn't tell Tera about this. I just began looking at the information and it directed me to different websites and I began reading the stories of some of the past Scientologists. Now, some of these people are just blatant critics who never really did anything with Scientology, they just don't have anything better to do than to raise hell at somebody so they do it with the Church. Maybe it's rightfully so. But there were some genuine stories of people, just like myself, who had had similar situations come up in their lives. So, I began to get interested in what they had to say. And I started looking into the Church and what the Church was doing. And, at that stage, since it had been a few years since we were on lines, we began to become more aware of out points that we had never looked at before. We began to talk to each other. There was a time in our marriage when, if my wife had said something to be critical about the Church, I would have had to have written her up.

Tera: And vice versa.

Ed: And would have! And would have written her up and she would have written me up!

Tera: (laughs) That's pretty ________________. That's pretty blind.

Ed: As a matter of fact, you've probably written me up before, didn't you, once or twice?

Tera: Yeah, I did. (laughs)

Ed: Yeah. So, you know, that's how loyal we were. But we had gotten to the point where we said, "You know, there's something not quite right. We're just going to weigh it out and let it kind of clear. Let the air clear and then we'll go back."

Tera: Keep a low profile.

Ed: Keep a low profile. Don't make any waves.

Tera: It was noisy. People were actually declared suppressive…

Ed: For being in the multilevel thing.

Tera: Because they were in this, yeah.

Ed: But anyway, I started looking on the Internet and I found information that opened my eyes. And what really got me…and totally changed my mind was when I saw that the current management of the Church is altering the technology. They actually have altered books. I didn't believe this at first so I went and grabbed some of my books and I had some of the little…remember the little, thin green books?

Tera: The little old ones.

Ed: Yeah, the old ones. I took those…

Tera: When LRH was still on lines.

Ed: …when LRH was still alive. And I took those books and I started to compare them with the new books. Now, you might say, "Well, yeah, but they found other information." And maybe they did but they would actually change the words in the sentences. And as I was looking at that, I took one of the books, I think, it was "New Slant on Life," and I opened it up and within about five minutes, I found three or four alterations. And that's when I confronted Tera. I said, "Tera, you know, I know you don't want to look at this but you've got to see what I've just found." And when I showed her that, I think it took you all of five minutes to say, "What?! We're done!"

Tera: Yeah, that was it.

Ed: That was it.

Tera: I mean, to me, that was the ultimate. That is the ultimate overt. You know, when you're alternating the technology. And not only that, there was alterations constantly on capitalization and commas, and to put the stresses in the wrong words.

Ed: Yeah, that could be almost rationalized.

Tera: But that's just it. Is that, with the Church, the one thing you really learn and you really get is you don't get reasonable on anything especially KSW - Keeping Scientology Working, which is, don't alter tech at all!

Ed: Right. But it wasn't just commas, but we're talking about actual…

Tera: This is words!

Ed: …words!

Tera: Phrases!

Ed: …Phrases!

Tera: Deleted data. Lots of deleted data! So, it's hard to miss when you've got omitted lines, omitted paragraphs, omitted pages!!

Ed: Omitted information off of tapes, like the study tapes.

Tera: Yeah. Altered! Grossly altered!

Ed: I've got the old study tapes that LRH did and I've got the new study tapes that are missing a lot of the old study tape information.

Tera: Including a whole tape!

Ed: And this is all verifiable, folks. I mean…
Tera: The student hat!

Ed: You know, if you want to get this information, just e-mail me.

Tera: This isn't something that we're just being, giving you generalities on. This is something that you could easily just prove to yourself by looking at the data and just seeing it for yourself. That is what did it for me because if he would have had me hear him or read somebody else's viewpoint or information, I would have kept my eyes shut. And I would have, like, we probably would have been divorced by now.

Ed: Yeah, because basically the Church policy is you have to disconnect from suppressive people. And I was going in the direction of being that way. You know, and then after we had made the decision that, you know what, this stuff isn't working for us. There's something wrong with this Church. It's not…I mean, there is a problem here. After we made the decision that we're just going to, like, disconnect… We had some friends who we had known for years who were loyal Scientologists who went all the way up through OT7. And what they did-as a matter of fact, one of them went on to OT8-they started to challenge the OT7 six month check because they found policy that was specifically about the six month check. They challenged it.

Tera: It's a technical bulletin.

Ed: And it's a technical bulletin that they were using. And they found that that bulletin had been altered and so they began pushing on this line and shortly thereafter became declared. The last conversation I had with a reg (Registrar) at Flag on the phone was that, "Hey, I have some friends who got all the way up to OT7 and then they became suppressive. You tell me what's right about that. If the tech really works…if you're really making OT's…how the hell does somebody go all the way up the bridge, contribute all kinds of money to causes and pay for all of that and then become suppressive?"

Tera: Or become deathly ill?

Ed: Which, we have a friend…

Tera: We have a friend who just looks like he's on his last leg…

Ed: …who is…he's gaunt!

Tera: …like, death row!

Ed: Yeah. He is just emaciated. And he's on OT7! And you know, you've got to look at that. And we finally just went, "You know, there's just something wrong here. Something badly wrong." Our lives after going to Flag and doing the super powerful L Rundowns, became a complete financial disaster! And you know, I'm through with looking at myself and going, you know, "Maybe it's just me." You know, I'm okay. My wife's okay. You know what we found and we learned through this disaster and this calamity? We found out who our real friends were. We found out the people who mattered to us were the people who would stand by us no matter what happened! And we learned who those people were. And yeah, there were one or two of our friends who were Scientologists who are still our friends. But by and large, the people who called themselves our friends won't speak to us now-won't call us. They avoid us, they are disconnecting. When this comes out, I'm sure they're going to hear all kinds of things about us.

Tera: (laughs) We're going to be popular.

Ed: Well, we know about the Church's policy on, you know, fair game. I'm sure we're going to become fair game. Our attorney is going to have a copy of this date and the date that we made it so that, you know, we can defend ourselves against slander and liable. But that's the way the Church operates. They will try to defamate us. They will try to create problems in our lives, I'm sure. And we understand that. Believe me, we have nothing to lose. I live in my parents' basement.

Tera: We have absolutely nothing to lose! (laughs)

Ed: I mean, what are you going to do, make my landlord kick me out? No, my mommy won't kick me out of her house. She had a hard time understanding why I'm still there four or five years later! But she's not going to kick me out of her house. So we've got nothing to lose.

Tera: No, I'll tell you what is ironic about all of this is one piece of tech of the Church is Potential Trouble Sources and suppressiveness. And the tech that you learn about is that when you are connected to suppression, you start to have all kinds of problems in life. And so, it's ironic that the tech comes from the very Church- that was altered by the way-that we became Potential Trouble with the connection because our lives literally started to go into trouble and ended.

Ed: Yeah, the more connected we…

Tera: The more connected we were…

Ed: with Flag…

Tera: The more connected we were, the harder and the worse our lives became! And the harder we kept a veneer on that things were going well and that we were successful because we were trying to portray the successful image of a Scientologist.

Ed: Right. And we were…

Tera: When we weren't!

Ed: We were having to keep that image up because we didn't want to…you know, I actually wrote a letter-I still have a copy of it-that I wrote to my auditor and had her route to the CS (case supervisor) that said, you know, "I don't want to have the image of being a Scientologist. I don't want to start a mission. I don't want to disseminate until I can get my life together! Because right now, I don't feel like I'm being what a Scientologist should be in terms of what I have and what I can do in life and what I can effect." But when we disconnected from the Church, when we said, "That's it, no more," our lives began to change in a very positive direction.

Tera: Drastically!

Ed: I was happier. I became less stressed. My business began to expand. Opportunities began to show up. Income started to increase. Bills began to be paid off. And we've got money now in the bank! We're going to be building a home. And, you know, that's great! So, what does that tell you? I mean, what does that tell me? Should I go back to the Church of Scientology? I don't think so! I'll tell you what was the thing that sold me on leaving. And at this point, all I can say is that, you know, we've spoken long enough. We've really told our story, (to Tera) wouldn't you agree?

Tera: In a nutshell.

Ed: We didn't give you all the gory details but I think you get the idea. L 11, L 12, Life changing? I would have to say no doubt about that. Life changing but not in the direction that I would want to go. You know, if it hadn't changed my life at all, I would just feel a little bit jilted, you know? That I paid $50,000 for nothing! Actually what I bought with that $50,000 was a complete disaster in my life that, you know, I'm just thankful that I have a wife who is understanding, children who, you know…

Tera: Three.

Ed: That are young enough that they don't really get all that's happened to us. We've made it the best for them. But my parents, who have been extremely patient with us and they don't even know this story. I mean, we've just been too ashamed to really admit that we were so duped! (laughs)

Tera: That we've been duped big time! We were blind!

Ed: That we were such suckers for this whole game! So, all I can tell you is that if you want to contact us, we will be glad to talk to you. And we're not going to charge you any money.

Tera: (laughs) It's for free.

Ed: All we want to do is just set things straight, you know.

Tera: There will be no reg cycles!

Ed: Yeah. We're not going to reg you. We're not going to convince you that you need to do what we did but I'd be glad to share with you where we found our information. And you can evaluate it for yourself. I would love to still have friends who are in the search. There were some nice people I met who I feel like are genuine. They didn't have any furniture but they were genuine people, you know? (laughs) They drove 20 year old cars…

Tera: And there were some great staff members. Great staff members.

Ed: …couldn't hardly keep gas in them.

Tera: Poor as can be but great people.

Ed: Yeah, wonderful people. If they were one of my neighbors, I'm sure I'd loan them a cup of sugar. But the thing you've got to realize is that these people are…they don't have stats in their own life! They are wiped. And, you know, maybe there's some virtue in that but that's not why I got into it. I got into it to become more successful. I spent a lot of money and a lot of time to try to achieve that goal and what I wound up with was an empty shell in my own life and the life of my family. And it's taken us a good five years to get things back. It's actually now been since 1994, it's 2001, it's been seven years now that it's taken us to actually begin to the recovery process.

Tera: We've actually just reached a new foundation. We were below foundation. We were still six feet under…

Ed: Right. And then…

Tera: …for those five years and we are just now on the surface building a foundation. We're just now at that point which we can now breathe.

Ed: Right.

Tera: And it feels good. The stress is gone. We're enjoying life. It's a lot more fun.

Ed: Yeah. We have just now begun to achieve some goals. We've taken some vacations with our children. We've paid off some of our bills.

Tera: Yeah. For the first time.

Ed: We still have many tens of thousands of dollars in debt that we borrowed against Scientology and we're hoping that this year we'll be able to pay all of those debts off and finally put this whole thing behind us. We're making this video primarily as just a way of cleaning the slate for us. We've really waited a long time to tell our story. And the story we had really planned on telling was still going to be a little bit of a fabrication. I mean, we were going to tell people how we lost money through bad investments. But, you know what? We're just going to tell the truth. We invested in an idea. We invested in this whole self improvement cult and that's what caused our lives to be what they became during these past seven years. A financial calamity! I remember my accountant just being in shock over the amounts of money I was giving to this Church. And you know, I look back at that and I think, you know, "Boy, you know, he must have really had to have toned it down to have even talked to me." My parents, they were in utter shock! They couldn't understand why, what are you doing? What's the problem? One of my brothers once told me, "Whatever you need," you know, "if you need to get out of this thing, I can get friends and we can help you to leave this thing." They were genuinely concerned! I was oblivious! I should have listened to them. And, in retrospect, I probably should have done a lot of things differently. But here we are. We're done. Feel free to contact us - again, my e-mail address. If you have got criticisms, fine. You know? I'm fine with that.

Tera: And if you need to send a declaration of suppression, this is where you can send it.

Ed: You can just forward our SP declare there and it will be okay.

Tera: I'm sure it's framed! (laughs)

Ed: You know, we're going to frame it. It's alright. I know our eternity is…

Tera: We're going to be proud of that one! (laughs)

Ed: Our eternity is done. And if you talk to us…I know some of you won't be able to…hold onto this video and, you know, don't watch it for five years and then watch it again. And maybe then, you will have the realizations that…hey, you know, maybe they were right. We don't say Scientology doesn't help some people. Obviously, it does help some people. It's just that it does hurt people too. And it certainly has been that for us. So, I think we're all done with this video.

Tera: Yeah.

Ed: Okay. Have a great life.

Part One xxxxPart Two

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