Interview: https://soundcloud.com/user-131237453-697682151/streeet-stories-interview/s-uHfd3
Key points
- Glen joined the church when he was 18
- He grew up in a country town,
- He is successful business owner
Scientologists tend to get a bad rap when it comes to representation by the media. Most if not all news outlets likes to focus on whatever crazy thing that Tom Cruise or John Travolta said regarding their beliefs. However, according the 2016 census data there are 1,684 Scientologists in Australia, surely they can’t all be mega rich celebrities that are all out of touch with reality? So, what leads the common man or woman to become a Scientologist and why?
Enter Glen Stewart. Glen is a local Canberra business owner, father, husband, and Scientologist. I had the pleasure of getting to sit down with him to talk about his journey to Scientology
Glen grew up in the country town of Bega, on the far south coast. He had a relatively normal for a country kid. He talked to me about hanging with his friends until well after dark, going to down to the river to play, and building tree houses, among other things. However, when it came to school Glen decided pretty early on that that the social studies, and the humanities weren’t for him and focus a lot of his effort on physics, mathematics and the sciences, and did pretty well at them as well.
When he turned 18, he moved to Canberra and started studying Information technology and engineering at the Australian National University (ANU). That’s where things started to fall apart for Glen, he found he couldn’t focus on his studies as well he used to able to. He talked about how in high school his mind was sharp, and he could remember pages and pages of computer code, but at university he just couldn’t anymore.
It was arond this time one of Glen’s roommates showed him a book called Dianetics. Dianetics was written by L. Ron Hubbard and was originally published in 1950. It is the first ever piece of literature regarding what would become Scientology. After reading the book Glen’s interest had been peaked and he and his roommate went down to the church to find out more.
Glen talked about how he went down to the church multiple times over the course of about a month and he would just talk to the people there. Over the course of these visits it became clear to him that these people knew something about life that he didn’t. At some point they asked him “what in your life do you want to handle?” And he replied with “study and communication”. Glen signed up for the communication course offered by the church. One of the prerequisites of the communication course was in depth study about the English language, Glen said that he had to look up and gain full understanding of around 5000 words.
After doing the prerequisite study and then the communication course Glen said he felt capable to study and tackle pretty much anything in life. So, he went on to do the “purification rundown” which involves sweating out all the toxins in your body and became a fully-fledged Scientologist.
Nearly 2 decades years later Glen is happily married with a 10-year-old daughter and has been running a successful business for the last 20 years.
Sam's blog 