The religious message and the religious practice of the Church of Scientology comes and is taught to mankind in a time when spiritual messages are not easy to perceive. There are many serious reasons why a person's subjective reality may be blocked from any spiritual message.
We shall name only a few:
1) mass secularization of public consciousness;
2) traditional religious systems, doctrine and practice hold little attraction the majority of contemporaries;
3) schisms of conventional churches foster a sense of mistrust and disappointment when simple believers begin to look for answers on religious questions;
4) losses of personal experience of one's spiritual foundation and false identification of self with transient values -- that is, the loss of spiritual identity -- causes the beginning of searches for answers to spiritual questions outside the conventional structures. There is a loss of the ability to view oneself in a wider spiritual context than the current life. The situation grows complicated through numerous social, political, ecological and cultural crises, the sources of which take root in the person's oblivion of his own spiritual nature. The person has lost the knowledge of self as a spiritual being which results in external accidents and shocks, i.e., the person has lost his spiritual identity and identifies himself with false values. As this false self-identification has gone too far, so then the returning to a true identity, to a realization of oneself as a spiritual being, requires a special long-duration path, a path to restoration of spiritual self-identification. The way of returning to spiritual self-identification does not always pass through a conventional religious system. To the contrary, many search for a way outside the conventional religious systems, and they certainly have the right to pursue a path of spiritual returning and restoration that is outside the conventional religious systems, if the traditions are not able to provide an answer to the demands of a period. Scientology in its religious practice and religious messages provides the answer and a way of spiritual returning. The Church of Scientology addresses the person who was born in a non-religious epoch, and uses customs and trends created by this special epoch sufficient to return a spiritual self-consciousness. The Church of Scientology takes into account the religious and confessional diversity of modern society. Therefore the spiritual message of the Church of Scientology is also directed to all religious groups, permits those of other religions to practice Scientology, and permits a member of Scientology to maintain his membership in another religion.
The mission of the Church of Scientology has a special importance for post-totalitarian countries. All the above-given barriers to spiritual returning in the modern world are multiplied in a post-totalitarian period. This adds extremely important problems which are unknown by countries with advanced democratic institutions such as the reconstruction of institutions of civil society which were completely destroyed in the period of totalitarian regimes. What is meant here are institutions of social and local self-management and the necessity to train the population in skills of common construction. And exactly here it is that the experience of the Church of Scientology in building a community, and its technologies of spiritual training, can and already do play a significant role in creating a new spiritual ground in which non-totalitarian authorities are present.
The situation becomes difficult through inter-ethnic and political conflicts which constantly threaten to develop into international and inter-religious situations in this post-totalitarian period. The experience of successful inter-religious work, which the Church of Scientology has, is therefore also an urgent matter for new states, countries and territories.
Scientology addresses the person who is ready to execute the search for his true spiritual nature on his own strength. Scientology gives clear promises and the criteria for fulfillment of these promises. It is especially important for people compelled to trust only in themselves and their own forces, and who simultaneously search for a spiritual basis and motivation of personal independence and independence in a spiritual sphere. There are many such people in all social and professional layers of modern Russia. It explains the fast and stable success of Scientology in the new Russia. So what are the aspects of its internal, religious/spiritual character, which make the image of Scientology attractive for independently thinking, active and fact-searching persons in the post-totalitarian era? For this purpose it is necessary to realize some of the fundamental features of Scientology as a doctrine and as a church organization as well as its value for people who did not find answers in the traditional church.
It is particularly necessary to answer these questions: What in Scientology represents its theological system? How does it address the problem of maintaining holy knowledge? What is the structure of the spiritual message of Scientology? What is the structure of the new beingness in Scientology and what is its understanding of the Absolute?
In the preliminary answers to these questions we will try to clarify the reason for the swift success of Scientology in Russia and in the post-totalitarian countries as a whole.