Online Courses Provide Tools for Life
Celebrating three years of free online training in 17 languages through the Scientology website and the Volunteer Ministers website: since launch of the program in October 2010, thousands have improved their lives through these courses.
An engineer from the Philippines, Jay had reached a dead end in his career. He had worked hard to earn a degree, but soon found his skills obsolete, outstripped by the speed of technological change. Searching online for a new direction, he found the Volunteer Ministers website.
Andy is from Ghana. He arrived at the Volunteer Ministers website for an entirely different reason. “I wondered why people fight,” he says. “I could not understand why there were a lot of conflicts or quarrels in our homes, schools, workplaces, churches, government and even between states.”
Sharon came to the website from the United States. She had spent the past 10 years in “very intense dedication to living life in a better way”—a decision she says she made to be able to proudly look at herself in the mirror. Her decisions “were not necessarily the ‘immediate fun’ of the now,” but ones she hoped would provide fulfillment and a different kind of fun in the future. Unfortunately, her choices were not very popular with her children and friends.
Three very different people from vastly different backgrounds with their own concerns. But they, and tens of thousands more, have found the exact help they needed from “Tools for Life” courses on the Scientology Volunteer Ministers website and the Scientology website. The courses cover these subjects:
- The Technology of Study
- The Dynamics of Existence
- The Components of Understanding
- The Emotional Tone Scale
- Communication
- Assists for Illnesses and Injuries
- Answers to Drugs
- How to Resolve Conflicts
- Integrity and Honesty
- Ethics and Conditions
- The Cause of Suppression
- Solutions for a Dangerous Environment
- Marriage
- Children
- Tools for the Workplace
- Basics of Organizing
- Targets and Goals
- Investigations
- Fundamentals of Public Relations
Each is introduced by a brief video that gives an overview of the course.
Once available only in Scientology Churches or Missions or through traveling Volunteer Minister centers, the release of the training online in October 2010 made it possible to extend this knowledge everywhere. These courses are available in 17 languages through the Volunteer Ministers website and the Scientology website.
As to the results:
Jay, the Philippine engineer, enrolled on the Technology of Study course. “It is really a must for an individual these days to be quick in studying any topic,” he says. He found Study Technology helped him overcome procrastination and a host of unpleasant factors he always associated with study in the past. His advice to others who find themselves in similar circumstances: “With so many redundancies happening in the workplace it is imperative that the individual should help himself get some form of qualification through study, and The Technology of Study could help you get there.”
On completing the How to Resolve Conflicts course, Andy felt equipped with tools to resolve conflicts large and small.
The Targets and Goals course helped Sharon look at her life and where she is going. “I am happier with myself than I have ever been in my life,” she says. “What the course really did for me was to validate what I had been doing, offer some ideas for more step-by-step ways to write my targets and goals and successfully carry them out...and to see my own forward movement to my own ideal scene.”
All 19 courses are available through the Scientology Website, the Volunteer Ministers website and the Scientology Online Courses App. Courses are individually supervised by trained Volunteer Ministers.
Scientology Founder L. Ron Hubbard conceived and developed the Volunteer Ministers program in 1976 in light of the escalating turmoil of the late 1960s and 1970s: student unrest, cities battered by riots, skyrocketing divorce rates, staggering increase in violence and crime. To counter this social chaos, he developed tools any caring individual can learn and use to bring order and calm to an area. The online Volunteer Minister courses contain the technology he developed to accomplish this goal.
The Volunteer Ministers program was expressly intended for use by Scientologists and non-Scientologists alike. Anyone of any culture or creed may train as a Volunteer Minister and use these tools to help their families and communities, and all are welcome to do so.
Equipped with effective technology to resolve virtually any difficulty, Volunteer Ministers live by the motto: “No matter the problem, something can be done about it.”
Transcending all ethnic, cultural and religious boundaries, the Volunteer Ministers program is there for anyone in need of help and those who wish to help others.
In creating the Volunteer Ministers program, L. Ron Hubbard wrote, “If one does not like the crime, cruelty, injustice and violence of this society, he can do something about it. He can become a Volunteer Minister and help civilize it, bring it conscience and kindness and love and freedom from travail by instilling into it trust, decency, honesty and tolerance.”