LEGAL STUFF : Nothing is quoted directly from any of the copyrighted procedures.
Dianetics® & Hubbard® & NOTs® & Scientology® are registered trademarks of the Religious Technology Center (RTC) and are acknowledged.
Click here to read the correspondence which result in material being removed.
I do not think any further inquiry is necessary to establish that the activities of this organisation are potentially harmful. I have no doubt that Scientology is totally valueless in promoting health and, in particular, that people seeking help with problems of mental health can gain nothing from the attentions of this organisation. [Kenneth Robinson, Hansard 737, 05 December 1966]
What they do, however, is to direct themselves deliberately towards the weak, the unbalanced, the immature, the rootless and the mentally or emotionally unstable; to promise them remoulded, mature personalities and to set about fulfilling the promise by means of untrained staff, ignorantly practising quasi-psychological techniques, including hypnosis. It is true that the scientologists claim not to accept as clients people known to be mentally sick, but the evidence strongly suggests that they do. [Kenneth Robinson, Hansard 472, 06 March 1967]
I settled down to the 'personality test'. This consisted of 200 questions of the type much favoured by women's magazines (Are you considered warm-hearted by your friends? Do you enjoy activities of your own choosing? Are you likely to be jealous? Do you bite your fingernails?) … Eventually, a young man took my answers away for "processing". … On the basis of all this, the young man gave me a 20-minute personality analysis, which mainly consisted of portentous-sounding pseudo-scientific neologisms … At the end, he said to me impressively, "So you see. it's all very scientific - thanks to the fact that our founder is a man of science himself" "Oh yes, very scientific indeed," I said. … I hadn't the heart to tell him that his super-scientific system had failed to detect the fact I had marked the 'don't know' column against all 200 questions in the test. [Dr. David Delvin, World Medicine, 29 July 1969]
In addition to violating and abusing its own members civil-rights, the organization over the years with its "Fair Game" doctrine has harassed and abused those persons not in the Church whom it perceives as enemies. The organization clearly is schizophrenic and paranoid, and the bizarre combination seems to be a reflection of its founder LRH. The evidence portrays a man who has been virtually a pathological liar when it comes to his history, background, and achievements. The writings and documents in evidence additionally reflect his egoism, greed, avarice, lust for power, and vindictiveness and aggressiveness against persons perceived by him to be disloyal or hostile.
A space-opera by Lafayette Ronald Hubbard that's become a major cult. Here in England they are not a church, as they like to think of themselves, which is why you'll often see the abbreviation CoS for Church of Scientology (the organisation behind the belief of Scientology), though detractors change this to Co$ as the auditing processes are increasingly expensive.
(They tried to get themselves registered as a religion here but failed, and in July 1970 Lord Denning said "In my judgment, the evidence indicates that the sort of ceremony which takes place on a Sunday afternoon in this chapel at Saint Hill Manor [East Grinstead, Sussex] is a ceremony of instruction in the tenets of this particular body, but it is not a ceremony which can be properly described as constituting worship, and consequently I agree that it has not been established that this chapel is a place of meeting for religious worship; and so, in my judgment, this appeal should be dismissed on the ground that the chapel is in truth not a place to which the section has any application. Appeal dismissed. Leave to appeal to the House of Lords refused.")
Many people consider Scientology a cult due to the levels of indoctrination (making people feel inadequate and incomplete because they haven't been cleansed of impurities, demanding group loyalty via repetitive procedures and communal behaviour reinforcement which brands anyone who doesn't toe the party line as disloyal and then increasing the pressure to be accepted back again to gain social status, never asking questions and accepting everything that is told to them by a 'higher authority') and their legal representative's attempts to suppress anyone who exposes their materials. They are also the funding organisation for various 'fronts' including those whose innocent exteriors advertise ways of shaking off dependency on drugs or alcohol, but in reality they are nothing more than recruiting schemes designed to lead to concepts such as cleansing / auditing.
The underlying premise is that a group of extra-terrestrial inter-galactic beings called thetans (who existed even before time began) eternally re-incarnated themselves as separate creatures. However, once the MEST universe began (Ron's techno-babble jargon for Matter Energy Space Time), they became trapped and their powers restrained by the use of 'implants' - some form of hypnotic suggestion. Apparently this has been going on for 4 quadrillion years (give or take a millennia or so), despite the fact most modern cosmologists quote a figure of between 12-15,000,000,000 years for the age of the universe, or rather this universe, as Hubbard proposes there are more than one existing side by side, which is certainly a valid hypothesis.
So, why can't you remember any of these incidents? Simply because you are being prevented from doing so by your own mind working against itself, as it's split into two parts. The first, or 'analytical' mind, is an infallible recorder of all the body's sensory experiences (even when in the womb or before conception, from past lives) and is a flawless computer; but the second, or 'reactive' mind, has a mass of records created during times of stress or pain (even if the body is unconscious at the time), which is where the engrams come in, for this is what they are - memories of bad things.
Anyway, back to the space opera, which even Hubbard acknowledged in his writing of this incident was an appropriate description. The aim of Scientology is to return power to the thetans (he wrote it as a capital Greek 'Theta' followed by a superscripted lower-case Roman 'n') by removing the implants, which will result in an 'operating thetan', or someone who is in full control of their extra-sensory powers. About 95,000,000 years ago there was a vast galactic confederation of 76 planets, ruled by a creature named Xenu (in some of the earlier documents this is written as Xemu), but as over-population had become a serious problem the inhabitants were slaughtered and their frozen souls (thetans) put into refrigerated boxes and transported to Earth (which was called Teegeeack at the time) in spacecraft that looked like Douglas DC8s (there is some confusion whether the DC8s were copied from the spacecraft or the other way around, but remember this doesn't make any sense and they had no taste otherwise they would have chosen Vickers Super VC10s which were far nicer to look at and fly in <g>), where they were left near active volcanoes that were subsequently destroyed by hydrogen bombs. He lists over two-dozen of the most common volcanoes and mentions there are 600 others, but the fact that the volcanoes he names didn't exist that long ago (despite his assertions they did and still do exist) is conveniently glossed over in the excited rush of his revelation, nor does he mention that once the bombs had exploded there wouldn't be much left of the volcano or anything else in the immediate vicinity (though he does mention some severe winds), but why bother with mere details?
From this we, as individuals, are actually groups of thetans, with body-thetans (a bit like medieval demons or bad spirits) having to be purged by reciting to them the incidents of their capture and imprisonment. This is part of a counselling process called auditing, during which 'engrams' or memories of bad incidents (traumas) are recalled, rather like psychotherapists doing regression hypnosis, and with equally fictitious results. Although René Lafayette (a pseudonym he once used for an early story he published) had a dread of psychoanalysis as he thought everything they did was based on electric-shock 'therapy', many of his ideas are actually based on discarded Freudian concepts regarding the origins of hysteria and psychosomatic illnesses, as is his use of the term 'engram' which he didn't originate; neither did he invent the term 'scientology', for it was created in 1907 by philologist Alan Upward to mock pseudo-scientific theories, so the use of the term is certainly appropriate in this context.
How do we know any of this is true? Well, in December 1967 Hubbard knew someone had to take the plunge, and he reached operating thetan level 3 (OT III), probably the only one in 75,000,000 years to have done it. Well done Ron!
There are higher levels which deal with envisioning lines of energy joining objects, placing one's intent one another person or divining their own thetans, and doing the same thing for animals and plants; these higher levels are hidden from people at lesser OT levels in case they are driven insane by the knowledge: OT3 even states that people can die from pneumonia and other things when trying to accept this particularly difficult concept.
Hubbard also claimed to have visited heaven at a very specific time.
This is something RTC excel at, as they are paranoid about letting anyone see the actual contents of their 'secret' levels; this is usually accomplished by litigation, but also extends to their own members who are not only denied any clues as to what lies ahead for them on their course of self-discovery, but also their ability to search the WWW is severely compromised by the installation of a program which acts in two ways - it either blocks access of any kind to certain http:// addresses (including quite a few universities and media sites) and newsgroups, or once into a site then removes various words (such as "not") and names whilst pages are displayed (they are replaced with spaces), but if it then finds further words it actually breaks the connection.
Full descriptions of the actual procedures from the original documentation can be found at some of the sites listed in the links below, where you'll see how the texts ramble on without any real attempt at coherence (they're full of repeated phrases and outright contradictions all in the same sentence), with lots of pseudo-psychoanalytical words and brain-numbing techno-babble whose only purpose is to provide 'meaning' to the processes. Any sane person has real trouble trying to follow it, simply because it's so stupid.
Once you've completed all the levels above, you are given access to the really secret stuff, called Lists, which go from levels L9-L12. It's basically more of the same with even more repetition (and auditing fees) as regression is taken to an extreme by continually asking the implant what it is, and this also explains the true causes of such things as allergies and physical illness, but to begin with any possible mistakes in past auditing must be repaired. There is some reassurance, however, for whilst the uninitiated might think both individual thetans and groups of them are everywhere, it only seems to be the case and isn't actually true.
As thetans are entities in their own right, and so can react differently from their host body to external stimuli, but they also become very confused about who they are, as well as where and when they are and what they look like, which is why they like to hang around with each other, but clearing all these misconceptions can lead to some truly incredible results. The problem is, getting rid of them isn't as easy as it might appear, for even though one thetan has been removed (it tends to evaporate as the result of being imagined into being and then exorcised), it can leave behind residual energy which itself contains another thetan, and some of them even protest about attempting to remove them by reacting negatively and becoming more entrenched.
Some of the tests, or 'rundowns' as they're called, involve trying to get a reaction from the subject by asking hundreds of questions and speaking single words at them in an attempt to discover the identities of the group of thetans and thus learn one's identity from the key-words; examples of types are : doctor, chemist, boaster, idiot, cheetah, pixie, killer, king, painter. Some sources indicate this process costs $1000 per hour and that a minimum of 25 courses are required, paid in advance, but as you've already spent over $100,000 just to get here, what's a little more to achieve a perfect clear? Thetans apparently go around zapping one another with beams of ultra-UV radiation (which would be bordering on X-rays), but as they have a hard time seeing they sometimes hit the host body instead, which results in a charge being built up that manifests as a desire for violence or even murder. This simmering danger can be removed, but only by… you guessed it: further auditing.
I'd like to be able to show a scan of Hubbard's childish scrawl of this series of events and a transcript, but after threats from Scientology's lawyersand Demon's legal department have removed them .
However, Wikileaks now hosts the entire series of documents, and despite having received an Ava-gram, have sufficient clout to ignore it, whilst Operation Clambake shows page 1 only.
If at this point you're going "clambake?", according to Hubbard's A History Of Man, which re-wrote evolution over the past 60 trillion years, many engrams can be traced back to clams who had an inner conflict between opening and closing, and so the discussion of these incidents with the uninitiated could cause their jaws to experience extreme pain or even lock-up. The book also explains why the uninitiated cannot cry, because they don't know what crying is really a reaction to. The answer is simple: - as clams developed into molluscs called 'weepers', they became stressed as they tried to breath air between being swamped by the ocean waves, so this anxiety became linked to emitting salt-water, though how the mollusc's breathing tubes (which became clogged with sand) became eyes isn't mentioned, and the Piltdown Man was also the cause of many engrams - Hubbard didn't know this was a hoax that would be exposed a year after publication.
A very slightly modified version of pages 1-3 is quoted in Margery Wakefield's book The Road To Xenu, which can be found through the links section below.
Auditing is performed using what is called an E-meter (electro-psychometer), which consists of two metal cylinders (ideally normal tin cans) to be held by the victim… auditee, in either hand, and responses to certain very specific questions are used to determine how much money should be requested for further auditing sessions. It's the basis of most so-called 'lie-detectors'.
However, in October 1962, during which Scientology was being investigated by the American Food & Drug Administration, Hubbard wrote that the E-meter was "a valid religious instrument, used in Confessionals, and is no way diagnostic and does not treat". This lack of treatment is certainly true, as it's patent title suggest: Device for Measuring and Indicating Changes in the Resistance of a Human Body, (US Patent 3,290,589).
The E-meter began as a simple ohm-meter for measuring resistance, and now it's a very complicated-looking ohm-meter that still measures resistance, but as Jenna Elfman said during a Mirabella interview in March 1999, "You know how your head feels heavy when you're having a problem? It's actually mass that you can weigh. It's compressed mental energy. And the E-meter sees changes in that." So, now you know.
Ron doing his thing on a tomato to prove they can feel pain [mid 1959].