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Video Vault: When Scientology basked in the success of giant cucumbers

Hubbard_ThetaClearOur video source is back with a new “quote video” for us today, and another fun slice of L. Ron Hubbard wisdom.

This week, we get a peek at the “Theta Clear Congress,” a series of lectures Hubbard made in 1959.

Here’s a description from Bridge Publications, which sells the lectures for $125.00:

“An experiment that riveted the world: Eighteen-foot tomato plants and cucumbers the size of watermelons made global headlines. But what those newspapers knew wasn’t even half of the epic saga surrounding L. Ron Hubbard’s greenhouse plant experiments, and a breakthrough concerning life itself: how the fundamental postulates of survive and succumb interplay in life and result in the game called ‘victim.’ In the wake of that breakthrough came further discoveries revealing the basic reasons for a being’s postulates of self-destruction, and their solution — Communication Processes sweeping the track clean of core aberrations. Moreover, here’s where application took on a fully massive dimension with the announcement of a new type of auditing enabling one auditor to handle hundreds, or even thousands of preclears at a time. It’s the means to broad scale clearing and planetary salvation. And yet, no matter the magnitude of these developments, standing behind them was something far greater. For here is the historic Congress where Mr. Hubbard first announced the acquisition of the most famous address in Scientology: Saint Hill Manor, East Grinstead, Sussex, England.”

Take a look at the short film Scientology made to entice sales of this landmark moment in Scientology history!

 

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“People have to agree to be ill.” You have to love that.

Anyway, yes, it’s good once again to equate 1959 with giant tomato plants. We previously established that with Jon Atack (some books and other publications have a tendency to date Hubbard’s famous photo with an e-meter and a tomato plant with an erroneous later date.)

And once again, we asked former Scientology worker Marc Headley for his thoughts on this video…

I think this video was shot after I left. It looks like they went to Minority Casting Incorporated. Someone is trying to get away from the “there are no minorities in Scientology” stereotype.

This video is a combo of nature stock shots and people smiling through the whole video. Pretty uneventful. I’d say 2-3 days max on how long it took to produce this polished little nugget.

I am pretty sure that at the very end of the video they used a shot of this guy that used to be in CMO Int. And you guessed it, he left long ago and might even have been declared a “Suppressive Person” for doing so. The one guy they used from the Int Base and it backfired on them.

In terms of the yakking in the background audio, from all that I have read, I am not sure there is any person that ever lived who had more of his dynamics “abberrated” than L Ron Hubbard himself. This lecture was given when Hubbard was conducting his “breakthrough” greenhouse plant experiments and reportedly grew 18ft tomato plants and cucumbers the size of watermelons. Based on this he became an “expert” on the subject of survival.

Imagine giving your life savings to and taking life advice from the guy who came up with those Tree Tomato things on late night TV. “20 slices from single tomato? I’m taking out another mortgage on my house!”

Thank you, Marc!

 
In other news, our regular Sunday Funnies tipsters were preoccupied with other matters this week — namely the grand re-re-openings at Big Blue in Los Angeles.

Most of you have probably already seen photos of the event, which we found generally very underwhelming. It was apparently a somewhat small crowd that showed up for a typical David Miscavige appearance — and we’ve seen plenty of those. We enjoyed reading this description from our friend Tory Christman…

How many peeps showed up? We all estimated under 200, including MOSTLY Staff. They had more handlers than they’ve had out for years at pickets. (Equal to the Anonymous days, really). Cops were pretty nice, all in all.

I met Ken Long (Legal) and he threatened to arrest me for yelling at “Dave.” The cop was there and I wanted him to hear my side of things. So I basically took Ken Long to the cleaners telling him how dare he try to stop MY free speech, when he and his low life partners work for “Dave” keeping up the many lies about myself and others…which IS Libel and thus he IS responsible. I also pointed out my “only terminal” is the IJC, who refuses to talk with ANYONE.

The event was THE shortest event we’ve ever seen. Dave blabbed for a few after some music to start, BOOM! Balloons released. Ta da. It’s OPEN…Thanks to those that came to picket, which were: John Dries, Drew Margolis, Tory Christman, Garry Scarff, Dan Cooke, Brett Chance, Graham Berry and anyone else who may have come after we left.

So much effort so Miscavige can give a three-minute speech to a couple hundred staff? What’s the world coming to.

 
Update: One of our tipsters who was inside the event pegs the crowd at more like 1200 to 1500.

Here’s the best shot of the crowd we’ve seen (from WWP)…

 
PACCrowd

 
“cakemaker,” at ESMB, used this map of L. Ron Hubbard Way to estimate a crowd of 1800…

 
PACMap

 
UPDATE: Here’s you extra fun fact for the day: The church is claiming attendance of 5,800.

 
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Posted by Tony Ortega on March 9, 2014 at 07:00

E-mail your tips and story ideas to tonyo94@gmail.com or follow us on Twitter. We post behind-the-scenes updates at our Facebook author page. Here at the Bunker we try to have a post up every morning at 7 AM Eastern (Noon GMT), and on some days we post an afternoon story at around 2 PM. After every new story we send out an alert to our e-mail list and our FB page.

Learn about Scientology with our numerous series with experts…

BLOGGING DIANETICS (We read Scientology’s founding text) 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25

UP THE BRIDGE (Claire Headley and Bruce Hines train us as Scientologists) 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43

GETTING OUR ETHICS IN (Jefferson Hawkins explains Scientology’s system of justice) 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14

SCIENTOLOGY MYTHBUSTING (Historian Jon Atack discusses key Scientology concepts) 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44

PZ Myers reads L. Ron Hubbard’s “A History of Man” | Scientology’s Master Spies | Scientology’s Private Dancer

 

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