We have a treat for you today from a new copy of Advance! magazine. Yes, the same magazine whose issues from the 1970s we’ve been mining for their excellent “OT Phenomena” testimonials. We’re happy to say that Advance! is still ticking along in 2012, and virtually in the exact format as it was 30 to 40 years ago, bringing exciting news about the OT life for upper-level Scientologists.
As in the past, Advance! issue 213 features a fascinating piece by L. Ron Hubbard himself — an excerpt from a 1952 lecture — and we found it quite illuminating. We thought we’d summarize it for you, and provide a few direct quotes (under the “fair use” doctrine) to give you its flavor.
Now, before we do that, we want to first deal with the heartburn that our independent Scientologist readers are probably already feeling.
Here at the Underground Bunker, we have a lot of respect for the longtime Scientologists who are declaring themselves independent of David Miscavige’s corporate church as a matter of conscience. We think it takes a lot of guts not only to walk away from an organization that might have been their home for decades, but also to speak out publicly when we all know what that can mean in the way of retaliation from a bullying crew that hides behind religious cloaking.
And no matter how much the Anonymous folks give us hell for it, we’re still convinced that the indie movement is an admirable group that has no desire to replicate the Church of Scientology’s abusive practices: the Sea Org, disconnection, fair game, sec checking, regging, and the rest.
What independent Scientologists and official church members do have in common, however, is an abiding admiration for L. Ron Hubbard. And that’s fine with us. However, we can never understand why they are so sensitive about the rest of us actually looking at what the man said and wrote about science, human beings, and history.
This is Hubbard. This is Scientology, official or unofficial. And we’re going to take a look.
Now, for the most part, Hubbard’s fascinating tale of Incident Two as told in OT 3 tends to get most of the attention. But that was written in about 1966 or 1967 when Hubbard was on the ship Apollo.
This 1952 lecture, however, shows that virtually from the beginning, Scientologists were being told about their quadrillion-year history as non-human, non-Earth beings.
Here’s how the excerpt of the March 10, 1952 speech begins:
You sit here on Earth today, not as a race of people who go back down an evolutionary track on Earth, but as an evolutionary race or a race which goes back into the depths of the galaxy.
Hubbard then explains that you should not confuse the two separate origins that produced you and your body. Your current body comes from a “protoplasm line,” but you are from a “theta line.” And that’s what separates you from the animals that evolved here on Earth.
You really don’t have anything in common with a tiger or a jackal or even the monkeys in the zoo.
(Even today, about half of Americans resist the idea that humans and other primates shared a common ancestor, so this probably went over even more easily in 1952.)
Hubbard then explains that your theta line has been inhabiting your Earth protoplasm line only for the last ten or twenty thousand years. Before that, your theta line was inhabiting one protoplasm line and then another, jumping from one place to another.
And here on Earth you arrive as a theta-I line and dub in on the Earth theta line and the protoplasm line on Earth, which was already continuing.
But where did all this begin? Hubbard is now going to take us to “O”, or origin.
This origin, at some unimaginable length of time in the past, certainly in terms of millions of years, perhaps in terms of hundreds of millions of years, perhaps in terms of thousands of millions of years (which would be billions) and perhaps even in terms of other-universe years, as distinct from this universe and its planets — way back here at origin, you get the first separation from theta. And that actually would be Incident One. Now, there are many other incidents follow that.
It’s interesting to see that Hubbard isn’t certain whether the origin of theta happened a few million or a few quadrillion years ago. That’s sort of like a coroner saying he isn’t sure whether a murder victim died on Monday or before the Second Punic War. But we digress.
Back to Hubbard’s story, which really begins to get interesting. After Incident One, there’s something called Heavy Facsimile One, which involves an “incoming race.”
The race to which we are native — the theta line to which we are native — was actually highly mystic. It was capable of a lot of things — telepathy, teleportation, odds and ends, stuff — and concentrated rather heavily in that. This invader race came in with a lot of electronics and said, “Boys, all you’ve got to do is take this little jim-dandy whizzer and, you know, you will be twice as ‘thetesque’ as before.”
This invader force, apparently millions of years ago, then imprisoned the rest of us using a device that “went around your head and across the top of your head and under your chin.” The device was aimed at our pineal glands, and it sapped our mystic powers.
That made us useless, apparently, so yet another race decided to discard us on a prison planet — which happens to be the Earth.
I don’t know too much about the modus operandi that worked at that time, but they evidently had it in mind. It contains, by the way, sort of being put in an ice cube state. It’s quite nice. And by the way, the early Christian hell was painted up as a hot hell and a cold hell. And you see the early Christian paintings have guys up to — ice cube up to the neck. Now, that’s two hundred — about two hundred A.D., you find them doing this.
To sum up, Hubbard reminds his audience that there’s Incident One (way, way back), Heavy Facsimile One (a few million years ago), and then getting kicked to the Earth (10 or 20 thousand years ago). “And the Earth is hell and you’re here, I guess, until you get reformed.”
And he reminds us that there’s another race out beyond space which doesn’t think much of us.
And here’s Hubbard’s very interesting final line from this excerpt:
I’m sorry if it stretches your credulity. I do hope, however, that it doesn’t stretch it to the point where you won’t operate on it.
Incredulity? Wherever could he get such a notion?
Well, this is good stuff and we’re glad we could share it with you today. We’ll now turn things over to our excellent commenting community for analysis.
