We’ve said it before: Scientology is really missing out by not being more open about its space-opera beliefs. Thanks to the Internet the word is already out, and there’s just no hiding the fact that Scientology is all about time travel to your brutal experiences taming unruly planets 10 million years in the past, getting implanted with memory-wiping brain-scans on Venus or Mars between lives, and spending years exorcising unseen alien entities with electronics that were considered sophisticated when a guy named Ike lived in the White House.
Maybe that kind of Space Age excitement, especially at several hundred dollars an hour, isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. But it seems to us that everyone would be a lot better off if Scientology were to embrace its L. Ron Hubbard weirdness and actually try to reach people in a more open way.
And that’s why we’re super excited by some new videos put out by the “Advanced Org” in Copenhagen, Denmark, which at least go a little way towards embracing that weirdness.
As we explained in “Up the Bridge,” our series with Claire Headley, once a Scientologist takes enough courses to “go Clear,” the next step is to move on to the “Operating Thetan” levels, with the highest level being OT 8.
Scientologists hold these top secret levels out to new members like mysterious sources of immense power. If they can only “go OT,” they’ll finally unleash all of the powers L. Ron Hubbard promised when he wrote Dianetics in 1950.
Of course, what Scientology is really selling is a “mystery sandwich,” and even after OT 8, none of the superhuman powers Scientologists are promised ever materialize. But shhhhh! Don’t tell the newbies that. They’re still dying to spend the incredible amounts it costs to reach these levels, and the Copenhagen folks are doing their best to pump up that feeling in these slick videos. So let’s dive in!
OT 1: Counting bodies
As Claire explained to us when we talked about OT Eligibility and OT 1 last year, the actual activities you’ll do on OT 1 seem remarkably pedestrian. The first exercise, in fact, merely consists of walking around and counting how many people you see — referred to as “counting bodies.” You do this until you have a “cognition” — an epiphany, of some sort. We’re afraid we’d mainly be having an epiphany about how we’d just spent more than $13,000 for this stuff. But that’s just us. Now, let’s see how Copenhagen AO sells it: Like the most expensive game of Myst, ever?
OT 2: Zapping the psychs in our whole track!
As Claire Headley and Bruce Hines explained to us in a two-part series on wild and wacky OT 2, this is where Scientologists spend about $5,000 and dozens of hours solo-auditing in order to find and neutralize booby-traps laid into our “whole tracks” by evil psychs. You’re an immortal thetan, you see, who has lived for thousands of trillions of years, and during that time, evil psychiatrists have implanted you with harmful “GPMs” like the “House” GPM of 40,029 trillion years ago. In order to neutralize them, Hubbard has handwritten hundreds of funny little koans, like “To Be Stupid is to Be Smart, To Be Smart is to Be Stupid” that, when you read them while on the meter, allows you to travel back all those eons and zap the psychs. Aren’t you glad you’re paying hundreds of dollars an hour for this stuff?
OT 3: The wall of fire!
We had another great two-part series about OT 3 last year with the help of Claire and Bruce. OT 3 is the most legendary level of all, the material that was parodied in an episode of South Park back in 2005. Xenu the galactic overlord, aliens hydrogen-bombed on Teegeack, 3D mental implants — the whole shebang. Hubbard claimed that he’d come through a “wall of fire” to discover this stuff, and the church has advertised on that notion in the past (see the ad at the top of the post from a mid-70s issue of Advance! magazine). But it’s still really startling to see today’s church playing with the motifs of OT 3, and even mentioning that it’s about something that happened on Earth 75 million years ago. Why is it startling? Because Scientology spokespeople have always denied the contents of OT 3 whenever they’ve been asked about it by the press. Come on, loyal officers, share this treasure with the public! And for only about 10 grand, you can go through the wall yourself!
OT 4: Your body thetans are junkies!
Bruce and Claire helped us understand this level, which is one of the most hilarious of all time. Well, OK, to L. Ron Hubbard illicit drugs were a deadly serious business — and they are — but in OT 4, he wants you to believe that even if you’ve stayed away from drugs all your life, those disembodied alien souls we told you about on OT 3, known as “body thetans,” were probably hopped up on all kinds of crazy narcotics billions and trillions of years ago that we haven’t even conceived of yet! And so on this level, even though you were under the impression that you’d wiped away all your body thetans on the previous level, you now have a whole new set of them that are a bunch of junkies and need drying out. Yes, you’re in rehab for the drugs your invisible cooties took on some other planet a billion years ago! (Now that’s a hangover.) Sure, this level will cost about 10 grand, but imagine the fun.
OT 5: Wake up, space cooties!
Bruce helped us through this very complex (and expensive — about $23,000) level. After wiping out body thetans on OT 3 and OT 4, it turns out there’s yet another set of unseen entities we need to “wake up” and deal with on this level. We contain multitudes!
Well, we think those videos from Copenhagen are really swell, and Scientology ought to share them with the public. (Oops, we just did.) Hey, where’s OT 6 through 8? We think you may have to go to Clearwater, Florida for OT 6 and 7, and OT 8 is only delivered on Scientology’s cruise ship, the Freewinds. Hey, it’s your turn, Freewinds, how about a groovy video to advertise OT 8?
BONUS VIDEO
Peter Bonyai alerted us to this gem which is aimed at Scientologists in Hungary. It features members of the Jive Asses — sorry, that’s what David Miscavige calls them, we’re told, but they’re actually known as the Jive Aces — who have been given a bad script of Hungarian text to read. We’re guessing that a statement, inviting people to the IAS gala at Saint Hill Manor in East Grinstead, England, was run through Google Translate, resulting in the following message…
Peter tells us this is what the Jive brother is saying…
Hungarian: Szia! Ron otthona Saint Hill vagyok. Szeretnék meghívni az IAS vacsoraasztaláre, ami itt lesz októberben Saint Hillben. A jó ég (?) lehetsz csak magyarul! Szia! Találkozunk Saint Hill októberben!
English: Hi! I am Ron’s home, Saint Hill. I want invite you to IAS dinner tables, which will be here, at Saint Hill in October. Good heavens (?) you can be in Hungarian! Hi! We meet Saint Hill in October!
Love it.
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Mark Fisher: Spied on after leaving Scientology
Jeffrey Augustine talks to Mark about his famous post-Scientology days being spied on by Scientology dirty-tricks private investigator Dave Lubow…
UPDATE: Daily Mail goes long on our Karen de la Carriere. Lots of good stuff here that’s pretty familiar to folks here in the Bunker, and some nice photos of her days with Heber Jentzsch.
We might gripe that the Mail, in a piece like this, pretends that it’s getting first to material that has been thoroughly plowed by many other journalists before them, and there are some odd things here and there (Karen was in the Hole? Huh?), but in all a nice treatment of a woman we’ve considered a brave survivor of ill treatment for years.
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Posted by Tony Ortega on September 10, 2014 at 07:00
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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, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48
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, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49
PZ Myers reads L. Ron Hubbard’s “A History of Man” | Scientology’s Master Spies | Scientology’s Private Dancer
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