Sunday Scientology sermon: L. Ron Hubbard on freeing kids from their bodies

Rod Keller is on assignment this week, so we’re going to have some fun this Sunday by once again bringing you some of that sweet, original Source.

On occasion, we like to bring you L. Ron Hubbard in his own words so you can get a better idea just what Scientology is really about, something that other media outlets almost never do. We find that it helps the new Scientology Watchers get a grounding in the material, but even if you’ve been around a while, it can be instructive to hear the man describe his ideas in his own voice.

Today we’re having a bit of fun based on something we saw being talked about recently on a Facebook group. A former Scientologist was remembering Hubbard crack a joke, and so we went looking for it and found it for you today. It is pretty fun.

It was 1952, and Hubbard was opening the Philadelphia Doctorate Course with a general lecture, and this short Fair Use excerpt we have for you is the opening part of that lecture.

We can really relate to what Hubbard is saying here. We too often hear from people who tell us that they have discovered something incredibly important about Scientology and they must speak to us in person or on the phone — the more they insist that they can’t simply send a message about it, the better the chance that it’s someone with a tenuous grip on reality who has something pretty nutty to tell us.

Hubbard describes the same kind of situation. He’s received a note from someone breathless with worry about Scientology, that it involves the Prince of Darkness or something. And so Hubbard jokes about how he’s going to respond to the nutter. Here’s the audio with subtitles, and a transcript…

I just got a wonderful wire. Just got a wonderful wire from somebody, day or so ago, and they were going to send me a registered letter that had to be very secret about this whole thing and of course I’m expected and John and Helen are expected to sort of hang on the ropes waiting for this letter to appear and it just came just now. And that’s why I look so pale and frightened. Somebody has just run into one of the standard manifestations. They pick a PC off the street, you see, and they start running them and this PC gets the idea that… uh… he is practically the Prince of Darkness or something of the sort and it’s all a big plot. Now they just start asking this; the person up to this moment has appeared perfectly a homo sapiens. And they’re the Prince of Darkness from Venus or someplace you see and that there’s a terrible plot out against everybody in Scientology. And everybody better be very, very careful to put up force screens so that nothing like this can get in and so. I’m going to send him back a letter. Uh… so… uh… you say you have some connection with the Prince of Darkness out there and you’re very worried about this. Who do you think I am?

Now look, we think this is actually a very good joke and we only wish Hubbard more consistently had this sense of humor about himself and what he was doing.

Later in this lecture, Hubbard has more fun with his audience in a passage that we’ve looked at very closely in the past.

It’s in this lecture that Hubbard spins a wild space opera tale about a place called “Arslycus,” and then seems to admit to his ardent followers that he’s been putting them on, and that he doesn’t actually believe the crazy space opera tales that he’s been telling them…

“Now, all this of course is—I’m just kidding you mostly. I don’t believe that you’ve been in the universe 76 trillion years. I don’t believe you have any past before birth. I don’t believe that there is any reason whatsoever for this universe to be here except some fellow called the devil or something that built it. And I don’t believe any of these things. And I don’t want to be agreed with about them. It infuriates me to be agreed with about them.”

We pointed out in an earlier story that some commenters in the media have pointed to this quote to suggest that Hubbard knew he was just conning the people listening to him. But our experts explained that Hubbard was doing something subtler. He was convincing his marks to believe that they were confirming for themselves that Hubbard’s wild ideas about the universe had come from their own memories of their past lives.

Anyway, if you haven’t seen that previous story of ours or heard those excerpts from Hubbard, you really should. For today, however, we wanted to bring you yet another excerpt from this really potent lecture.

Throughout this talk, Hubbard is regaling his audience with an entertaining, if ludicrous, notion that the laws of physics only exist because of our “agreement” with them, and that one of the aims of Scientology is to teach you how to disagree with this universe a little. In that way, you can gain superhuman powers and leave your body and affect matter with your mind. This is what Scientologists are chasing — the ability to have godlike powers and ignore things like gravity and solid matter.

It’s something Hubbard talks about regularly in these early lectures. But we found it striking that in one particular part of this lecture, he brings up the idea of children attaining these super powers.

He talks about “springing” young children out of their bodies, and then the consequences of doing so — that the children can then go to the British Museum as disembodied souls, or they’ll have X-ray vision and be able to cheat on school exams, or that two sad siblings spend their time out of their bodies creating illusions with their minds for each other.

Now, we don’t know how it will strike you, but for some reason we found this to be an exceedingly creepy outlook from Hubbard about the superpowers that he’s peddling. Here’s the audio and the transcript. Please let us know what impression it gives you.

How does a little kid get bent into an agreement with the MEST universe? Well it’s a remarkable thing, he runs down the street and he’s got a body. And the body has to run just so fast and his mother by the way is busy telling him, “You are a body, take care of your body,” the teacher says so, the cops say so, traffic laws say so. Everybody says so. The doctor gives
an inspection. You are your body. You are your body. You are your body. You oughta hear the wheezing sigh of electronic relief that goes out from a thetan you spring out of an 8-year-old kid. And that’s wonderful. You know you can just take ranks of kids and you can just go down and say, “All right, you’re two feet behind your head. OK, you there? Oh, that’s fine. Next kid, two feet behind your head. What did you say? What did you say? Oh, you want to go to the British Museum? Go ahead.” One fellow… one fellow doing this, as… he was able to get the cooperation of a whole troop of scouts. Simply by telling them, “Now you want all the ice cream you can eat and you want to go to any of the cinemas you want to go to, OK now this is how you do it.” And sure enough… it’s impossible to do anything with those children… it’s really terrible. I mean he should have thought of the future society before he did this because those children those children are doing terrible things. They don’t study. They don’t study. One of them picked up a bank of an education at Oxford and plugged it in. Well, you know you’re not supposed to get things that easy in this universe. And another one, studying geometry. Very interesting but all he would keep doing was making the shapes. He’d just make the shapes and fit them together. And of course, he could answer his problems. And he could tell what the angles were on a truncated polygon when you did this or that with it. Very easy, he d really just make one you see. He didn’t keep figuring the way you were supposed to on it. And another one horribly enough of course looks through the top of the desk at the answers on the examination paper. Goes back to his seat and makes his body write them down and gets a hundred. Why, that’s no good. I mean we can’t have the society running like that. Two of these kids, by the way, are very amusing. They’re brother and sister. And… oh they were in kinda bad shape. They’d lost their daddy one way or the other a few years ago. And gee, they brightened right up, one of ‘em lost her glasses, and the other one lost his shyness and became really well-mannered instead of just shyly well-mannered. And… they spent hours and hours and hours now playing a game. One will mock up an illusion and put it on the mantelpiece. And the other one will look at it. And then he will mock up an illusion and put that on the mantelpiece. And she’ll take hers down. And then she’ll mock up an illusion. And see they’re looking at each other’s illusions that way. And that’s all they do. They just sit there. Their body’s parked over in the other side of the room you see. Now, it’s very amusing that phenomena of this character and so on could exist all these years and be individually known in so many places without really coming up and presenting itself, and saying here we are.

 
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Bonus items from our tipsters

Speaking of kids and creepy…

 
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Posted by Tony Ortega on January 28, 2018 at 07:00

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GETTING OUR ETHICS IN: Jefferson Hawkins explains Scientology’s system of justice
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Other links: Shelly Miscavige, ten years gone | The Lisa McPherson story told in real time | The Cathriona White stories | The Leah Remini ‘Knowledge Reports’ | Hear audio of a Scientology excommunication | Scientology’s little day care of horrors | Whatever happened to Steve Fishman? | Felony charges for Scientology’s drug rehab scam | Why Scientology digs bomb-proof vaults in the desert | PZ Myers reads L. Ron Hubbard’s “A History of Man” | Scientology’s Master Spies | The mystery of the richest Scientologist and his wayward sons | Scientology’s shocking mistreatment of the mentally ill | The Underground Bunker’s Official Theme Song | The Underground Bunker FAQ