Scientology’s greatest lecture of all: It’s finally time we look closer at Xenu in all his glory

Over the last few months, we’ve made an occasional series out of bringing you Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard in his own words. On its new television network, Scientology itself has a program it calls “L. Ron Hubbard: In His Own Voice,” but that’s the safe stuff, Hubbard’s recollections of his travels that helps to perpetuate his myths about himself.

Our series has been an attempt to bring you the unadulterated Hubbard, the space opera and superhuman claims that is meat and potatoes to Scientologists, who believe that they are creating a new species of human being with Hubbard’s vast galactic wisdom.

We’ve brought you Hubbard on space aliens, on the true name of our society, on his days as a race car driver tens of thousands of years ago, his claims that we’ve all lived so many trillions of years we all have horrific crimes against children in our pasts, on religion (before Scientology was a ‘church’), and on how to read people’s minds and control them through lying, and more.

But there’s one Hubbard lecture that is more notorious than any other, and we figured it was finally time to dive into it. Sure, you probably know it. It’s the time in 1968, aboard the yacht Apollo, when Hubbard was giving his “Class 8” lectures to create a new, higher level of auditor among his followers. And on October 3, in the tenth lecture of the series, titled “Assists,” he spelled out for them an ancient memory they were going to have to deal with among their subjects, a memory he had discovered the year before for something called “OT 3.”

It was the story of Xenu.

You’ve no doubt heard most or all of this lecture. Alex Gibney and Lawrence Wright used parts of it to great effect in their 2015 HBO documentary “Going Clear,” and it was the basis for what you saw in South Park’s 2005 episode, “Trapped in the Closet.” But we’ve never dug into it for this website before. We’re sensitive to the complaints of some former Scientologists that too much emphasis is put on the Xenu tale by the press and “never-ins” who don’t realize that Xenu, the evil galactic dictator, is only a very minor figure in the total experience of Scientology.

We get that. But on the other hand, what a lecture. We figured it’s time we dove in with both feet.

In September 1968, Hubbard announced that he wanted every org on the planet to send two auditors to the Apollo to be trained as Class 8 auditors. The course would take three weeks, and discipline would be harsh.

On October 3, he turned to the subject of assists. Nearly every Scientologist is trained in how to give a “contact assist” or “touch assist.” It’s essentially Scientology’s version of faith healing, built on the idea that you lessen an injury’s effect by re-staging it with a light touch (a contact assist), or help the body “communicate” with itself by running your finger over the affected area (a touch assist).

Sometimes, however, the simple assist doesn’t work, and Hubbard explains that your subject — known as a “preclear” — is suffering the effects from an “engram,” a traumatic memory, perhaps from one of his or her past lives. These memories may have been something we actually experienced in the far past, or they might be “implants,” false memories forced on us by malevolent agents. Hubbard wants his students to understand that although each of us have many different individual experiences, if you audit people far enough into the past, you will run into a few memories that we all have in common.

In Hubbard’s cosmology, there is an Incident One which occurred about 4 quadrillion years ago, which marked the beginning of this universe (actual scientists say the universe has only been around about 13.8 billion years, but whatever), and a more traumatic Incident Two, which occurred much, much more recently — only around 75 million years ago.

Hubbard discovered this information the year before in Las Palmas in the Canary Islands, when he went through the “Wall of Fire” and learned the details of Incident Two, which explained Earth’s violent past. The handwritten notes from that session are given to Scientologists when they reach the secret “Operating Thetan Level Three.” But here, Hubbard launches into a much more detailed version of the tale to his Class 8 students, to help them deal with the nasty engrams they’re going to run into among their preclears.

Here’s our first Fair Use excerpt from the lecture, as Hubbard begins to explain the background to Incident Two.

 
Earth is part of a confederacy made up of 21 stars and 76 planets. The tale Hubbard is telling started with the capture of people on those planets.

At the time, Hubbard explains, the culture of the confederacy was very much like the 1950s and 1960s in the US. And there’s a reason for that, he says. Incident Two left behind an “implant” that is referred to as “R6,” which has left all of us with these vague memories of the old confederacy and what its society looked like. And so in the march of civilization here on Earth in the past few thousand years, human beings were simply trying to recreate the look of society in the old confederacy without really understanding that they were doing so.

The confederacy had an elite class known as the Loyal Officers who had elected a leader, Xenu. (And yes, Hubbard here says his name could be spelled X-E-M-U, but we’ve already explained why we continue to refer to him generally as Xenu, which Hubbard used in all other written texts.)

After electing Xenu, the Loyal Officers had lost faith in him and were going to “unelect” him. A sort of civil war ensued between Xenu and the Loyal Officers, and Xenu used subterfuge to capture many of his enemies — he employed the ruse of an income tax audit to bring them in, for example.

To this day, Hubbard says, the United States is blindly following the R6 implant by having an income tax. (We love that particular detail.)

OK, here’s the second excerpt…

 
The civil war continued, and whole planets were wiped out, becoming like “billiard balls.”

After capturing his enemies, Xenu used a special technique not only to kill a body but seize their spirit — known as a “thetan” in Scientology. A needle in the lung was followed by encasing the body in “frozen alcohol and glycol,” which would trap the thetan inside.

The corpses were then put into spaceships which looked just like DC8 airplanes. (Presumably, human engineers, also affected by the R6 implant, slavishly ended up copying a space plane in their past when they designed modern airplanes.) Xenu’s forces then made the trip to Teegeeack, which was this planet’s name then, moving faster than the speed of light because Einstein’s theories are “balderdash,” Hubbard says.

He gives a particular example to illustrate that point: One of the 21 stars in the confederacy is Polaris, our north star, which astronomers recently estimated to be 323 light years away. Hubbard says the trip from Polaris’ planet Coltus took nine weeks, so that’s moving at about 1.2 trillion miles an hour — or about 1,800 times the speed of light.

The corpses were stacked up in boxes around volcanoes in various parts of Teegeeack, and then blown up with hydrogen bombs. A sort of electric field — an electronic ribbon, Hubbard says — captured the thetans that were released from the destroyed corpses, and then the thetans were assembled to be forced to watch color movies.

These movies put implants — false memories — into the thetans, giving them memories seemingly from trillions of years ago that are encountered during the really bizarre auditing level of OT 2.

Here’s the third excerpt…

 
Over the course of about 36 days, the captured thetans were forced to watch 3-D movies that indoctrinated them with false memories of “God, the devil, space opera, etcetera…the entirety of Roman Catholicism, the devil, all that sort of thing, that is all part of R6.”

After being indoctrinated with the R6 implant, the thetans were then sent to assembly areas in Hawaii and Las Palmas, and then were sent out to various planets to live a much more programmed kind of life.

Symbols contained in the implants, for example, would influence people in odd ways. Modern movie theaters, he says, preserve those symbols in their interior design and people have no idea that they’re being influenced by the implant.

After the processing and transport, about 178 billion programmed thetans were sent to each of the planets in the confederacy, with about 250 billion left here on Earth/Teegeeack.

Remnants of the explosions can still be found when you dig down deep enough in the earth, Hubbard says, and find a layer of green glass.

Here’s the next part…

 
One of the motivations behind this complex operation, Hubbard says, was an overpopulation problem. The newly programmed thetans now were influenced by ideas which would cause them to engage in behavior that inhibited their survival.

For example, one of the results was the sexual molestation of children, which was taught by the R6 implant.

Meanwhile, Earth was left with a grim reputation because everyone in the confederacy associated it with the explosions and genocide. “This planet is the planet of evil repute,” Hubbard says.

 
All of this took place almost 75 million years ago. Some 20 million years ago, a new “body line” started up on the planet, and humanity was instilled with the thetans implanted with R6.

The history of civilization is man’s attempt to recreate those conditions of the confederacy, not knowing that we’re being influenced by this evil programming.

And when anyone tries to stand up and counteract that — to save the planet, as it were — the rest of us are programmed to kill that person.

Again Hubbard refers to the Catholic church, which has “picked up” fragments of R6 to dramatize them.

Meanwhile, Hubbard reveals that some Loyal Officers did manage to survive, and ultimately defeated Xenu in the civil war. The evil overlord was imprisoned with some of his followers in a wire cage “charged with an eternal battery” in a mountain on one of the confederacy’s planets. “He is not likely ever to get out.”

The Loyal Officers then had to start civilization over again from the beginning.

Hubbard then makes an interesting observation — that in order to counteract the effect of the implant, you should never say that we are “saving” the planet but that “you are the people who own the planet.”

 
One of the results of the R6 implant is that we react to the symbol of a volcano, where the corpses were blown up by Xenu. And that’s why Hubbard had an erupting volcano put on the cover of his book “Dianetics,” which he holds up to the class.

Another symbol in our implant is that of crucifixion, which is common in R6. “Everybody is shown crucified,” he says. But someone around the year 600 BC somehow “found a piece” of R6 and used it to create what became Christianity.

“There was no Christ,” Hubbard says. But pretty much everyone you audit is going to say that they remember being Christ in a past life – that’s just the R6 implant talking.

The implant also causes illness, and makes sure that we only live around 70 years, which was not the case before Incident Two.

In general, the people living on this planet are a mess, but now that Hubbard had discovered the implant (and had supposedly almost paid for it with his life during his “Wall of Fire” incident the year before), Scientology was now the only answer to combating it.

Removing the implant, living as free “operating thetans,” Scientologists could live longer and without the false ideas of Christ, the devil, and other religions.

Hubbard, not being of this planet, is less concerned about it: “The truth of the matter is that it is more the business of the inhabitants of this planet than it is mine.”

Wow. Is that something or what?

Why don’t we see this stuff on Scientology TV?

OK, we can’t wait to hear your thoughts after listening to Hubbard spell this stuff out. How do you think it would have affected you at the time, on the ship Apollo in the Mediterranean, cut off from the outside world? What do you think about the reactions you can hear from the audience? And if Hubbard did dream this all up, how does it stack up as science fiction? Let us hear it.

 
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Chris Shelton and Sunny Pereira on the Introspection Rundown

Says Chris: “Here’s my new video for this week, the second part of my series on mental illness treatment in Scientology. In this one, we go into the Introspection Rundown and the setup for it. The next (and last) part will be the technical details and steps.”

 
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Make your plans now!

HOWDYCON UPDATE

We’re just a little more than two months out, and Chee Chalker is working hard to make sure things are going to run smoothly at this year’s HowdyCon in Chicago, June 21-23. As in past years, we’re looking forward to meeting readers of the Bunker, culminating in Saturday night’s main event.

The biggest difference this year is that our Saturday night event is separate from that evening’s dinner. Chee is setting up an inexpensive pizza dinner that you don’t need to pay for ahead of time, after which we’ll walk over to the theater where our event, hosted by Chicago Fire star Christian Stolte, will take place.

Because it’s a separate event, we’re asking that you pay $10 each to get into the Saturday night event, which will help us recoup what the Bunker paid for the venue. (We have never made a penny on our HowdyCon meetups, we only try to break even.)

Please email your proprietor (tonyo94 AT gmail) in order to reserve your spot for Saturday night’s main event. Seating is limited, and we’re going to have some really interesting people on stage and they may make a few announcements that you don’t want to miss.

 
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Posted by Tony Ortega on April 19, 2018 at 07:00

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Learn about Scientology with our numerous series with experts…

BLOGGING DIANETICS: We read Scientology’s founding text cover to cover with the help of L.A. attorney and former church member Vance Woodward
UP THE BRIDGE: Claire Headley and Bruce Hines train us as Scientologists
GETTING OUR ETHICS IN: Jefferson Hawkins explains Scientology’s system of justice
SCIENTOLOGY MYTHBUSTING: Historian Jon Atack discusses key Scientology concepts

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

Our non-Scientology stories: Robert Burnham Jr., the man who inscribed the universe | Notorious alt-right inspiration Kevin MacDonald and his theories about Jewish DNA | The selling of the “Phoenix Lights” | Astronomer Harlow Shapley‘s FBI file | Sex, spies, and local TV news