Scientology’s founder L. Ron Hubbard on the ‘God trick,’ Christ implants, and Muslims

 
Our regular readers know that besides looking into the breaking Scientology news of the day, and keeping track of court cases, and asking around about church leader David Miscavige and his missing wife, we also, from time to time, like to dive into the source material of this wacky thing that calls itself a church.

We’re talking about the words of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, and our occasional dives into his really bizarre, hilarious, and often very troubling ideas that most other news outlets rarely seem to examine. And boy, do we have a good one for you today.

We stumbled upon it completely by accident, looking for something else when a search turned up a transcript from a 1953 lecture titled “Blackness” that we weren’t familiar with. Stunned by what we found in it, we went searching for the audio, which wasn’t easy. But eventually, we tracked it down.

Hubbard delivered the lecture on December 2, 1953, while he was a couple of weeks into his Second American Advanced Clinical Course, in Camden, New Jersey. And it’s just chock full of the great stuff we love about these early lectures — which, we’ll point out, are not confidential and which Scientologists may run across fairly early in their careers.

This is bedrock stuff that describes Scientology’s most basic ideas about the human life cycle, Scientology’s promise of achieving godhood, and the paradoxes resulting from recurring lifetimes. This is really what sets Hubbard and Scientology apart from other organizations, and yet it’s so rarely discussed in the media about the church.

Anyway, on this particular day in New Jersey, Hubbard had kept his students on the hook since November 17, lecturing them day and night. And, to give them a little encouragement, he started things off by suggesting that after a little more work his audience members were all going to achieve Scientology’s most cherished, final goal: Operating Thetan.

There’s a little bit of a lack of adeptness in handling these things on the part of auditors present, but you’re getting better. I call to your attention, this is only two and a half weeks deep in this course. All right. Now, that is fine. That means that we’re sailing along, and we have to a large degree at least indicated that we’re going to be very successful in these goals, because I want to see everybody leave here an Operating Thetan. And — that’s right, that’s right — everybody who’s completing the course, I’d like to see in that category.

This surprised us because we tend to associate Operating Thetan with OT 8 and beyond, the top secret upper levels that Hubbard didn’t begin to put into place until much later, and which forms the top of the “Bridge to Total Freedom.” Scientologists are led to believe that after years of intense auditing (and up to a couple of million dollars in fees and donations), at OT 8 they will achieve a kind of godhood, with the ability to freely leave their bodies and affect matter, energy, space, and time with only their minds. But here in 1953, Hubbard is making that promise to his ACC attendees after only a couple of weeks of lectures. What a tease.

Hubbard then dives into the meat of his lecture, which is about how his students, as auditors, will run into problems with their “preclears” involving “occlusions” in their whole tracks, which tend to be “black stuff” or “blackness” that prevents them from seeing their true natures properly.

See, in Hubbard’s cosmos, we’re all trillions of years old, and we are “thetans,” immortal soul-like beings who inhabit countless bodies over our extensive “whole track” of existence. A key part of Scientology is using auditing (and the E-meter) to recall those past lives and reveal as much of our own whole track as possible. But this “blackness” keeps us from retrieving some parts of that track, apparently. It prevents us from seeing things as they properly are, and it’s the result of various forms of nonsense we’ve been led to believe over our many, many stupid past lives.

Like, for example, that we keep falling for this nonsense about “God” that various nations and states have imposed on us over the millennia.

Now, the state actually can’t get along in this universe without religion. Every time the state tries to get along without a religion, gets in trouble. And they always are surreptitiously closing terminals with religion just because of that. The only sure trick there is in the whole universe is the God trick — that’s a real sure trick.

We’ve pointed out at other times how dismissive Hubbard is of religion, especially in this period, when Dianetics and Scientology were still being marketed as “sciences.” And it isn’t the only time that Hubbard expresses a real disdain for people stupid enough to fall for the “God” idea. It wasn’t just that Scientology would replace the idea of a Christian or Jewish or Islamic deity with a much more vague concept of the “8th Dynamic,” which Scientology defines as “infinity.” No, it was also that people had been so stupid to fall for the “God trick” for so many centuries. Dumbasses.

But here’s the fun part: Just sixteen days after this lecture was delivered, Hubbard, his son, and four other people signed the incorporation papers for the first “Church of Scientology” right there in Camden. After railing against religion for several years, Hubbard was ready to join them.

The church trying to control large masses of people down through the ages have become very expert in this. And the state trying to control large masses of people and keep law and order, generally will look very kindly upon any activity such as the church which is using this God trick. You can just call it the God trick, and it’s a very easy trick to understand. And the thetan’s always had this happen to him.

At this point, in 1953, God is just a “trick,” but a few years later in 1967, Hubbard spins the Xenu story, saying that a galactic overlord had implanted the ideas of Christianity and other world religions in an “R6” implant some 75 million years ago.

Jesus, in other words, is just a figment of the imagination, implanted by an evil alien dictator.

But some of that won’t come for several more years yet. In this 1953 lecture, Hubbard does make a rare reference to Islam, and we’d love to know if Minister Louis Farrakhan and his followers who have been so enthusiastically taking up Dianetics and Scientology have managed to run across this reference yet.

It comes when Hubbard is making a brief reference to the Arabian Nights, which he says is no children’s story.

And the Mohammedan religion and the Christian religion are differentiated between, there, very easily, because it is not all pro-Mohammed. You see, you stick around Mohammedanism long enough and it gets funny. Because, you see, in Mohammedanism you have the — Christ is a saint, you know — and they kind of stood by the caravan trail and rewrote it all, until finally the only difference you could tell between a Mussulman and a Christian was the method they used to go to the bathroom: one stood up and the other squatted. Now, this dissertation goes on in the Arabian Nights, it’s a beautiful dissertation and it analyzes the whole thing, and draws at last this tremendous conclusion.

Oh, yikes. That’s not very diplomatic, is it. But Christianity also comes in for another drubbing, as, once again, Hubbard makes the claim that Christ was simply an “implant” — a false mental image, and one that has a provenance far older than makes sense for the Biblical narrative…

See, there have been holy crosses around for the last eight or ten billion years. Didn’t have anything to do with Golgotha, that’s just another piece of it. There are Christ implants on the track eight thousand years ago — that’s interesting, isn’t it? It’s a story that is just gone over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over. All right. How do we face up to this if our PC is very upset about religion or he says he isn’t very upset about religion or if he has religious differences or opinions or he belongs to another cult or church or a new igloo or something? Where do we start in then? We’ve got all these different PCs and so forth. Well, just as I said about the Mussulman and the Christian, there isn’t any difference from PC to PC — they’re loused up on the seventh and eighth dynamic. I mean, that’s the end of it. I mean, you just got it. There’s the “something/nothing” religious trick sitting on the bank.

Implants and booby-traps and blackness waiting to ambush us on our seventh and eighth dynamics and our Whole Tracks — so much nefarious crap keeping us from our true nature as gods, which only Scientology can help us recover.

And that true nature we rediscover is that we’re incorporeal thetans, beings with no physical substance, that can float around and achieve the impossible. Hey, isn’t there another word for ephemeral entities floating around, messing with reality? Why yes, Hubbard says…

There’s also demonology. I don’t care if he says, “I don’t know what a ‘demonology’ is.” And you say, “A ‘demonology’ is a study of demons.” And he says, “Well, I’ve never had no truck with demons. I ain’t never met no demons. All we had in our neighborhood was ghosts.” The niceness of vocabulary here: We have the ghost, the spirit, the demon, the genie, the marid … One time I was going through a list of these things, and I won’t bore you with it right now, but it runs something on the order of 580 in fairly common usage in English. That was just the light list, you know, the quick passers-by. I think there’s more words for a thetan than any other single object. That’s right.

Well, there you have it. You’re a thetan, and you’ve been mistaken over the centuries as a ghost or a demon. And instead of embracing your nature as a free-floating patch of godhood, you’ve fallen deeper and deeper into a trap as you’ve fought instead to defend the “God trick” and reduce your own status as low as it will go…

Any thetan you’ve got, you give him that concept after he’s exteriorized and so forth, he’ll realize the only way he went down Tone Scale is he could not punish those who offended his deity — didn’t recognize he was a god and bang! you know. They wouldn’t leave his sacred places straight and wouldn’t leave his things alone, that’s all. And he just started on down Tone Scale. He’s eventually convinced that he couldn’t be a deity at all because he can’t defend any of his sacred possessions or represent a nobility and so forth in general. And it’s indicative of a society when the desire for “Let’s all be common as old shoes” gets into the woof and warp of the society so deeply that nobody in the society will ever try to do anything or put up any dignity. Because that merely tells you that they’ve run fresh out of the offended deity. You find the youth — they’re on the bottom of that line. You’ll find the youth of the country, although they’re very easy to exteriorize, will argue with you about being a body.

Dumb kids who think they’re bodies. Get off his lawn, Hubbard says. These poor saps, defending nonexistent gods, reducing their own roles to be as common as old shoes. And then, even worse, they grasp for logic and science to justify their march to sameness…

So your problem is a deteriorating belief in a spirit, not encroaching superstition. A society goes downhill away from superstition toward logic. Incredible statement for me to make, but it’s absolutely true. It goes downhill from superstition, spirits, mumbo-jumbo, into science and logic and mathematics, and it’s all precise, and you’re just a body — or you’re just a doll or you’re just a can or whatever you’re supposed to be. Now, that’s pretty hard to swallow. But superstition is actually superior any day of the week to logic — where logic is being employed to predict the future. This is most apparent to a person who is familiar with such mathematics as those employed by actuaries.

Hubbard had started out by trying to convince his early followers that he was using “science” to discover the true nature of the human mind. But actually, he was indoctrinating them to distrust science and doctors and other authority figures. How else could they embrace such magical thinking about jumping into new bodies or trusting that Hubbard and his E-meter were actually describing something real.

Hubbard also makes the point that the problems on the eighth dynamic, the blackness encountered on this ultimate search for infinity and godhood, is much more important than any of the other dynamics — even the second dynamic, sex, which so preoccupies our lives…

Sex — it’s interesting, but aberrative value of sex compared to the aberrative value of eight is zero. Of course, what happens to somebody like Freud that concentrates on sex, is he really doesn’t have guts enough to just kick completely outside all agreements with his civilization. And for somebody in 1894 to have suddenly said, “God — well, I tell you about God, he’s a trick!” They probably would have lynched him. They’ll probably lynch me yet, but anyway … For somebody to have kicked outside the confines of the church at that time would have been too adventurous to contemplate. It almost is now.

Did you get that? Sigmund Freud’s problem, Hubbard says, is that he didn’t have the guts to say that God was merely a trick. And what a throwaway line by L. Ron, that he might yet get lynched for denying the existence of God.

Why doesn’t anyone ever ask Kirstie Alley or John Travolta about this? Hey, Tom Cruise, Hubbard said he was superior to Freud because he wasn’t afraid to pronounce God a trick — fun stuff, right?

Now, when a fellow kicks off after death, he just takes off and goes up into the between-lives area, and then is immediately rerouted and collides with the first baby he meets-gets his instructions, just exactly — and comes and collides with the first baby he meets, and grabs the baby, and he’s OK from there on. Well, this sounds awful simple. It’s actually quite complex.

Here, Hubbard briefly recounts one of our favorite bedrock concepts of Scientology. After your current lifetime ends, you leave your body and then, as an invisible, free-floating thetan, travel to the “between-lives” area on either Venus or Mars, or the Alps on Earth or something, where some alien invaders operate machines that they use to wipe you of your memories, implant some false memories, and then send you back down to Earth to jump into a newborn baby in a maternity ward somewhere as you begin a new life.

And then, Hubbard mentions a really amazing idea about the consequence of doing this, of coming along and jumping into a newborn and taking over…

The reason everybody can do everything to him, and the reason he’s got to lay himself wide open to the world and let them hit him as they will, is the fact that he stole a baby. The reason Papa and Mama can do anything they want to to him is he stole a baby. He isn’t the son or daughter of Father and Mother, and he knows it damned well. But he’s got this buried from himself so deep — so deeply and so viciously certain that he himself mustn’t know it — because, you see, if he knows it, he will think it, and if he thinks it, somebody’s liable to pick it up by telepathy, he thinks. That’s his reasoning, that’s what he’s been told too often. Like the God trick — you mustn’t think anything because if you think it, we can read your thoughts. Who’s “we”? Oh, any number of cults or groups. All right. Here he is. He is a baby. But somehow or other, he isn’t a baby. And this is the confusion in which he enters life, and on which he tries to plot his future. And it doesn’t plot worth a nickel. It just doesn’t plot well. What’s the future for such a being, who isn’t who he is, but is somebody else? Well, his future’s confused. And that’s why the thetan is confused. That’s a present time problem with him: “Who is he?”

In Scientology, you are a baby-stealer. You have to be a baby-stealer simply to be alive. Your parents? They aren’t your parents. Your identity? Completely obfuscated between the infant theft, the between-lives implanting, and the blackness on your Whole Track preventing you from knowing who you really are.

In other words, Hubbard’s completely farcical, utterly bullshit, totally crackpot version of life, the universe, and everything made sure that you had the most completely screwed-up concept of who you are imaginable. And only Scientology can fix it for you. At hundreds of dollars an hour.

Scientology is an abomination.

 
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HowdyCon 2019 in Los Angeles

Janis Grady has set the June 22 combined event. Her annual reunion and barbecue will coincide with the Saturday event for HowdyCon. If you wish to attend, you will need to RSVP with Janis (janisgrady@gmail.com), and there will be a small contribution she’ll be asking for to help pay costs.

We are very close to securing our Friday night venue in Los Angeles, and we’ll provide another update on that as soon as we have it confirmed. All we can tell you at this time is the Friday night event will be more like a presentation in a theater (like the final night last year in Chicago), and the Saturday event will be a more casual barbecue setting.

 
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Scientology’s celebrities, ‘Ideal Orgs,’ and more!

We’ve been building landing pages about David Miscavige’s favorite playthings, including celebrities and ‘Ideal Orgs,’ and we’re hoping you’ll join in and help us gather as much information as we can about them. Head on over and help us with links and photos and comments.

Scientology’s celebrities, from A to Z! Find your favorite Hubbardite celeb at this index page — or suggest someone to add to the list!

Scientology’s ‘Ideal Orgs,’ from one end of the planet to the other! Help us build up pages about each these worldwide locations!

Scientology’s sneaky front groups, spreading the good news about L. Ron Hubbard while pretending to benefit society!

Scientology Lit: Books reviewed or excerpted in our weekly series. How many have you read?

 
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THE WHOLE TRACK

[ONE year ago] Scientologist ‘Dapper CEO’ Vick Tipnes wins victory against discrimination lawsuit in Tampa
[TWO years ago] The most Scientology-involved movie ever made? Here comes Nancy’s baby!
[THREE years ago] Erika Christensen goes psychbuster in Rod Keller’s Scientology Social Media Review!
[FOUR years ago] LEAK: Scientology celebrities are stepping up their involvement behind the scenes
[FIVE years ago] AOLA’s grand re-opening — a look at the last time Scientology cut the ribbon at Big Blue!
[SIX years ago] Blogging Dianetics, Part 9: Hubbard and Perversion!
[SEVEN years ago] How Scientology Drives Your Local Librarian Nuts

 
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Posted by Tony Ortega on February 28, 2019 at 07:00

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