Vance, we’ve reached the final chapter of this book.

It’s been a long slog — this is our 25th installment, going back [...]]]>

Welcome to our ongoing project, where we blog a 1950 first edition of Scientology’s bible, Dianetics, with the help of ex-Scientologist, lawyer, and author Vance Woodward. Go here for the first post in the series.

Vance, we’ve reached the final chapter of this book.

It’s been a long slog — this is our 25th installment, going back to January 4 — and we’re looking forward to your overall thoughts about re-reading this book.

But for now, let’s deal with this final offering from the Commodore.

He starts off this chapter, “Dianetics — Past and Future,” by telling us that his work on Dianetics dates back to 1935, and that 1938 was the pivotal year when he made some of the first key discoveries.

That, of course, rings true with what we know — it was in 1938 when Hubbard had a life-changing experience under the influence of nitrous oxide during a dental procedure and had a sort of weird vision of the universe.

He then gets back to some characteristic boasting, saying that Dianetics is a true science, and that it will soon be moving on to “Plan B”…

Plan B includes further research into life force, an attempt at resolution of some of the ills not yet embraced such as cancer and diabetes, and the perfection of techniques discovered and their dissemination.

And Dianetics is also bound to become useful on a civilization-wide scale, Hubbard tells us.

— There’s “Judiciary Dianetics,” he explains, because once the evil reactive mind is gone and Clears run the world, we’ll have to get rid of our old notions of good and evil.

— With whole nations going clear, there will be less reason for war.

— And with dianetic therapy getting better and more streamlined, it’s tantalizing to imagine where it might lead us.

The way forward that Hubbard imagines is something like a bridge that goes from one plateau, over a canyon, and to a higher plateau.

It has been supposed that no bridge could be built across the canyon and indeed, since those on the lower plateau could not see the higher level, the existence of the higher plateau itself was denied.

Thankfully, there’s a lone engineer with the foresight and imagination to plot and build that inclined bridge to higher land. And once he does, people begin to use it!

And thus, the book concludes with these lines…

In this handbook we have the basic axioms and a therapy which works. For God’s sake, get busy and build a better bridge!

Hubbard would, of course, build on Dianetics, and then, after bankruptcy, start over again in 1952 with “Scientology.” He started establishing “churches” of Scientology at the end of 1953, and eventually developed an incredibly complex and expensive set of training levels which he did, indeed, characterize as a span across a chasm. And ever since, Scientology has been selling a “Bridge to Total Freedom.”

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Vance, please give us your thoughts about this chapter, and then let’s talk about the experience of going through this book for you, many years after you first encountered it.

VANCE: First, Hubbard nailed it with this bit of prescience: “In twenty or a hundred years the therapeutic technique which is offered in this volume will appear to be obsolete.” But come to think of it, doesn’t something have to be useful before it could ever be accused of obsolescence? Anyhow, Hubbard dished out some nuggets that stuck with me the first time I read this chapter. For instance, Hubbard mentions that human groups behave as individual organisms and that societies, just like individuals, have aberrations. I reinterpreted this into economic terms in that otherwise good and sane people can be incentivized to act wrongly and insanely, and to some extent the reverse is true too. Maybe it isn’t mind blowing for those who have already engaged these ideas. But Dianetics was my first exposure to them.

Hubbard also says in this chapter that the cause of human problems isn’t other humans but rather ignorance and inanity. He says, “Attack unreason, not the society or the man.” He left women out of the equation. Maybe he considered women to be congenitally unreasonable and therefore permanently subject to attack. But taking the words as charitably as possible, they seem right-minded.

And he says, “The past acts of an individual who has been cleared should be stricken from his record even as his illnesses have been, for with the cause removed there can be no point in retribution unless society itself is so aberrated that it desires to operate on sadistic principles.” I agree with half of that: if we could actually cure sociopathy, there would be no point in continuing to jail and punish sociopathic criminals. And it all leads the hopeful (and uncritical) reader to the conclusion that Dianetics is the solution to ignorance, insanity and war. A lot of people desperately want that to be true. I did. Either way, it’s a good example of valid generalities being misapplied to specific situations. Just because a cure for insanity would be great doesn’t mean that Dianetics is that cure. Like, no kidding. And yet, I kinda missed this point for many years.

THE BUNKER: Let’s talk about the book as a whole. Going through it again for the first time in quite a few years, what did you find surprised you the most now that you have left the church?

VANCE: What surprises me now is that the book is more like a stream-of-consciousness cult manifesto than a scientific dissertation. I honestly thought the first time I read it that Hubbard had done an excellent job of squeezing much useful information into a small space, and that it was up to me to unzip and extract the content. Any failure was mine alone, which is typical cult-addict mentality. Now I realize the book is just a wince-inducing pile of garbage with nothing in it that is simultaneously novel and correct.

By the way, it amuses me that Hubbard identifies criminals, traitors, and zealots as the society-level equivalent of engrams in this final chapter, given that I found zealots to be disproportionately over-represented among Scientology’s membership. I guess Hubbard got that right too.

THE BUNKER: Before this thorough reading, we were familiar with the concepts of the reactive mind and engrams, and the aims of auditing. But what really surprised us as we really bored in cover to cover is just how much Dianetics is focused on life in the womb, and how misogynistic it is.

A couple of years later, in 1952, Hubbard would start over with Scientology and its emphasis on past lives — re-experiencing life in the womb was quickly de-emphasized. And yet, to this day, Scientology pushes Dianetics on the public as an introduction to the church, even with its obsession on prenatal fantasies. Isn’t that bizarre?

VANCE: Yes, it seems very bizarre from the outside. One day, one accidental utterance during pregnancy could permanently destroy a human mind (but for Dianetic therapy). The next day, prenatal engrams are passé because Hubbard found something even more significant: past lives and theta cooties or whatever.

But it all makes sense if you understand that the believer has already decided that Scientology and Dianetics work. When you’re in, you just accept that Hubbard routinely changed his mind about supposedly important things. Believers assume that contradictory aspects of Scientology and Dianetics are not so much contradictory as just different tools for different situations. And Hubbard gave little guidance on when to emphasize what because he assumed we’d be able to figure it out on our own. But we failed to live up to his expectations. Bummer. At least that’s how I eased my cognitive dissonance.

THE BUNKER: Vance, we’re so glad you could help us out during this adventure. You’ve given us key insights into the minds of Scientologists, and you’ve kept things entertaining when this book did its best to clog up our nerve centers.

Any final thoughts about our trip through the modern science of mental health?

 
VANCE: Thanks for giving me the opportunity to expostulate. While working on this project, I realized what a self-defeating system Dianetics and Scientology are. With them, Hubbard presents admirable goals of achieving a dynamic personality and long-term happiness, among other goodies. But then we are duped into relying on Hubbard for instructions on how to achieve those things. I was in a mind trap, reliant on someone else to tell me what I needed to do.

I always believed that the keys to success and happiness included large doses of curiosity, openness to new ideas, and the self-confidence to say what is. And yet I somehow brushed all that aside in practice to adhere to Hubbard’s instructions. Like I said: self-defeating. The thing that almost everybody knows that Scientologists (and other cult addicts) don’t know is that we have to figure life out ourselves.

THE BUNKER: Well, Vance, your cogent analysis has been a perfect antidote to reading Hubbard. We really had no idea, when we started this project, just how mind-numbingly bad this book was. But reading it with you has been pure pleasure.

 
——————–

Scientology Replies to DeCrescenzo in Motion for Protective Order

On Monday, there will be a hearing in Laura DeCrescenzo’s four-year lawsuit against the Church of Scientology for abuse during her 13-year career in its “Sea Organization” — including, she says, a forced abortion when she was only 17.

The church has been fighting a court order that it turn over thousands of pages of evidence in DeCrescenzo’s “pc files” — notes taken during confessionals which the church argues are religious in nature and should be protected under priest-penitent privilege. But Scientology admitted that 259 different church officials compiled and reviewed the notes in those pages, which is one of the reasons Los Angeles Superior Judge Ronald Sohigian decided that the files were not protected under California’s priest-penitent statute.

Scientology has been fighting Sohigian’s order to turn over the documents tooth and nail: It lost an appeal to the California Supreme Court and was just denied an application for an emergency stay to the U.S. Supreme Court.

But the church also filed a motion for a protective order, asking that even if it does have to turn over the documents by Sohigian’s July 2 deadline, it wants the documents kept from public view. DeCrescenzo opposed that, saying that it was too late for the church to be making such a request. Now, in the document below, the church has replied, stressing again the sensitivity of the documents.

We’ll be interested to see how Sohigian rules on Monday. Will he allow the public to see the files? Will he ask that certain items be redacted (names of third parties, etc.)? We’ll find out in a few days.

DeCrescenzo: Scientology Reply

 
——————–

Posted by Tony Ortega on June 28, 2013 at 07:00

E-mail your tips and story ideas to tonyo94@gmail.com or follow us on Twitter. We post behind-the-scenes updates at our Facebook author page. Here at the Bunker we try to have a post up every morning at 7 AM Eastern (Noon GMT), and on some days we post an afternoon story at around 2 PM. After every new story we send out an alert to our e-mail list and our FB page.

If you’d like to help support The Underground Bunker, please e-mail our webmaster Scott Pilutik at BunkerFund@tonyortega.org

We’re finally going to finish the chapter “Mechanisms and Aspects of Therapy” this week, Vance, and we won’t really be very [...]]]>

Welcome to our ongoing project, where we blog a 1950 first edition of Scientology’s bible, Dianetics, with the help of ex-Scientologist, lawyer, and author Vance Woodward. Go here for the first post in the series.

We’re finally going to finish the chapter “Mechanisms and Aspects of Therapy” this week, Vance, and we won’t really be very sorry to see it go.

By this point, Hubbard is just riffing on what he’s previously proposed, generally rehashing his ideas about engrams picked up in the womb and how to remove them so they stop affecting adult life.

In the final portion of this chapter there’s a lengthy example involving a woman who is skeptical about the auditing that her husband is going through.

That skepticism is making the man’s own auditing take longer, and we’re told that the couple’s nine-year-old child is also a nervous type because of his mother. When the husband suggests that his wife was “aberrated” and could benefit from dianetic therapy, she blows her stack, withdraws their money, and absconds with the kid.

But this story has a happy ending. Eventually the woman relents, gets auditing, and then discovers that she is suffering from the usual horrific womb-stories that Hubbard has a knack for finding…

It was instantly discovered that her father had many times threatened to kill her mother and that her father had not wanted her. Further it was found that her father’s name was Q and that her engram bank was strewn with remarks such as “Q, please don’t leave me. I will die without you.” Additionally, when she was no longer in session, she suddenly volunteered what was to her a hysterically humorous fact that all her life she had been having affairs with men named Q no matter what their shape or size or age….She divulged that she had tried many times to abort their son because she was terribly frightened that he would be a blond whereas she and her husband had dark hair. Further, the engrams of that child, she knew, contained data which she considered incriminating beyond mere abortion; while pregnant she had had intercourse with three men other than her husband.

Another woman who is a danger to her fetus is ensnared and neutralized by the Great Scientist.

VANCE: Yes, Hubbard saved the day once again.

A bit later on in the chapter, I noticed Hubbard was already laying down cult foundations: “One either practices all dianetics and gets results or practices himself into a decline: that is a mechanical, scientific fact. Dianetics, as a self-protecting science, demands practice by clears or at least good releases.” Yes, Dianetics is always effective but it demands Clears and “good releases,” which I take to mean that only Clears and good releases can effectively apply Dianetics. So, the reason you aren’t getting results is that you’re not a Clear or a good release. The solution is to continue auditing until you are.

There’s another example here that struck me as autobiographical.

THE BUNKER: The story of “R” and “C”?

VANCE: Yes. R was “high dynamic.” C was apathetic. C didn’t understand the auditor’s code, got mad at R while auditing him, and so forced R into an anger valence. Ultimately, they audited out the bad auditing (yes, you can do it). R audited out a dental extraction engram, “which contained an enormous amount of conversation between the dentist and his assistants and R’s mother, who, unfortunately for his sanity, had accompanied him to the dentist’s office.” Next C realized that she’d been a pretty lousy wife and needed to start treating R better if she were to get any results from auditing R (this might have been induced by the 50-point IQ increase she obtained from R’s quality auditing). Later, “it was suddenly disclosed” that the reason R got so upset with C is because C reminded R of a nurse from a tonsillectomy. Case closed.

Maybe it’s the “R,” but this example always struck me as being semi, if not entirely, autobiographical.

THE BUNKER: And assuming you’re right, this portion of it seems especially revealing…

His ulcer stemmed from an attempted abortion. His father, an extremely aberrated individual, had sought to abort the baby when it was seven months in the womb. The mother remonstrated that the baby might be born alive. The father said that if it were alive when born he would kill it as soon as it came out. He had said, further, that the mother had to hold still while he operated. On another occasion the father had said that he would lock the mother in a closet until she decided to abort the child. (This case was much complicated because the mother had been afraid to tell the father and had pretended not to be pregnant for three months, giving the husband the belief that the child, seven months along, was actually only four months along. Therefore, there was much secrecy in the case, much confusion and conflicting data.)…R would now cooperate but his time track had wound into a ball around the holder engram, the key. Two exodontistries for the removal of wisdom teeth with nitrous oxide anaesthesia were also suppressing the prenatals.

As you say, Vance, case closed. And if that’s true, did Hubbard believe his mother had tried to abort him, and had succeeded in injuring him so that he suffered from an ulcer as an adult? As we’ve seen in previous examples, that’s a scenario that Hubbard seemed to believe was surprisingly common.

We can’t leave this lengthy chapter without quoting one of the biggest howlers in the entire book.

“Charlatanism is almost impossible where dianetics in any of its principles is being practiced.”

Sometimes, you just have to admire Hubbard’s chutzpah.

 
——————–

Last Night in LA: Scientology on the Big Screen!

 
Mark Bunker tells us that last night’s Cinefamily event was a big hit, with a packed crowd and numerous surprises. Held at the Silent Movie Theater in Los Angeles, the event featured two classic Granada documentaries about the church introduced by Bunker, A Faith for Sale and The Shrinking World of L. Ron Hubbard. Also seen was the beloved music video, “We Stand Tall,” and a panel discussion that featured Battlefield Earth screenwriter J.D. Shapiro. Also on hand to field questions were Tory Christman and Norway’s Geir Isene, who are seen here with event emcee Hadrian Belove. Bunker tells us Isene put on a demonstration of auditing (using Belove as a guinea pig) that was remarkably fun and not nearly as repetitive and boring as actual Scientology processing. Way to go, Geir!

 
——————–

Posted by Tony Ortega on June 20, 2013 at 07:00

E-mail your tips and story ideas to tonyo94@gmail.com or follow us on Twitter. We post behind-the-scenes updates at our Facebook author page. Here at the Bunker we try to have a post up every morning at 7 AM Eastern (Noon GMT), and on some days we post an afternoon story at around 2 PM. After every new story we send out an alert to our e-mail list and our FB page.

If you’d like to help support The Underground Bunker, please e-mail our webmaster Scott Pilutik at BunkerFund@tonyortega.org

Vance, as we near the latter stages of this book, we’re still plowing through this lengthy chapter, “Mechanisms and Aspects of [...]]]>

Welcome to our ongoing project, where we blog a 1950 first edition of Scientology’s bible, Dianetics, with the help of ex-Scientologist, lawyer, and author Vance Woodward. Go here for the first post in the series.

Vance, as we near the latter stages of this book, we’re still plowing through this lengthy chapter, “Mechanisms and Aspects of Therapy.”

As we said last week, Hubbard tends to get into a groove as he describes dianetic techniques for troublesome engrams, which come in flavors like “denyers,” “holders,” “bouncers,” and “groupers.”

For whatever your father or mother uttered while you were in the womb and now holds you back as an adult, Hubbard has the cure for what ails you.

As usual, it’s an example that tends to break the reverie.

In this case, it’s a brief rant Hubbard goes on about drugs.

As you read what he has to say about nitrous oxide in particular, keep in mind that it was a trip to the dentist that changed everything for Hubbard. As Lawrence Wright described in Going Clear, in 1938 Hubbard experienced a life-altering trip while under the influence of nitrous oxide for a dental procedure. He would tell people that he’d seen all the world’s wisdom at once, or something.

With that in mind, we found this passage fascinating…

Nitrous oxide is easily the worst, being no anaesthetic which would dull pain at all but a first class hypnotic. In nitrous oxide the pain is filed and the content is filed with high and brilliant fidelity. Some years ago some investigator wondered if nitrous oxide did not make the brain decay. Fortunately brains do not decay that easily; but nitrous oxide does bring into being particularly severe engrams. The serious late-life engrams which the auditor will encounter may include, at the list’s top, a nitrous oxide dental or surgical or obstetrical engram. Nitrous oxide engrams are particularly bad when they involve exodontistry; they often form the most severe late-life engram. Aside from the fact that all exodontists have in the past talked too much and have offices which are far too noisy with street sounds, running water and flapping drill belts, nitrous oxide is not at all anaesthetic and sharpens rather than dulls pain.

What do you make of it, Vance?

VANCE: I think we’re always confronting a layered mix of fact and fiction with Hubbard’s autobiographical comments. Oh who am I kidding? Everything he said was a mix of fact and fiction. Anyhow, yes, I figure these statement are at least partially autobiographical even though they apparently belie other things Hubbard has said. Maybe he did get a mind-blowing high from being under nitrous oxide and he told some people about it. And then, later, while auditing himself, maybe he “realized” that, during that same operation, the nurse felt him up and whispered lascivious desires in his ear, which would have explained (to his satisfaction) why he abused his wife and had rotting teeth. And maybe behind all that was a desire to keep the source of his enlightenment (drugs) secret from his followers. Call me cynical, but I figure he wanted people dependent on him rather than on drugs.

Besides, Hubbard was the epitome of “Do what I say, not what I do.” Take for example, this bit in which Hubbard compares several drugs to alcohol: “Opium is less harmful, marijuana is not only less physically harmful but also better in the action of keeping a neurotic producing, phenobarbital does not dull the senses nearly as much and produces less after effect, ammonium chloride and a host of other stimulants are more productive of results and hardly less severe on the anatomy.” And that’s right after he finished extolling amphetamines and caffeine. Later on, in the 1970s, once he had a going concern with Scientology, Hubbard needed a cadre of angry rule-mongers more than free-thinking self-experimenters. At that point, Hubbard “realized” that drugs were a major source of problems in society (in other words, he was annoyed some of his followers were getting stoned rather than making him money). Just a guess.

THE BUNKER: But an intriguing one. Thank you, Vance. We’ll close out this chapter next week and then the end is in sight! (And a big thank you to our reader who sent a copy of History of Man and some other volumes.)

Next week — Dianetics Noir: Dangerous Women Hiding Their Womb-Secrets

 
——————–

Monday on Channel 4: The Bunker Invades the UK

Monday night at 9 pm, our UK readers will get a chance to see a 1-hour documentary on Channel 4 put together by director Joseph Martin and producer Danielle Clark. The title is “Scientologists at War,” and we expect it to feature the rise of Independent Scientology that is proving to be such a challenge to the church itself.

Last September, we were covering one of the most unusual stories we’ve written for the Bunker, about two former private investigators who had followed one man for 24 years on orders of Scientology leader David Miscavige. (The story itself was published in November.) We had flown to Texas for the story, and we drove down to Corpus Christi with the two private eyes and their attorneys as they were reunited with the man who had first hired them for the church in 1988, Marty Rathbun.

Also on hand was the Channel 4 team, which included producer Michael Simkin. We found ourselves being filmed as we interviewed Rathbun about the private eyes, one of the most interesting conversations we’ve ever had with him.

Later the film crew asked us if we’d be interested in getting even more involved with the project. We spent a week in Los Angeles in November with them, interviewing quite a few people, as well as a couple of days near Houston.

We don’t know what the finished film looks like, or how much of our contribution remains. But we were impressed by the amount of homework that Martin and Clark and Simkin had done, and the excellent questions they asked.

We’re not sure how viewers outside of Britain will get to see the documentary, but we have a feeling the clever folks at WWP will find a way.

 
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Posted by Tony Ortega on June 13, 2013 at 07:00

E-mail your tips and story ideas to tonyo94@gmail.com or follow us on Twitter. We post behind-the-scenes updates at our Facebook author page. Here at the Bunker we try to have a post up every morning at 7 AM Eastern (Noon GMT), and on some days we post an afternoon story at around 2 PM. After every new story we send out an alert to our e-mail list and our FB page.

If you’d like to help support The Underground Bunker, please e-mail our webmaster Scott Pilutik at BunkerFund@tonyortega.org

Vance, we’ve reached another marathon chapter in this book, “Mechanisms and Aspects of Therapy.”

We were surprised to see that this chapter [...]]]>

Welcome to our ongoing project, where we blog a 1950 first edition of Scientology’s bible, Dianetics, with the help of ex-Scientologist, lawyer, and author Vance Woodward. Go here for the first post in the series.

Vance, we’ve reached another marathon chapter in this book, “Mechanisms and Aspects of Therapy.”

We were surprised to see that this chapter begins with a few paragraphs about extra-sensory perception — ESP. But in fact, Hubbard only brings it up in order to debunk it, in particular the person who says he can remember his time in the fetus with views from outside his mother’s body.

“There is the patient in the womb and yet he can ‘see’ outside….This prenatal ESP does not in fact exist,” Hubbard writes. “It has been proven, after considerable test, that whenever the returned pre-clear thinks he sees something, the scenery itself is mentioned in the engrams and gives him an imaginary picture of it. There is no prenatal ESP, in other words.”

After trashing ESP, Hubbard then calls telepathy “rainbow chasing,” which we found really precious.

Anyway, let’s push on. We also found interesting this passage about life in the womb…

It is very noisy in the womb….Intestinal squeaks and groans, flowing water, belches, flatulation and other body activities of the mother produce continual sound. It is also very tight in later prenatal life….When mother takes quinine a high ringing noise may come into being in the foetal ears as well as her own — a ringing which will carry through a person’s whole life. Mother gets morning sickness, has hiccoughs and gets colds, coughs and sneezes. This is prenatal life. The only reason anybody “wanted” to “return to the womb” was because somebody hit mother and yelled “Come back here!” so the person does.

Vance, we’re nearing the later stages of this book. As you’re reading it after having left the church, what are some of the biggest revelations you’ve had about it?

VANCE: Yeah, I’ve had a few revelations … or none, depending on who’s counting. I’m struck by how random the information is. It’s like Hubbard typed out a stream of consciousness and never gave a second thought to editing. And yet he promoted Dianetics to best-seller status. It’s an amazing feat of self-promotion … or mass stupidity.

Incidentally, Hubbard also pooh-poohed the notion of past lives early on. In a contemporaneous lecture, he mentioned a preclear that had dreamed up a past-life engram about being eaten by a saber-toothed cat. Hubbard dismissed this as a false memory and emphasized the point by claiming (incorrectly) that saber-toothed cats went extinct before humans showed up. Hubbard changed his mind about past lives later on, of course. Cash trumps coherence in Scientology.

One thing from this chapter that has stayed with me is the notion that there are two modes of thought: black and white vs. graduated. As Hubbard obscurely puts it, “the analytical mind computes in differences,” and “the reactive mind computes in identities.” Yes, I’m sure plenty of philosophers have articulated this notion better. It just happened to be my first exposure to the concept that absolutism is dumb and textured thought is intelligent. But I’m bringing this up mostly to show how Scientologists interact with Hubbard’s dreck. I would willingly slog through pages of crap to find one or two precious nuggets of enlightenment. I somehow convinced myself that it was worth the expedition.

That brings me to another revelation: I sometimes feel ashamed at all the time and money I wasted on Scientology. I especially felt it when I first left. I reckon the threat of humiliation is what keeps a lot of people stuck in it.

THE BUNKER: Well, we can, at times, see the seductive lure of this stuff. Later in this chapter, Hubbard confidently talks about different techniques to deal with difficult patients. We have to admit, it can sound like the advice of a very competent practitioner discussing material that is not controversial.

But then, it’s always the examples that break that spell.

We get another rather amazing one here, and it’s lengthy. We’ll try to condense it.

A patient’s case was hung up on the word “hear,” and it wasn’t obvious what incident in the person’s past was causing the blockage. It turned out that the situation the person was “remembering” occurred when he was in his mother’s womb, and his father was violently kneeling on her stomach, causing the patient to experience a “somatic.” (In other words, dad’s knee on mom’s stomach could be felt — in the form of pain — by the zygote inside her.)

Hubbard tells us this was occurring three days after the blastocyst had been conceived.

Just to set the scene again, we have a grown man in a (don’t-call-it-hypnotic) reverie describing what his father was yelling at his mother as he was attacking her while the patient was a two-day-old zygote inside her, but which was faithfully recorded by the zygote’s reactive mind for recall decades later. Here’s some of what the zygote heard…

FATHER: “Stay here! Stay down, damn you, you bitch! I’m going to kill you this time. I said I would and I will. Take that! (Intensified somatic as his knee ground into the mother’s abdomen) You better start screaming. Go on. Scream for mercy!….I’m going to punish you and God is going to punish you! I’m going to rape you! I’m going to stick it into you and tear you! When I tell you to do something you’ve got to do it!….You are dirty and diseased! God’s punished you and now I’m going to punish you! (Coitus somatic begins, very violent, further injuring child) You’ve got something terrible in your past. You think you’ve got to be mean to me! You try to make me feel like nothing! You’re the one that’s nothing! Take it, take it!”

Hubbard claims in a footnote that the father turned out to be a bank president, and after the son confronted him with this information, he went apoplectic. But then Dad got some auditing, and everything turned out well.

We almost wish Hubbard would actually spell out that scene, with Son telling Dad how he’d learned that Dad had said such things to Mom all those years ago.

Well, color us skeptical.

Can you see what we mean, Vance, about the examples breaking the spell of Hubbard’s passages about technique and expertise?

VANCE: Now, definitely, I can see how these examples wreck the illusion. But back when I was a believer, I didn’t give it a second thought. Maybe I unconsciously chalked this type of dialogue up to the nature of the times. Many old television shows, for example, suffer a similar problem: bizarre dialogue in unreal complete sentences. So, was this Hubbard’s bad fiction or his patients? It didn’t even occur to me to ask that question. Either way, it didn’t faze me. The theory sounded good, the book was a best seller, and all sorts of people at the Church claimed this would benefit me.

My dad (and many others) used to tell me that Dianetics and Scientology were nothing more than hype. And I’d counter that it was impossible for them to be mere hype considering “so many people” were doing it. I mean, how could “so many people” be fooled. *face palm* Well … oops.

About the scene of the child and his banker father, that’s an example of Hubbard’s pervasive obscurity or, as I like to call it, his silver-tongued doublespeak. Does it mean the banker/father blanched and admitted the “truth”? Or does it mean that he, being stunned by the wild imaginings that auditing can produce, decided to try some himself? It wouldn’t be the first time a child got a parent to try some drugs.

THE BUNKER: We’ll stay with this chapter next week, but the end of the book is in sight. When we’re finished with Dianetics, we’d like to move on to A History of Man. Does anyone out there have an early edition of it that we could use? Drop us a line.

Next week — This is Your Dianetics on Drugs: The Nitrous Engram

 
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Nevada Blows Chance to Regulate Narconon

Our man in Las Vegas, Nathan Baca, updates us on that state’s opportunity to introduce some oversight of Scientology’s drug rehab facility there…

SB501, the bill pushed by Nevada State Health employees to allow them to inspect Narconon Caliente, failed to pass the legislature before the mandated 120-day session.

This was due to poor bill scheduling on the part of State Senate Finance Chair Debbie Smith (Debbie.Smith@sen.state.nv.us), who let the bill languish in her committee for weeks, and State Senate Majority Leader Mo Denis (Moises.Denis@sen.state.nv.us), who failed to get the bill on the Senate Floor until just a few hours left on the last day of session.

Assembly Speaker Marilyn Kirkpatrick (Marilyn.Kirkpatrick@asm.state.nv.us) didn’t receive the bill until 30 minutes before the midnight deadline this Monday. She tried a last-ditch attempt to move the bill to committee as required, but ran out of time.

Therefore, Narconon Caliente will continue to run un-licensed in Nevada for another 2 years. There was no organized opposition to the bill. Given the weakness of the state’s legislative system, it simply wasn’t seen as a priority. Instead, there was State Senate debate on whether we should have a state dog.

 
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Posted by Tony Ortega on June 6, 2013 at 07:00

E-mail your tips and story ideas to tonyo94@gmail.com or follow us on Twitter. We post behind-the-scenes updates at our Facebook author page. Here at the Bunker we try to have a post up every morning at 7 AM Eastern (Noon GMT), and on some days we post an afternoon story at around 2 PM. After every new story we send out an alert to our e-mail list and our FB page.

If you’d like to help support The Underground Bunker, please e-mail our webmaster Scott Pilutik at BunkerFund@tonyortega.org

Vance, we’ve now reached another marathon chapter, “Mechanisms and Aspects of Therapy.” It reviews various techniques of dianetic therapy that L. [...]]]>

Welcome to our ongoing project, where we blog a 1950 first edition of Scientology’s bible, Dianetics, with the help of ex-Scientologist, lawyer, and author Vance Woodward. Go here for the first post in the series.

Vance, we’ve now reached another marathon chapter, “Mechanisms and Aspects of Therapy.” It reviews various techniques of dianetic therapy that L. Ron Hubbard has already described.

Generally, Hubbard is giving an auditor tips for how to deal with various issues that come up in therapy, always with the goal of eventually returning a patient to his or her very first engram, whatever first traumatized the little zygote soon after conception.

But in these instructions, we ran into something that really startled us and had never, as far as we can tell, come up before in this book.

As Hubbard is running down a list of “tools” that an auditor can use in therapy, he makes the point that an auditor must disregard what a patient thinks his case is about — an auditor is in charge of his case.

But it’s the way that Hubbard expresses this that really stunned us:

Wife, son, whatever you may be to the pre-clear, you are the auditor when you are auditing.

Hey, wait a minute. Hubbard never discussed this before — he apparently expects that just about any two people might engage in this therapy, even a man auditing his own mother, or a wife auditing her husband.

Say what?

We’re suddenly flashing on all of the material that’s come before — a fetus being knocked unconscious because his parents are having sex, “remembering” what his parents were shouting at each other while screwing or fighting.

And now, it comes out that Hubbard expected that this kind of thing would emerge while a mother was auditing her son, or a woman auditing her father?

The implications of that are actually very disturbing. Can you help us out here, Vance? By the time you had got into Scientology, were there some boundaries drawn that would keep, for example, a mother from auditing her son about the kinds of things that happened to him while he was (supposedly) in her womb?

VANCE: Even by the time I got in there weren’t any hard boundaries. Any two people are free to audit each other, including family members. Of course, there’s no directive that they do so. I’d say that, on balance, most Scientologists avoid giving or receiving auditing to their family members for the obvious reason that it might make it more difficult for the preclear to open up. And while Hubbard got a lot wrong, he definitely knew that absolutely nothing would happen in auditing if the preclear doesn’t trust and open up to the auditor. On the other hand, I met at least one guy who was quite proud that he had audited his own son to clear. So, they’re all over the map.

But let’s back up a little. First, Dianetics is supposed to be a sort of lay person’s psychotherapy, something that anybody could do. And who else are we going to do it with than our friends and family? I believe that Hubbard does note somewhere that it is not ideal for families or couples to audit each other for obvious reasons. On the other hand, he says that even bad auditing is better than no auditing. So, if nobody else is available, then you’re better off “co-auditing” with a family member than not auditing at all. So, yes, it’s shocking, but if we were to credit the idea that any auditing is better than none (a notion I reject, just in case you were wondering), it kind of would follow that family members should just hunker down and audit each other if nobody else were available.

Second, we should remember that Dianetics auditing isn’t much like (my notion of) a traditional talking therapy where patients try to figure out their problems with rational guidance from a therapist. Rather, in Dianetcs, preclears create a scene. There are no questions like, “How did that make you feel?” or “What made you think that?” or “Why did you say that?” It’s more like, “What happened next?” and “What’s the temperature?” The focus in Dianetics auditing is on the physical perceptions of the preclear rather than on mental status. So, as long as auditors can contain their incredulity about the scene being fabricated, things can proceed nicely. I think this at least notionally helps reduce the chances of family members getting into arguments during an auditing session.

Still, I get your point that it would be just a little uncomfortable for a child to regale mom or dad about their sexual exploits. For hard-core Scientologists, that’s something we would endure and proceed. That’s where the Scientology communication drills come into play, which teach a person how to not react to situations.

THE BUNKER: Another thing that surprised us in this chapter, Vance, was a four-letter word that Hubbard rarely seemed to use: love.

He has a short section titled “Love” in this big chapter, and it starts off with Hubbard waxing poetic again: “Without doubt Love has ruined more lives than war and made more happiness than all the dreams of Paradise.”

He then suggests that love comes in three types:

It has been discovered that there are three kinds of Love between woman and man: the first is covered under the law of affinity and is the affection with which Mankind holds Mankind; the second is sexual selection and is a true magnetism between partners; the third is compulsive “Love” dictated by nothing more reasonable than aberration.

Hubbard goes on to say that the second kind really only exists in legends, the first can be found if you look around, but that he’s really concerned with the third type, which “crams the courts with urgent pleas for divorce.”

Well, so much for love.

Vance, please tell us what you saw in regards to “2D” — Scientologists and their relationships, and what people seemed to think about the concept of “love” while you were in the church.

VANCE: Scientologists are all over the map in terms of relationships. Some Scientologists are romantic. Some are robotic. Relationships form and end. Infidelity is rare, but not unheard of. Child and spousal abuse are extremely rare so far as I can tell. On the whole, as long as both partners are Scientologists, most Scientology couples get along fine and are loving. Scientology is just like any other cult in that regard. And it makes sense. I mean, this is a group of people with a range of personalities weighted towards oddballs, and all of whom want to be better people and have better relationships. Granted, we all have different definitions of what it means to be a better person, but it’s pretty much universal for people to consider peaceful loving relationships to be better than acrimonious ones. I think it’s more about values than skills. Scientology offers some (but no cost-effective) skills for improving relationships with others. Either way, we’re talking about people who endorse and strive to evince warm relationships. Again, just like any other cult.

But maybe I didn’t quite answer your question. Referring back to the book, I think all those scenes of couples warring with each other are depictions of what Scientologists consider to be typical wog behavior: yet more evidence that Scientology works because Scientologists don’t act that way. I don’t recall ever having a discussion with anybody about these so-called three kinds of love. To me, it seemed like a pedestrian analysis. We have the customary two kinds of love: sexual/passionate and filial/philanthropic. And then Hubbard tells us there’s a third, which basically amounts to unhealthy co-dependency. Yawn. Of course, he packages it all in his own special twaddle to make it seem like these things “were discovered.”

Oh, one final point. Scientologists use “2D” as a noun to refer to their romantic partners or to sexual psychic energy. You can hear Scientologist talking about Joe and Betty “2D flowing” at each other. Even when I was in, that word choice drove me up the wall.

(Next week — Dianetics Has No Patience for ESP or Telepathy — That’s Pseudoscience!)

 
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Posted by Tony Ortega on May 30, 2013 at 07:00

E-mail your tips and story ideas to tonyo94@gmail.com or follow us on Twitter. We post behind-the-scenes updates at our Facebook author page. Here at the Bunker we try to have a post up every morning at 7 AM Eastern (Noon GMT), and on some days we post an afternoon story at around 2 PM. After every new story we send out an alert to our e-mail list and our FB page.

If you’d like to help support The Underground Bunker, please e-mail our webmaster Scott Pilutik at BunkerFund@tonyortega.org

Vance, we’ve reached a short chapter titled “Some Types of Engrams,” and it provides several examples of engrams, which we always [...]]]>

Welcome to our ongoing project, where we blog a 1950 first edition of Scientology’s bible, Dianetics, with the help of ex-Scientologist, lawyer, and author Vance Woodward. Go here for the first post in the series.

Vance, we’ve reached a short chapter titled “Some Types of Engrams,” and it provides several examples of engrams, which we always find rather entertaining.

Our old friend Jeff Jacobsen has criticized us for not doing more in this series to explain that L. Ron Hubbard inherited many of his ideas from previous writers. And there’s no doubt, for example, that the basic notion of your adult life being affected by what happened while you were in your mother’s womb was something that had been suggested many years before Hubbard wrote Dianetics in 1950. If you haven’t seen it, you really should look at Jeff’s 1992 essay, “The Hubbard is Bare,” that lays out some of the predecessors to this book.

However, it’s Hubbard’s specific explanations for how prenatal engrams affect adults that we find astounding, and when you examine them, you simply must give Hubbard himself full credit for their creativity.

Let’s look at the doozy of an example that starts off this chapter, for example.

Hubbard asks us to imagine a pregnant woman who is struck in the stomach by her violent husband. She screams, and he says, “God damn you, I hate you! You are no good. I’m going to kill you!”

The woman responds: “Please don’t hit me again. Please don’t. I’m hurt. I’m hurt. I’m frantic with pain!”

And the father comes back with: “Lie there and rot, damn you! Good-bye!”

Now, in Hubbard’s way of thinking, the lingering effect of this sad scene results from what the fetus absorbs of this conversation after being knocked “unconscious” from the father’s blow. (And remember, this may be taking place just days after conception.)

This scene is imprinted on the reactive mind of the unborn in several different ways.

1. It is severe because it is so early — in other words, a prenatal engram rather than one that comes later in life.

2. It contains an element of hurt (“I’m frantic with pain!”)

3. The engram contains a “holder” (“Lie there”), and Hubbard says that means it will have a tendency to be “chronic.”

4. The command to “rot” will probably produce disease in the adult.

5. The “God damn you” introduces a religious aspect which will confuse the adult.

6. The “You are no good” will convince the adult that other people are not good.

7. The hostility in the tone — “I hate you” — deepens the effects of the engram.

8. And the child, once born, has to live with these awful people who were fighting while he was a fetus.

Given our history exploring this book, that last one sounds once again like Hubbard working out his own issues about his parents. He also suggests that the adult will have a tendency to take on, alternatively, the “valence” of the bullying father and the valence of the “cowardly” mother (his characterization).

And so this is how the adult goes through life with that prenatal engram residing in his reactive mind:

If he dramatizes the mother, he will feel the pain she received, which is a blow in the stomach (whereas his own was on his head and heart); if he dramatizes the father, he will be in trouble with society, to say nothing of his own wife and children.

And so our Hubbardian everyman stumbles through life, unaware that his unhappiness can be sourced to the words of an argument that occurred while he was the size of a pea in his mother’s womb.

We know from many previous examples that this is the basics of Dianetics, Vance, but it still amazes us that anyone took this idea seriously.

VANCE: Yeah. It amazes me too, and yet I did take it seriously. After I left, I concluded that the only way I could save face and not suffer enduring self-loathing was to realize that I worked very hard to make sense of Hubbard’s take on reality. So I proceeded to realize exactly that. Anyhow, here are couple of things that helped me feel a little comfortable with the wackiness while I was in. First, Hubbard claimed that engrams were more like insentient recordings than memories. So, he wasn’t claiming that knocked-out fetuses could understand the words being spoken in their vicinity. Rather, a person would have to learn language before the word content of engrams would have any hypnotic effect. That seemed plausible to me. (Don’t worry, it no longer does.)

Also, Hubbard theorized several possible causes of most maladies. So, for example, chronic saddies as an adult could come from the word content of prenatal engrams (“I’m sad”), from the raw emotional content of those engrams or from “painful emotion engrams” (i.e., traumatic losses in life). According to Hubbard, these traumatic losses are what sequester and seal up a person’s life force. In English, people who experience crappy events tend to be sad. This explains why children are happy and adults are miserable: an accumulation of losses and disappointments. That seemed pretty intuitive as a general, though not absolute, truth. But Hubbard went on to claim that prenatal engrams provide the foundation upon which painful emotion engrams rest. Get rid of the prenatal engrams and emotionally painful events would no longer stick with a person. In other words, well-audited individuals would spring back much more quickly from emotional setbacks. In theory. Well, it sounded promising. But more importantly. I was sad and wanted help with that. For me, I suppose it was a combination of incentives, an ability to self-deceive and hangups about taking drugs. Either way, happiness is something that, arguably, is always real. In other words, delusion-based happiness is happiness. In other words, reality is for people who can’t handle Scientology.

THE BUNKER: We’ll just point out one more example from this short chapter. To illustrate how powerful and resilient engrams are, Hubbard — ever fascinated with pregnancy — suggests that morning sickness is a psychosomatic condition resulting from an engram that is passed down from generation to generation because of things that pregnant women say aloud and which is heard by their unborn.

He hypothesizes that this chain of vomitous hypochondriac suggestion may have gotten started when some woman in the primordial past happened to get food poisoning while she was pregnant.

So, for thousands of years, women have been passing on to each other the idea of being sick while pregnant because of the things they blurt out while nauseous, and morning sickness is not caused by the things actually happening to a woman’s body.

Having never given birth, Vance, we’re thinking it might be best to allow our commenters to give us their thoughts on this one.

VANCE: I’m with you on that. Let’s leave that one to the crowd.

Next week — Word To Your Mother: Dianetics And Its Lack of Boundaries

 
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Get Your Soul Duds Ready!

We were going to save this wonderful flier for Sunday Funnies, but then Mike Rinder went ahead and put it on his blog, ruining our plans. That so-and-so!

Anyway, we can’t imagine what a fun time it’s going to be when people gather at the Inglewood facility to hear a brother from the Nation of Islam explain to them why they should give donations so Scientology can refurbish a building in the San Fernando Valley. That’s going to be some speech!

 
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Posted by Tony Ortega on May 23, 2013 at 07:00

E-mail your tips and story ideas to tonyo94@gmail.com or follow us on Twitter. We post behind-the-scenes updates at our Facebook author page. Here at the Bunker we try to have a post up every morning at 7 AM Eastern (Noon GMT), and on some days we post an afternoon story at around 2 PM. After every new story we send out an alert to our e-mail list and our FB page.

If you’d like to help support The Underground Bunker, please e-mail our webmaster Scott Pilutik at BunkerFund@tonyortega.org

Vance, we’ve now reached the longest chapter so far in this book, “Emotion and the Life Force.” We have to admit [...]]]>

Welcome to our ongoing project, where we blog a 1950 first edition of Scientology’s bible, Dianetics, with the help of ex-Scientologist, lawyer, and author Vance Woodward. Go here for the first post in the series.

Vance, we’ve now reached the longest chapter so far in this book, “Emotion and the Life Force.” We have to admit to being rather disappointed that L. Ron Hubbard, after finally tantalizing us with some specifics about dianetic therapy in the previous two chapters, chooses at this point to go back into theory with such a long digression.

And especially about something as vague as “life force.” Not only is life force unquantifiable (“Let us assume that the entire being is possessed of 1000 arbitrary units of life force”), but at least three times in this chapter, Hubbard once again admits that he’s really just guessing about how things work: “recall it is just a theory and dianetics can stand without it.”

So what we get are several pages about how some people are more “alive” than others, but there’s no way to measure it with any real precision, and any theory about how such differences work may be completely off since Hubbard has no real evidence of any kind.

And yet, this stuff is worthy of the longest chapter so far in this meandering book.

At least Hubbard has graced us with another of his eye-opening examples to reward us for our perseverance.

You just knew that Hubbard would eventually get around to Alexander the Great, who conquered much of the known world by the time he was 33 years old, but then died in Babylon in 323 BC.

Hubbard provides a very entertaining dianetic reading of this renowned ancient…

He was educated to believe he was a god, his manic engram said he was a god and had a holder in it. Alexander conquered the world and died at 33. He could hold in his manic only so long as it could be obeyed: when it could not longer be obeyed, it changed his valence, became no more a manic and drove him, with pain, into dispersed activities. The engram, received from his mother, Olympia, can almost be read even at this later date. It must have said he would be a joyous god who would conquer all the world and must keep on conquering, that he must always strive to rise higher and higher. It was probably a ritual chant of some sort from his mother, who was a high priestess of Lesbos and who must have received some injury just before the ritual. She hated her husband, Phillip. A son who would conquer all was the answer. Alexander may well have had fifty or a hundred such “assist” engrams, the violent praying of a woman aberrated enough to murder.

After our previous chapter on mothers bestowing engrams on their babies, we have to wince at this from Hubbard. Is he certain that Olympia chanted while pregnant, or did she just have a difficult time one day on the toilet?

Anyway, Hubbard continues, explaining that Alexander’s engram somehow got less effective once he got far enough away from its source (his mother in Macedonia). Although, in truth, he had returned to Babylon after getting as far east as India.

Thus he could be assumed to have conquered until he could no longer stretch a line of supply for conquering, at which time he, of course, would no longer be able to obey the engram and its force of pain would turn on him. The engrams dictated attack to conquer, and they enforced the command with pain: once conquering could no longer be accomplished, the pain attacked Alexander. He realized one day he was dying: within the week he was dead: and at the height of his power. Such, on a very large scale, is a manic phrase in an engram at work.

But consider, Hubbard says, if dianetics had been around back in Alexander’s day, and he could have been “cleared” of his engrams. What then?

He would most certainly have been able to conquer the world and at eighty might well have been alive to enjoy it.

And how does Hubbard know this? Because Alexander was operating with only 500 of his 1000 life force points. And if he’d been cleared by dianetics, he would have been twice as manically forceful than he actually was in life.

“The theory may be wrong, the observed data is not,” Hubbard says, clearly satisfied with himself — but perhaps mostly with the thought that anyone would take any of this seriously to begin with.

Vance, are we nuts to think that Hubbard thought himself as some sort of Alexander who was being held back by a lunatic mother?

VANCE: Oh, absolutely, you’re not. Hubbard rarely spoke about his parents, and when he did, it was not good. In one lecture, he described the following scene. He’s madly typing away in his room, filing cabinet doors are banging open and slamming shut, paper flying all over the place. This is Hubbard’s kind of ideal chaotic high-energy activity. Enter his mother telling him that he needs to calm down and take a break, that he is working himself to exhaustion. That, in Hubbard’s opinion, was an attempt to kill him, to shut him down, to make him smaller. He warned his followers to watch out for those types.

Hubbard told another story of how his mom beat the family dog with a chain for eating chickens or something like that, but the dog was too stupid to even understand that it was being punished and simply responded with loving dog kisses. Granted, Hubbard was insanely precious with his praise of others. Either way, based on his rare comments about her, Hubbard’s mom was evil.

And get this: Hubbard claimed to be the sole source of the only “technology” that could help the universe in all its trillions-of-years-long existence. Alexander was merely out to conquer the world. Pffft. Hubbard had a much a grander vision. Thank goodness he discovered Dianetics and was able to escape Alexander’s fate.

THE BUNKER: This chapter just goes on and on. Thankfully, Hubbard gives us two more unforgettable examples of how engrams work, and we feel compelled to bring them to our readers. In the first one, Hubbard is explaining why an adult might be suffering from arthritis which was actually caused by something that happened to him while he was in his mother’s womb. It turns out, his adult arthritis is caused by an incident of his pregnant mother stumbling over a pig.

Mama said, when she gracefully fell over a pig, “Oh, I can’t get up! Oh, my poor, poor baby. Oh, my baby! I wonder if I hurt my poor, poor baby. Oh, I hope my baby is still alive! Please God let him live. Please God let me keep my baby. Please!” Only the God to which she prayed was the Reactive Mind, which makes one of its idiot computations on the basis of everything is equal to everything. A holder, a prayer for life, a thoroughly bruised baby’s spine, Mama’s sympathy, a pig grunt, a prayer to God, all these things are equal to the reactive mind and so we have a fine case of arthritis, particularly since our patient sought “survival” by marrying a girl with a voice just like Mama’s sounded when he was in the womb…Arthritis is a baby is a pig grunt is a prayer to God is wife’s sympathy is being poor is Mama’s voice and all these things are desirable. He’s kept himself poor and he’s kept his arthritis and he married a wife who would make a harlot blush and this is pro-survival…

Fortunately, there’s Dianetics to help the man remember the pig incident by taking him back to his life as a fetus. As for the second example, a case of a fellow experiencing bleeding ulcers, his time in his mother’s womb was even more fraught with danger…

In the case of the ulcers, here was baby poked full of holes (Mama is having a terrible time trying to abort him so she can pretend a miscarriage, and she uses assorted household instruments thrust into the cervix to do it) and some of the holes are through and through his baby’s abdomen and stomach: he will live because he is surrounded by protein and has a food supply and because the sac is like one of these puncture-proof inner tubes that seals up every hole. (Nature has been smart about attempted abortion for a long, long time.)…It also so happens that Grandma lives next door and she comes over unexpectedly…She therefore finds much to censure when she sees a bloody orangewood stick in the bathroom. Baby is still “unconscious.” Grandma berates Mama: “Any daughter of mine who would do such a horrible thing should be punished by the vengeance of God…and driven through the streets…Now you go right on through with your pregnancy, Eloisia, and when that baby is born, if you don’t want him, you bring him to me!”…And so, when our bleeding ulcer gets born, there is Grandma and there is security and safety…And Roger will, when Grandma is dead, develop bleeding ulcers to get her back.

To review: A man gets ulcers because his grandmother has died, and she had defended him against his mother who had sent a stick through his abdomen in an abortion attempt that he somehow survived. And this is the memory that he has recovered under a (don’t-call-it-hypnotic) reverie.

Hubbard uses these examples to make the case that some engrams are “pro-survival” because they are produced around the allies in our lives. When we lose those allies, it is particularly painful for us, and it’s an auditor’s job to dig up those feelings and expose them.

Now, we might gently point out that when you ask someone to remember when they first learned about the death of a loved one, it will not only bring back the pain of that experience, but it might also help release that pain and make a person feel better. It’s pretty easy to understand that phenomenon without the need for “engrams” or the “reactive mind” to explain. But what do we know.

Vance, there’s one more thing we want to point out in this marathon chapter, and then we’d love to hear your thoughts on all of this. Late in the chapter, for the first time in this book, Hubbard describes moments when a patient “may not be…occupying his own body.” He calls this exteriorization, but at this point, his explanation for what’s going on is rather pedestrian. Exteriorization, he says, is caused when “painful emotion is present in such quantity that the patient cannot occupy himself.”

The patient is recalling something so disturbing, in other words, he can’t bear to experience it again, so watches it happen from a remove. But as the patient recalls the incident a few more times, the pain will reduce, and he’ll see it again from within himself.

Uh-oh. Did Hubbard just say that therapy helps end exteriorization, which he has described as merely a trick of the mind?

Vance, we know that Scientology will later make exteriorization the ultimate goal of Hubbard’s tech, and tell believers that it’s the actual detaching of the soul (the thetan), from the corporeal body, and something that therapy produces, not reduces.

Are we looking at early-Hubbard heresy here?

VANCE: Throughout his career, Hubbard oscillated between negating and affirming things. Regarding what he said about exteriorization in Dianetics, he later said that he realized people really were exteriorizing, and leaving their bodies. He went through a similar evolution regarding past lives. Early on, he dismissed them in his lectures. Later, he embraced them. The thing to keep in mind is that Hubbard could contradict himself and modify his opinion all he liked. When Hubbard changed his theory, it was a good thing. It proved that research was being done and that the man could admit when he was wrong. Well, that and it proved he knew how to make money. Either way, this doesn’t mean anybody else could have an opinion. No, no, no. Try contradicting Hubbard’s final word on any issue in a Church of Scientology and you’ll soon find yourself in front of the Scientology thought police. Fact.

Also, Scientology lends itself to some doublebabble. The idea with Scientology — I’m paraphrasing here but not exaggerating — is first to bring people up to the point that they realize they’re messed up and then from there to the point where they’re OK again. So Scientology is like a big loop, but people are supposed to be better off from the trip. This notion is often articulated when discussing Scientology’s famous personality test. From test to test, the graph might show improvement or not. Improvement on the graph of course is evidence that Scientology is working. When the graph (inevitably) collapses, that means the Scientologist has “gone out through the top and come back in through the bottom.” Voilà! More improvement!

So we could rationalize all this exteriorization talk as follows: “Aberrated people imagine that they go exterior as a way of escaping reality. Dianetics brings people up to the point where they can confront reality (i.e. experience engramic incidents from an interiorized viewpoint). And only then can they move up to the point that they can exteriorize for real.” Convinced?

THE BUNKER: Vance, you could sell us anything.

Next week — A Womb With a View: More Dianetics Just-So Stories

 
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Tell Us What You Think Will Happen in Laura D’s Case Today

Yesterday, the California Supreme Court denied Scientology’s petition to put a stay on Laura DeCrescenzo’s forced-abortion lawsuit. It seems like ages ago, but earlier, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Ronald M. Sohigian had set a date of May 6 by which time Scientology had to turn over thousands of pages of evidence in Laura’s “pc files” — confessional material gathered during intense interrogations in her time as a Sea Org worker. But then the church began petitioning California’s appeals and supreme courts, and Judge Sohigian set a new status hearing for May 16 — today! So now, after striking out with its appeals, what will Scientology do when they come into court today? The way the church has been fighting tooth and nail not to turn over the evidence, you have to wonder if they’ll walk into court this morning with a big fat check to settle the case (or at least begin settlement talks). Could the church ask for the time to petition the US Supreme Court? Or heck, maybe the church will actually cooperate and turn over Laura’s pc folders? Stranger things have happened. Anyway, give us your vote on what’s going to happen today, and we’ll be looking forward to finding out what actually happens later this afternoon…

 
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Posted by Tony Ortega on May 16, 2013 at 07:00

E-mail your tips and story ideas to tonyo94@gmail.com or follow us on Twitter. We post behind-the-scenes updates at our Facebook author page. Here at the Bunker we try to have a post up every morning at 7 AM Eastern (Noon GMT), and on some days we post an afternoon story at around 2 PM. After every new story we send out an alert to our e-mail list and our FB page.

If you’d like to help support The Underground Bunker, please e-mail our webmaster Scott Pilutik at BunkerFund@tonyortega.org

Vance, we’ve reached a chapter titled “The Laws of Returning,” and it’s at moments like these that we wonder how this [...]]]>

Welcome to our ongoing project, where we blog a 1950 first edition of Scientology’s bible, Dianetics, with the help of ex-Scientologist, lawyer, and author Vance Woodward. Go here for the first post in the series.

Vance, we’ve reached a chapter titled “The Laws of Returning,” and it’s at moments like these that we wonder how this book was ever taken seriously by anyone.

“Let us take an engram which comes from one of Mother’s bowel movements,” L. Ron Hubbard writes in this chapter and, come on, what human being puts those words together in a sentence?

She is straining, which causes compression, which brings about “unconsciousness” in the unborn child. Then, if she habitually talks to herself (a monologuist) as an enormous number of aberrated women do, she may say, “Oh, this is hell. I am all jammed up inside. I feel so stuffy I can’t think. This is too terrible to be borne.”

What is it the kids say today? “Said no one ever.”

But let’s humor Hubbard and entertain the thought that somewhere, at some time, a constipated pregnant woman spoke the words “I’m so stuffy I can’t think. This is too terrible to be borne.” Hubbard tells us that because she’s straining to relieve herself, it “knocks out” the fetus (again with the quotes because in Dianetics actual unconsciousness isn’t really necessary to soak up an engram) and whatever she then says gets absorbed by the zygote’s reactive mind, which takes everything literally.

Hubbard proposes two results. Later, as an adult, that child will have a persistent cold (“I feel so stuffy”) and will regret his own birth (“too terrible to be borne”).

Now, just let that sink in a moment.

We’re talking about a worldview that suggests a grown man could have the sniffles because, decades earlier while he was in the womb, his mother had a hard time taking a dump and unwisely spoke out loud while straining on the toilet.

This guy Hubbard had issues.

Vance, is it just that Scientologists don’t actually read this book, or had your fellow church members found a way to dismiss examples like this. Or, a horrifying thought, did they actually believe the human mind works this way?

VANCE: It’s complicated. Superficially, yes, Scientologists believe unquestioningly that the mind really works this way. If Hubbard says it’s so, then it’s so. A Scientologist’s only job is to understand what Hubbard wrote and then apply it. That said, I think most Scientologists know that they are not as messed up as they should be if it were so easy to mentally destroy a zygote with a mere pooping coupled to some horrific dialogue. So, I think this all plays out with Scientologists feeling a bit lucky that their engram-filled minds haven’t been “restimulated” to the point of making them go insane. In other words, Scientologists get the sense that they are sort of walking hair-trigger bombs that could be set off at any minute from some minor but restimulative event.

But I’m not sure that’s the most accurate answer nowadays. Take me. When I was in, my response to Hubbard’s claims was always more or less something along the lines of, “Well, I don’t know. Maybe. I guess. We’ll see. I’ll find out eventually. Either way, I hope I’ll get some benefit from this, like everybody else.”

Having talked to a few other ex-members, I now get the sense that nearly everybody has secret reservations. It’s like we were all a bunch of morons, each having our secret doubts, and each hiding those reservations to avoid being a downer for everybody else. Incidentally, this type of thing played out in other ways with, for example, some Scientologists simultaneously encouraging others to empty out their savings while they themselves saved their own money. It’s like the place is salted with voyeurs who are good at giving lip service while staying above the fray. I was not one of them. I mean, I was a voyeur too. But I paid for the privilege. In summary, nobody can deny that Scientology is much more about PR than actuality. And that’s part of what convinces me today that the e-meter does worse than nothing: it allows pathological liars and sociopaths to sail by in Scientology while earnest folks get hammered. Oh, those were fun times.

I can almost imagine a day when the entire religion falls apart and all that will remain is David Miscavige saying, “Geez, guys. By the time I realized it was all nonsense I felt obligated to carry on because everybody was hanging so much of their happiness and self-worth on my shoulders. I felt trapped. Terribly sorry about that.”

Well, maybe not.

THE BUNKER: The chapter then goes on to explain that there are ways the auditor can be skillful and detect when certain types of engrams are resisting removal. The auditor must use what Hubbard calls “repeater technique” to get at those basic problems that lie underneath a person’s problems.

And somehow, he always seems to come back to a preclear “remembering” the experience of being in the womb while his or her parents had sex fraught with anxiety and drama.

There’s this example that Hubbard supplies, for example, to illustrate how a woman makes a breakthrough during counseling. Up to this point, the auditor had been unable to get at her prenatal memories. But he kept at the repeater technique until finally…

GIRL: I have a somatic in my face! It feels like I am being pushed. (This was good news for the auditor knew she had a mid-prenatal pain shut-off which prevented later somatics from appearing.)

AUDITOR: Contact it more closely and continue to repeat.

GIRL: “Much later. Much later.” It’s getting stronger.

AUDITOR: Continue.

GIRL: “Much…” I hear a voice! There. That’s it. Why, that’s my father’s voice!

AUDITOR: Listen to the words and repeat them, please.

GIRL: He’s talking to my mother. Say, this face pressure is uncomfortable. It keeps going up and down on me. It hurts!

AUDITOR: Repeat his words please.

GIRL: He’s saying: “Oh honey, I won’t come in you now. It’s better to wait until much later to have one.” And there’s my mother’s voice. Say, this pressure is hurting me. No, it’s eased up considerably. Funny, the minute I contacted his voice, it got less.

AUDITOR: What is your mother saying, please, if you hear her?

GIRL: She’s saying: “I don’t want you in there at all then!” She’s mad! Say, the somatic stopped. (Coitus had ended at this point.)

AUDITOR: Please return to the start of this and recount.

GIRL: (Regains the beginning, somatic returns) I wonder what they’re doing? (then a pause) I hear a squishing sound! (then a pause and embarrassment) Oh!

Vance, why was L. Ron Hubbard so obsessed with his parents screwing? And wasn’t it obvious to his followers that they were supposed to work through his own hangups in their cases?

VANCE: Funny, when reading these examples, I always assumed that Hubbard was describing his own sexual experiences as an adult. Either way, it never occurred to me that Hubbard was essentially guiding people through his own personal hell and forcing others to “audit his case,” as it were. When I was in, I believed that he had alighted upon some universal truths and that, despite all the the shortcomings of Scientology, I could get a lot of benefit from it. I’d never heard anybody articulate the idea that fundamentally, we Scientologists were being forced to work through Hubbard’s hangups. Only then did it seem obvious. It makes me wonder if Scientology doesn’t attract people who are similar in some way to Hubbard. Yikes.

I should probably note that Dianetics is way more focused on sex than the bulk of Scientology. So, you might be getting a slightly warped idea of what Scientologists are learning on the whole. Don’t get me wrong, Scientologists tend to be a little sexually repressed in my experience. As an example, masturbation is discouraged though not, in my experience, grounds to be sent to an Ethics Officer, the Scientology thought police.

THE BUNKER: Thanks, Vance. We hate to think of you going to ethics for that. Anyway, just for fun we’ve put a headline on this story that brought back some great memories of a person we sorely miss. He was taken from us 15 years ago this month. Phil, you were the best…

 
Next week — Babylon Surmising: Dianetics Rights an Ancient Wrong

 
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Posted by Tony Ortega on May 2, 2013 at 07:00

E-mail your tips and story ideas to tonyo94@gmail.com or follow us on Twitter. We post behind-the-scenes updates at our Facebook author page. Here at the Bunker we try to have a post up every morning at 7 AM Eastern (Noon GMT), and on some days we post an afternoon story at around 2 PM. After every new story we send out an alert to our e-mail list and our FB page.

If you’d like to help support The Underground Bunker, please e-mail our webmaster Scott Pilutik at BunkerFund@tonyortega.org

We’re now getting into a very interesting part of Dianetics. We’re finally going to learn some actual methods of auditing, and [...]]]>

Welcome to our ongoing project, where we blog a 1950 first edition of Scientology’s bible, Dianetics, with the help of ex-Scientologist, lawyer, and author Vance Woodward. Go here for the first post in the series.

We’re now getting into a very interesting part of Dianetics. We’re finally going to learn some actual methods of auditing, and L. Ron Hubbard wants us to understand that what he is teaching us is in no way hypnosis.

Of course, when Hubbard is very emphatic about something, you should always figure that the opposite may be true. Let’s take a look at the way he describes how to get a subject into the proper dianetic “reverie”…

Auditor: Look at the ceiling. When I count from one to seven your eyes will close. You will remain aware of everything which goes on. You will be able to remember everything that happens here. You can pull yourself out of anything which you get into if you don’t like it. All right (slowly, soothingly): One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. One, two, three (patient’s eyes close and eyelids flicker), four, five, six, seven. (Auditor pauses; installs canceller.) All right, let us go back to your fifth birthday… (work continues until the auditor has worked the patient enough for the period)…Come to present time. Are you in present time? (Yes.) (Use canceller word.) When I count from five to one and snap my fingers you will feel alert. Five, four, three, two, one. (Snap.)

Yeah, Vance, we see what he means. Nothing like the hypnosis shows we’ve seen on stage. We can’t believe anyone thought there was any similarity at all!

VANCE: For sure. While I was hooked on Scientology I reasoned my way out of this issue by telling myself that the important difference between hypnosis and auditing is that, with hypnosis, the hypnotist implants ideas into the patient, whereas with auditing the patient undertakes a journey of self-discovery. So, it’s not so much that auditing is different than hypnosis in all imaginable ways. It’s different only in one way: with auditing the goal is to put the person in control of themselves rather than superimposing yet more compulsion and repression on top of already existing compulsions and repressions. Think of it as being like a long mathematical equation and then adding in a negative sign at the beginning. In a sense it’s the same thing, but in a sense it’s the opposite thing.

If only it were true. The reality is that Scientology zealously micromanages its user’s “cognitions” (Hubbard-speak for realizations). So, the supposed distinction between hypnosis and auditing is, ultimately, illusory. Welcome to Cult Studies 101.

THE BUNKER: The other important thing to take from this chapter is Hubbard’s idea of what a snap clearing away the reactive mind should be. For our non-Scientology readers or those who may have not been following along throughout this series, Hubbard proposed that there’s a nefarious part of our minds that takes over when we’re unconscious, recording things people say while we’re knocked cold in the most literal and damaging ways possible. These recordings are called engrams, and they get “restimulated” later in ways that interfere with our lives. In Dianetics, the goal is to travel back into the past and find out where we picked up those engrams, experience them again, and in that way make them harmless — in this way the reactive mind itself can be cleared away.

But Hubbard says that there are potentially so many engrams that have accumulated throughout your life, how can you begin to clear them away? His answer: by going immediately to the first ones that you picked up in your prenatal state. In 1950, when this book first came out, Hubbard and his followers seemed most interested in somehow “remembering” their experiences as sperm, egg, and zygote, and discovering what engrams were picked up as mommy and daddy fought and fornicated while you hugged the uterine wall.

Get your preclear back to that point, he tells potential new auditors, and you’ve reached the tip of a pyramid of engramic material…

The auditor will find it expedient to work in the prenatal area and as early in that as possible. If he can clear the time from conception to birth, including birth, his task is nine-tenths complete. To clear the entire reactive bank is his goal. The reactive bank is like a pyramid which is fairly well armored everywhere but just under the point, and which becomes unarmored when the point is contacted. This is taking the reactive bank in an exposed sector.

Once you’ve begun to unravel the engrams at that start point, the rest roll up quite easily. As he said at the outset, Hubbard expected that it would take only about 20 hours of auditing in order to make someone a “clear.”

So Vance, that must sound awfully optimistic for Scientologists today, who spend years and years (and hundreds of thousands of dollars) trying to clear away engrams not just from their time in the womb, but along their entire “whole track” of lifetimes, going back billions and trillions of years. Is it jarring for them to read Dianetics today and see that Hubbard thought making a clear would be such a snap?

VANCE: I found it more disappointing than jarring. But first of all I should clarify that the whole-track past-life stuff isn’t particularly the focus of auditing until after a person goes Clear. In other words, time and money spent auditing out body thetans shouldn’t exactly be counted as lengthening the road to Clear.

Nevertheless, going Clear is much much more time consuming and costly (ka-ching!) than Hubbard estimated in Dianetics. When reading Hubbard’s low estimate, I figured there could be a few possible reasons for it. For instance, Scientology users frequently talk in saucer-eyed amazement about Hubbard’s auditing skills. As you probably know, Hubbard frequently said that bad results in Scientology stem solely from wrong application of the “tech.” In other words, “you’re doing it wrong.” So, I figured the estimate was a reflection of Hubbard’s skill (and everyone else’s lack of it).

Also, I figured modern Scientology auditing techniques were more reliable, though longer. In other words, I figured that, for Dianetics to work, an auditor would have to be quite intelligent and savvy. In comparison, I figured that the IQ barrier to becoming a competent Scientology auditor was lower so more people could learn to do it. (Boy was I ever right … or wrong … definitely confused.)

I imagine a lot of users get a little bummed that they don’t go Clear as easily as Hubbard promised. I did in any case. Thankfully, the prime targets in Scientology auditing are doubts one might have about the efficacy of Hubbard’s directions (or sanity). That saved me from those troublesome suspicions that Hubbard was a gigantic blowhard. I mean, at least I got that much peace of mind from my auditing.

THE BUNKER: And what price can you put on peace of mind? Especially when it comes in 12.5-hour packages.

Next week — Dianetics: Super Colon Blow For Your Mind

 
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What Would Scientology Be Like If It Told the Truth About Itself?

A tip of the hat to Possibly Helpful Advice, who turned up this overlooked gem from 2008. What a great editing job of the 2007 IAS spectacular, when David Miscavige revealed “The Basics” with Tom Cruise and John Travolta in the front row…

 
Speaking of oldies but goodies, we were recently made aware of this gem from 2011, when Scientologists picketed outside the home of former church member Samantha Domingo in Southern England. The Scientologists were particularly hacked off that Domingo had welcomed as houseguests former church spokesman Mike Rinder and fellow former member Christie Collbran. Please pay special attention to the way the Scientologist picketers have brought along a young child to help, um, make their point, or something…

 
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Posted by Tony Ortega on April 26, 2013 at 07:00

E-mail your tips and story ideas to tonyo94@gmail.com or follow us on Twitter. We post behind-the-scenes updates at our Facebook author page. Here at the Bunker we try to have a post up every morning at 7 AM Eastern (Noon GMT), and on some days we post an afternoon story at around 2 PM. After every new story we send out an alert to our e-mail list and our FB page.

If you’d like to help support The Underground Bunker, please e-mail our webmaster Scott Pilutik at BunkerFund@tonyortega.org

Vance, in the chapter “Diagnosis,” L. Ron Hubbard gets down to specifics, instructing an auditor how to assess [...]]]>

Welcome to our ongoing project, where we blog a 1950 first edition of Scientology’s bible, Dianetics, with the help of ex-Scientologist, Bay Area lawyer, blogger, and author Vance Woodward. Go here for the first post in the series.

Vance, in the chapter “Diagnosis,” L. Ron Hubbard gets down to specifics, instructing an auditor how to assess the preclear that he’ll be counseling.

We were surprised when Hubbard suddenly started talking about hysterical blindness and hysterical deafness. Both are outdated concepts that became popular as diagnoses in the 19th century. Today, doctors refer to them as conversion disorder, but the idea of someone being totally blind or deaf from “hysteria” seems a dated idea.

Hubbard says, however, that most folks are suffering from a version of this, which either hinders or enhances their vision or hearing.

This is how he describes someone with “hypo-hearing,” who has some deafness, apparently caused by engrams and not something wrong with his ears…

This patient has something he is afraid to hear. He plays the radio very loudly, makes people repeat continually and misses pieces of the conversation.

Someone who has “hypo-sight” has a hard time making things out with his eyes…

The patient who is always losing something when it lies in fair view before him, who misses signposts, theater bills and people who are in plain sight is “hysterically” blind to some degree. He is afraid he will see something.

Then there’s the person who sees too well, which he calls “hyper-sight”…

A girl, for instance, who sees something or thinks she sees something but knows she doesn’t and is very startled, who jumps in fright when anyone silently comes into a room and can be so startled rather habitually, is suffering from extended sight.

And someone who over-perceives sounds is said to have “hyper-hearing”…

A person who is alarmed by noises, by sounds in general, by certain voices, who gets a headache or gets angry when the people around are “noisy” or the door slams or the dishes rattle, is a victim of extended hearing.

Since these conditions are caused by engrams, Hubbard supposes that these victims, when they were unconscious (or in the womb, perhaps) were in the presence of someone who shouted “Don’t see! Don’t hear!” and it has affected them the rest of their lives.

So it’s the auditor’s first job to decide where his preclear is on this scale.

Vance, did any of this stick around for Scientology of more recent years?

VANCE: None of it stuck around. Remember, Scientology came shortly after Dianetics. Consequently, Dianetics was essentially relegated to the status of a gateway drug used to get people hooked on the expensive stuff: Scientology. And Scientology’s Bridge to Total Freedom — the sequence of auditing procedures that Scientologists wade through on their way to financial ruin — is very much one size fits all. By that I mean the entire notion of diagnosis mostly went out the window with Scientology. With the Bridge, everybody gets the same set of processes in the same sequence, more or less.

That said, I’d say that most Scientologists are completely aware of the misogynistic roots of the word hysterical, and they are as reluctant to use the word as anybody else these days. Obviously that kind of sensitivity completely eluded Hubbard, but I’ll give modern Scientologists what credit is due on that point.

THE BUNKER: Well, for all that fuss about over-perception and under-perception, Hubbard ends up suggesting to the beginning auditor that he choose someone who seems to be of average sight and hearing in order to avoid complications. And so much for this chapter. So with our very average preclear, we’ll press on to the next chapter next week.

Next week — Dianetics is Not Hypnosis — Well, Except For That “You Are Feeling Sleepy” Part

 
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Fresh Out of the Cincinnati Ideal Org

We’re going to reach out to the young woman who made this video about her brother, who has apparently fled his job on staff at Cincinnati’s Ideal Org, which was opened just last year.

Earlier, “Storm Zara” had shot some video inside the org, making her brother rather nervous. But now, he’s apparently ditched the place. His account is interesting, and we’re hoping there’s more to the story…

 
There’s so much going on in the Bunker this week. We want to thank our readers for the huge response to our story on Shelly Miscavige and the International Base yesterday. It even got noticed over at Daily Kos.

We have a lot more good stuff coming…

 
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Posted by Tony Ortega on April 18, 2013 at 07:00

E-mail your tips and story ideas to tonyo94@gmail.com or follow us on Twitter. We post behind-the-scenes updates at our Facebook author page. Here at the Bunker we try to have a post up every morning at 7 AM Eastern (Noon GMT), and on some days we post an afternoon story at around 2 PM. After every new story we send out an alert to our e-mail list and our FB page.

If you’d like to help support The Underground Bunker, please e-mail our webmaster Scott Pilutik at BunkerFund@tonyortega.org