Was just chuckling again at the South Park rendition of “WHAT SCIENTOLOGISTS ACTUALLY BELIEVE.” Nutty as it all is, I realized that even in Crazy Town, L. Ron would have had to have claimed to “learn” the truth about thetans, Xenu, and intergalactic federations from millions of years ago. (Not like he made it all up or anything! Ha!)
So, how did he CLAIM to come across this information, anyway? Did it come to him in a dream, or what?
IIRC Scientology and its foundations were the result of a conversations LRF had with a friend who was explaining religion to him. His ultimate response was that if all that was true he could/would whip up his own religion which ultimately became Scientilogy. Boils down to all being the product of a fertile immagination. Read some of his Sci.Fi. and you will get the idea.
Right, I’ve read that too. And thanks for the xenu.net link. But neither really addresses what L. Ron told his followers about how he uncovered all this prehistoric superhuman information. Or whether anyone ever bothered to ask.
I’m not asking about whether this is a huge pile of bullshit - clearly, it is - but rather about a particular aspect of the bullshit.
IIRC Hubbard claimed to have remembered it all through autohypnosis after much self auditing. I know Xenu.net has records of Scientologists claiming to have recovered memories of incarnations in the Xenu era.
Actor and comics writer Del Close claimed to have been present for this conversation and wrote a segment for a comics series called “Wasteland” about it.
Hubbard was a full fledged astral travelling MoFo. He claimed to have been “almost run over by a frieght locomotive” on Venus. He comments that it is nice and warm in the Van Allen belt. He claims to have received visions. Before Xenu there is a thing about hearing a loud snapping sound and seeing a chariot that “turns right then left”. This is taken as the origin of our universe.
It’s Joe Smith. Joseph, actually, since that’s what he always went by. And he claimed the Book of Mormon was an English translation of a record ancient inhabitants of the Americas had carved onto metal plates and stored in the ground for ~1400 years, until one of them came to him as an angel and showed him where they were.
What I don’t understand…Hubbard was a notorious liar…about everything. His naval career was a disaster (he depth charged a submerged rock , thinking it was a Japanese submarine). His Sci_Fi was pretty mediocre, and most of the other things he claimed to have done were exaggerated. The whole Xenu story is such BShow do educated people fall for this crap?
You don’t learn about the Xenu story and other bizarre stuff until you’re in the upper levels of the church, possibly too late for you to be able to get out. There are security checks, and at that point you’ve spent a lot of money and the church is a huge part of your life. They used to sue anybody who published the OT documents, but nowadays they can’t stop them from spreading around on the Internet.
As I understand it, the adherants have also gone through years of auditing which requires recording reactions to words. Given the number of words that they will go through and the possibly embarassing reactions to specific words gives the Scientology ‘management’ a large dossier of potentially embarassing or revealing information about the person. That information can (and will) be used against them should they decide to leave the curch. Look up info on Dead Agenting, Suppressive Persons, and Fair Game. These deal with people who are outspoken critics, but leaving the church also means being shunned by all those who remain.
What I find particularly interesting is the fact that L. Ron is deemed a god and inerrant, but that critical documents keep changing, and high-ranking officials who leave the church are ‘erased’ from existence within the church. There are pages of these types of actions buried somewhere in XENU.NET.