For L. Ron Hubbard's 115th birthday: That time he admitted Scientology was all a sham

[Karen#1]

TONY ORTEGA
Excerpt:

​

Lafayette Ronald Hubbard was born 115 years ago today in Tilden, Nebraska.

According to Scientology, forty years ago in 1986 Hubbard, then 74 years old, voluntarily left his corporeal body in order to pursue further “researches” in another part of the galaxy.

So, wherever you are, Commodore, we thought we’d commemorate your 115th with a look back at some remarkable admissions you made at one point in front of a live audience.

It was during a 1952 lecture that Hubbard interrupted what he was talking about to seemingly admit that he didn’t really believe any of the wild space opera stuff he’d been telling his followers…

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

Several observers have pointed to this to suggest that it was an amazing moment of clarity, when Hubbard admitted that “Scientology” (and Dianetics before it), was all just an elaborate con job.

Ten years ago, we first took a deeper look at this quote in its context, and we thought we’ve bring it over to the Substack on this festive occasion. Here’s what we wrote in 2016, and happy birthday, Ron!


Was it all, then, just a con? Many critics have always assumed so, that Hubbard knew he was spouting nonsense about being a race car driver on Earth some 40,000 years ago, or that the Marcabian invader forces operate between-lives implanting stations on Mars and Venus, or, in a later fever dream he came up with in 1967, that a genocidal galactic overlord named Xenu was responsible for clusters of invisible alien souls that constitute each one of us.

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For L. Ron Hubbard's 115th birthday: That time he admitted Scientology was all a sham

Lafayette Ronald Hubbard was born 115 years ago today in Tilden, Nebraska.

tonyortega.substack.com

 

[I M Dex]

As a master con man, Hubbard knew that in saying "Don't believe it on faith", he was making himself seem more trustworthy and thereby faith worthy. And then later, if and when you got past the initial introductory service or two and onto a more committed course, further along in the indoctrination, you were hit with "Keeping Scientology Working" where you were informed in no uncertain terms that everything he said was the one and only truth, and that whatever else you or anyone else thought or said was all "aberration" and "suppressive evil". In "KSW" you were conditioned to suppress cognitive dissonance, one example being to accept that someone could somehow get cancer from a physical beating, and that such behavior is the result of not thoroughly absorbing and accepting his every word. Once you were brought through KSW, all Hubbard's principles were "perfect and superior logic".

 

[pineapple]

It's much more interesting and fun to believe someone has all the answers and you can change your life for the better than it is to believe you've been conned.

 

[Hatshepsut]

Interesting reddit conversation line. It quotes David Mayo's feelings on whether Clear was a scam or not. There have been beneficial release states all along. I guess there are times we achieve more certainty of self than in other times.

From the expanded comments in reddit that link to International Viewpoints Magazine

I think it's important to remember another point from the IVy article: that Mayo did not believe that Clear was ever anything more than a temporary, relative, subjective release state. Any claims that it was more than that were, in his view, a lie.

He definitely did think that the redefinitions of '78-'80 were based on money, but did not think that Clearing Course clears, or any other kind of clear supposedly produced over the years, was all the way clear or permanently clear. Those things he regarded as unattainable with any existing technology, if not simply impossible. He also felt that while the redefinitions of '78-9 were a chaotic mess, redefinition of the state had been going on since the early '50s. Moving the goal posts was something he'd always done.

"It is also significant that the attributes of a clear, as described in DMSMH, were never actually attained, although in reading DMSMH, one might be led to believe that they were. When people started attesting to clear, the definition was watered down...

The truth appears to be that there are various stages of release, at each one of which you are clear-er than you were. A person experiencing the glee of insanity is clear-er than someone who is just completely unconscious. It was PR and marketing considerations that led Hubbard to decide that certain people were 'clear' at a certain point, and that they therefore had no reactive mind. However this assertion is a lie, and a very destructive one...

Trying to define 'clear' is difficult because it is being done over a lie. We either have to restore the meaning of clear to its original absolute meaning (which means that there aren't any clears in existence), or we have to say that what people have attested to as clear is actually only a state of release or reduction."

I think that's the big takeaway from the article. Greed was involved in the final round of redefinitions, but it wasn't like they were going from real clears to fake clears. (Ron himself thought he'd gone Clear doing early 1950s objective processes, which are found at the very bottom of the grade chart.) Nobody had ever met the DMSMH definition, and nobody got rid of their reactive mind, regardless of methods.

"Everyone does have a reactive mind - his own reactive mind. That's why one flies ruds and goes E/S and gets off BPC on anyone regardless of their point on the grade chart. The mechanics of the reactive mind continue to exist all the way up."

"The idea of 'harmonics of clear' is quite accurate. The main reason why LRH blew up at the idea of 'harmonics of clear', as expressed in the HCOB I wrote, was, as he told me, that this idea tended to leave him open to the charge that the claims he had made in DMSMH and elsewhere concerning the 'state of clear' were fraudulent."

And per Mayo, though he expressed it in a roundabout way, they were fraudulent

From Ivy magazine

International Viewpoints Home Page

https://www.reddit.com/r/scientology/comments/1c6tz0h