The one "win" that Scientology produces consistently and reliably is the wonderful and creative excuses and "reasons why" it never ever produces the promised gains.
"No OT abilities" has become a problem for Scientology, especially after seventy years. Scientology's way of "handling" this problem makes a list of excuses, beginning with:
"What? Did you say you don't have OT abilities?" Well, I do and other Scientologists do. There's something
wrong with
you."
"Scientology works! You need to re-do your Bridge. You falsely attested to everything."
How many of the OT 8 suicides have received that "handling" is anyone's guess.
Then there's the changing of the meaning of OT, from the definition Hubbard gave it at the entrance of Scientology. Which eventually became a revised meaning. This is a watered down meaning, just as the meaning for Clear was watered down.
Registrars do this. "Oh,
you thought OT meant
that?" Then the substitute meaning for OT is given.
And that could be almost anything including having the OT ability of purchasing a higher donor status.
With outside of Scientology Inc. (Independent ) Scientology, there was recently a discussion of the "handling," of the problem of no OT abilities, by the wife of the fellow who runs the Dror Center in Israel. The "handling" was to characterize OTs who might demonstrate their abilities (of which there appear to be none) as "clowns."
Another "handling" is to say that a certain number of people must become OT 8 (free Of Body Thetan case) and, then, all "New" OT 8s will, suddenly, become OTs with OT abilities. This is, essentially, the hundredth monkey idea, only, in this case, its requires some undetermined number of thousands, or even millions. This is complicated by no one actually having truly completed NOTs, since, per Hubbard's account, the universe, and particularly Earth, is crawling with BTs, clusters, fleas, targs, and other similar icky stuff.
Underlying all of this is the reason for doing Scientology, which is to
have done Scientology. And, in the present tense, to be doing Scientology.
Exemplifying this is this book's title:
Perhaps the reason most contemporary Scientologists are happy never attaining Hubbard's very tangible definition of OT is that they know that Scientology "Bridge" is about significance.
While the Organization focuses on making money, collecting blackmail, and asserting and maintaining dominion over thoughts and loyalties, the mass of Scientologists are content to dwell in a bubble of Scientological significance: literally, it gives their lives
meaning.
Not unlike this fellow who became a Space Ranger while watching Captain Video on his TV in Brooklyn in the 1950s. He worked in the sewer during the day but, to some extent, he was Space Ranger there too. And it made life tolerable.
This is not to say that everything upon which Scientology has stamped its name is automatically nonsense. That's what Scientology would like us to say, so it can produce
one thing that isn't nonsense.
We're more sophisticated than that.
But the parts of Scientology that are not nonsense are not sufficient to motivate someone to hand over his mind to be washed, rinsed, and washed again.
The trade off was that one would submit temporarily in exchange for OT.
In his 1972 book,
Naked Scientology, beat author William Burroughs attempted to explain why he endured Scientology's control and invasions of privacy for as long as he did:
"Like an anthropologist who has, after unspeakable indignities, penetrated a savage tribe, I was determined to hang on to get the big medicine."
Turns out the big medicine wasn't there. Scientology had no actual, tangible, state of OT to sell.
But it has plenty of significance and, apparently, that was enough to make some people happy.
*
As for Freewheeling in the OT 3 sense, there's no indication that Hubbard "free wheeled."
During early 1967, in Las Palmas, he moped in bed for three weeks, surrounded by bottles of drugs.
Virginia Downsborough fed him soup, and he talked about how he was never married to Sara, (erased) wife number two.
Old timer, Alan Water, had to do "repair auditing" on what Virginia had experienced. She was crushed by what she had witnessed.
Russell Miller's
Barefaced Messiah, features, in chapter 16, the account.
The excuse for Hubbard's early 1967 emotional breakdown (after the humiliation of Rhodesia) was that he "took the plunge" into "The wall of Fire."
The excuses never stop.
