Why so many spin offs of Hubbard's work?

programmer_guy

True ex-Scientologist
That's similar to asking why there are so many denominations of Christianity.
(But I don't want to derail the topic of this thread.)
 

Bill

Well-known member
This list is long despite a decades long program to "ruin utterly" those who improvise, reform, and develop the subject further.

The list is long of spin-offs that met with some susccess. The results were not all bad.
Because Scientology was a failure. Some people thought they could "fix" it or salvage out some "workable" part.

I really haven't seen evidence of any notable successes.
 

I told you I was trouble

Suspended animation.
Because Scientology was a failure. Some people thought they could "fix" it or salvage out some "workable" part.

I really haven't seen evidence of any notable successes.
Or ... because it was so successful in making lots of $$$ and creating adoration for the founder ... there are wannabe gurus on every street corner these days.

:confused:
 

Hatshepsut

Well-known member
This list is long despite a decades long program to "ruin utterly" those who improvise, reform, and develop the subject further.

The list is long of spin-offs that met with some susccess. The results were not all bad.
I think this has all been done before. It's like rekindling a distant memory of how to run a Ponzi scheme. It all comes back to you when the playbook is open again. There's nothing new exists under the sun.

Besides, Scientology is a mirror of gnostic religions where adherents all believe in the Fall of the soul. Slogging out of the matrix, methods have been held in common. Same purpose (supposedly) to excavate the soul from its contaminations and illusions of self.

1631167706677.png
 
Last edited:

freethinker

Controversial
This list is long despite a decades long program to "ruin utterly" those who improvise, reform, and develop the subject further.

The list is long of spin-offs that met with some susccess. The results were not all bad.
Because Scientology made money.
 

Cat's Squirrel

Well-known member
Because Scientology was a failure. Some people thought they could "fix" it or salvage out some "workable" part.

I really haven't seen evidence of any notable successes.
How about this one?

 

Veda

Well-known member
That's similar to asking why there are so many denominations of Christianity.
(But I don't want to derail the topic of this thread.)
It is a derail, :gaaagh: but it deserves a response.

Why elevate a secretive and dishonest discredited system of psychology - posing as religious institution for tax and law-avoidance purposes - to the level of an actual, sincere, religion? Especially when considering the pernicious behavior made possible by Scientology Inc.'s religious cloaking also known as its "religion angle"

Link to Fraudulent religious cloaking thread.

Link to Scientology's Sharia Law thread.

Why is it that people who dislike all religion (generally), and see it as a negative influence on society - who are often "hard" (totally certain) physicalists/materialists (not agnostics but usually atheists), are so often suckers for Scientology's "religion angle" ? It seems that at least part of the reason that they think that by calling Scientology Inc. a "religion" that they're insulting it or discrediting it, since (in their minds) all (actual) religions are bad.

Anyway, end of derail. :scratch:


I think this has all been done before. It's like rekindling a distant memory of how to run a Ponzi scheme. It all comes back to you when the playbook is open again. There's nothing new exists under the sun.

Besides, Scientology is a mirror of gnostic religions where adherents all believe in the Fall of the soul. Slogging out of the matrix, methods have been held in common. Same purpose (supposedly) to excavate the soul from its contaminations and illusions of self.

View attachment 14145
Link to Antecedents to Scientology thread. Scroll down to Israel Regardie's 1937 Middle Pillar quote: "...by endeavoring to expand the horizon of consciousness..."

Before some are inadvertently impaled on Hubbard's and Miscavige's pointy religion angle, a reminder that Scientology's primary inspiration, Aleister Crowley, when asked if his Thelema could become a religion, responded that doing so, "would create a rather stupid kind of mischief."


How about this one?

This does appear to be a spin off that has attained a level of genuine respectability.

Link to What is applied Metapsychology?

Link to Find a practitioner

Look at all these nice wholesome people, and yet it's largely recycled Dianetics and Scientology, minus the abuses and the science fiction. :unsure:
 

Bill

Well-known member
How about this one?

I'm always happy if people are helped.

The fact that TIR is recognized as something that might be useful is nice.
 

Ed8

Well-known member
This list is long despite a decades long program to "ruin utterly" those who improvise, reform, and develop the subject further.

The list is long of spin-offs that met with some susccess. The results were not all bad.
First of all, the majority of it is not Hubbard's work. He laid claim to other people's efforts. If I wanted to be mean and nasty I would say that the only good stuff in scientology was the work of other scientologists. That's a hell of a lot closer to the truth than Hubbard = Source.

I would posit that the spin offs come in a few varieties:
Efforts to get rich.
Efforts to get rich AND help people. (an idiotic pursuit in my opinion).
Efforts to help people using 'standard tech'.
Efforts to continue the work of scientologists other than Hubbard, and do a lot better job of it than the damned church.
 

Karakorum

Ron is the source that will lead you to grief
Because Scientology was a failure. Some people thought they could "fix" it or salvage out some "workable" part.

I really haven't seen evidence of any notable successes.
On the contrary! Scientology was a great success in taking away the money from the gullible and into the pockets of the FSMs.
That is the greatest good for the greatest number of registrars!
 

Veda

Well-known member
First of all, the majority of it is not Hubbard's work. He laid claim to other people's efforts. If I wanted to be mean and nasty I would say that the only good stuff in scientology was the work of other scientologists. That's a hell of a lot closer to the truth than Hubbard = Source.
The chronology of the rejection of Hubbard as "Source" began with J.A. Winter, who had written the Introduction to Dianetics, the Modern Science of Mental Health and, less than a year later, resigned from the Hubbard Dianetics Research Foundation, and then wrote A Doctor's Report on Dianetics, with an introduction by Fritz Perls. Around the same time, Astounding magazine editor John Campbell also resigned from the Hubbard Dianetics Research Foundation and, later, described Dianetics as a cult.

Then came the assertion of independence by the California Association of Dianetic Auditors, and the appearance of the Aberree magazine.


The Aberree continued to be published into 1964, soon after which the first Doctor of Scientology (circa 1954), Jack Horner, was Declared a Suppressive Person, Horner disagreed with the new Hubbard bulletin titled Keeping Scientology Working, in which Hubbard had firmly and emphatically reasserted himself as the sole source.

As far as I know, the first delineation of the sources of Dianetics and Scientology was in a cassette tape titled Nibs to the Field in 1984, which named various people (Scientologists) to whom were attributed the origination of early Scientology ideas and techniques. Nibs, of course, was L. Ron Hubbard Junior.

Then came the book Messiah or Madman? in 1987, which detailed antecedents such as Crowley, Freud, Richard Semon, Korzybski, et al.

The Sole Source Myth thread on old (archived) ESMB contains a lot of information and names that can be plumbed.

One of the drawbacks of a dismissive attitude towards a topic is the disinclination to examine details. Who wishes to examine garbage?

The irony is that Hubbard's claim to be "Source" (with a capital "S") is a hypnotists trick, the power of which can be weakened by calmly and unemotionally examining earlier (actual) sources. But one must take a subject (at least slightly) seriously to do this. Who takes garbage seriously?

This can result in people who are OUT being unable to communicate to people who are IN, even if, by some quirk of fate, an opportunity for that communication occurs, such as a person surfing the internet and accidentally coming across something, such as this thread.

I would posit that the spin offs come in a few varieties:
Efforts to get rich.
Efforts to get rich AND help people. (an idiotic pursuit in my opinion).
Efforts to help people using 'standard tech'.
Efforts to continue the work of scientologists other than Hubbard, and do a lot better job of it than the damned church.
It does seem unlikely that Hubbard did not have at least one "good idea" during his entire lifetime.
 

Reyne Mayer

Pansexual Revolutionary
sorry, but i think the premise of this gives Hubbard and Scientology too much credit.

they were but one point in the counter-culture milieu of the 50s-70s, and specifically the human potential movement, a complex morass of influences and cross-connections that form a web like one of those crazy charts that conspiracy theorists create.

though Hubbard had a knack both for garnering inordinate attention and publicity, and in posing himself as the 'source' of everything even though he heavily plagiarized earlier sources and took credit for the work of those around him. it seems to me that ex-members are people who bought into that at the time, reinforced by policies like those against 'other practices' that might have caused them to start to find out how un-original the concepts and practices really were, and who sometimes are still partly under the thrall of the illusion.

Scientology itself could be said to be an offshoot of Aleister Crowley's work (Thelema) -- and some new religion scholars peg it as just that, alongside Anton LaVey's CofS (Church of Satan). that might seem like an inadequate way to portray it -- but so is positioning Scientology as the source of anything remotely similar that happened after the early 50s.

lots of peopled did Dianetics and Scientology, which were kind of the 'in' thing to check out for a while, and other things as well before and after, and then went on to do their own thing. like, i've seen accounts that a lot of people at the time had read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle maintenance, Siddhartha, and other period classics before getting into Scientology, and even joining partly inspired by those works. as i see it, it's a chicken-and-egg problem in at least 3 dimensions, not easily simplified.
 

Zertel

Well-known member
Didn't most or almost all of the spin offs occur before the internet made the space opera on the OT levels easily accessible public information? I don't recall the exact dates but I don't think the personal computer became a common household appliance until the 2000's. The first one I got worked okay on a dial up connection. I was out of scn around 1980 soon after "attesting to Dianetic Clear" and never bothered to look into what was going on in scn until I watched the HBO movie Going Clear in 2015. The current version has little resemblance to what I engaged in in the 1970's.

The reference cited in the thread is dated 22 December 2012.
 
Last edited:

Reyne Mayer

Pansexual Revolutionary
Didn't most or almost all of the spin offs occur before the internet made the space opera on the OT levels easily accessible public information?
we might want to try to make some sort of distinctiong between independents/freezone, and spinoffs or offshoots.

there were some of both from the very beginning, but from what i can tell of the history the indie/FZ movements really took off in the 80s as Hubbard receded from view and Scientology experienced purges and schisms, and then 'source' finally died to be replaced by someone unsatisfactory to loyalists, orthodoxists and just those who held a more idealized view of the 'subject'. i don't know how much it had to do with BBS and the internet or whether it just happened to coincide with the rise of those technologies, though they certainly allowed scattered individuals and small groups to communicate more readily.

a lot of major figures who left in the 60s and 70s and into the early 80s started their own practices or groups, perhaps just because the time was more ripe for that than the 50s. some were takeoffs or their own take on Dianetics and Scientology, with names like Dianology obviously reflecting that, and others could be said to have gone different directions less influenced by Hubbard's 'work', like the Berners' Enlightenment Intensive that took a more Eastern influenced path incorporating meditation and yoga along with more collaborative dyad (equal pair, rather than auditor/PC) work.
 

programmer_guy

True ex-Scientologist
@Zertel

Example:
According to what I have read on the internet one spinoff was Dianology (started in 1965?)
In 1970s when I was franchise mission staff I met another staffer that told me that she left Dianology to go to Scientology.
I don't remember what her reason was for that.
 
Last edited:
Top