Hubbard's Research Methods Revealed (2000 Chris Owen Essay)
Feisty
From: Chris Owen
Subject: ESSAY: Hubbard's research methods revealed
Date: 2000/01/22
Something that's puzzled me for a long time is just how Hubbard came up
with Scientology's bizarre mythos: a shabby, run-down heaven with
radioactive statues, Xenu, the Fifth Invader Force with "incredibly
horrible hands" (sic) and so on and so forth.
One particularly curious point is that his original research notes have
never been published. They probably show him to be a complete
fruitcake, if a fascinating lecture entitled "Electromagnetic Scouting:
Battle of the Universes" (April 1952, exact date unknown) is anything to
go by. Back in 1952, this lecture was just another part of Scientology
- there wasn't anything secret or, for that matter, sacred about it
(this was in the days when it was explicitly stated that it was a
science, not a religion). It wasn't until the start of the 1960s that
such material began to be designated "confidential" as part of the OT
courses. Access to this particular tape is highly restricted these
days, so presumably it forms part of the OT materials.
The lecture features Mary Sue Hubbard auditing her husband. Ron is
trying to locate and question "theta entities" - his term at the time
for what were later termed Body Thetans - to find out their purposes.
The Hubbards were using the first version of the E-meter (the Matheson
version) to try out various ideas and seeing if they caused a reaction
on the meter, indicating a response on the part of the BTs.
As the session begins, Ron declares that "I am, for the first time in
ages, completely without a somatic" - the implication being that, as
somatics ("a pain or ache sensation") are in Hubbard's view caused by
BTs, the BTs have all run off and hidden to avoid being exposed by the
E-meter. Sure enough, says Ron, "I got a notion they're all standing
about 20 feet from me, at least."
The question-and-answer session gives a vivid insight into the way
Hubbard worked out his mythos:
LRH: Well here we made this what we've been calling Home
Universe. That's actually the MEST Universe...
MSH: Dropping there.
LRH: ...and was actually the Home Universe and we were just getting
along fine and the reason we settled off and just started to make the
Home universe and so on and dropped off the main body of theta is
because theta started expanding. No more than that. It just started
expanding. I think there was probably something wrong in its vicinity
or something of the sort.
MSH: The needle's rising.
LRH: Something wrong in its vicinity.
MSH: Drop there. What was wrong in its vicinity?
LRH: It was getting encroached on, so it's sort of a divide and rule.
It's the whole modus operandi of the other universes. They started
riding up the main body of theta to some degree. No, no drop. Anyway,
the theta universe just suddenly got ambitious and decided to make a
universe and picked up everything and...
MSH: Your needle dropped...
----------
MSH: Well, what are these entities composed of?
LRH: What..?
MSH: Well, what would you call this kind of stuff?
LRH: Well, it may be first universe stuff - and stuff ...
MSH: Yeah.
LRH: ... maybe twenty-ninth universe stuff - fifteenth universe
stuff - twenty-first universe stuff - thirty-three universe ... is
there a thirty-three universe?
MSH: No drop.
LRH: No ...
MSH: They come from a lot of different universes.
----------
Here Hubbard comes up with the idea of Earth being a "prison planet",
the basic rationale for Xenu dumping people here in the first place:
LRH: The entheta beings ... I think in recent times entheta beings
have been triumphing in certain locales over theta and I think earth
is a prison planet to some degree because the entheta beings have
pretty well won out over the people that are here.
MSH: You got a big drop on that.
LRH: I did? Entheta beings have worn out all the people who are here
and what I got a big drop on is just the .... Well, now we can do a
rehabilitation job throughout this part of the universe and we can do
a rehabilitation job on straightening out these entheta beings and
theta. Because all the entheta beings are running around - they're
here, out of line. They may be the product of a union. The entheta
beings [unintelligible] or something of the sort. They didn't do what
they were told.
MSH: You got a drop there.
[...]
LRH: Well that's what theta did. Now, theta sitting right out in space
some place, other planets, and so forth, all of a sudden says, the
hell with these bodies and beings, we've got a heck of a lot of theta
beings ...
MSH: Bang! Needle is dropping.
LRH: ... who have been beaten by entheta beings.
MSH: Bang!
LRH: And the battleground is too rough and these things have mutinied
so let's put 'em all in one place and lock 'em on to earth. They gotta
stay on earth 'til we get 'em straightened out. They'll send somebody
down here sooner or later and he'll straighten them out.
MSH: You're getting drops in needle on all this material.
----------
Hubbard goes on to slap Christianity and religion as a whole (which
gives a whole new perspective to Scientology's accusations of its
opponents as anti-religious). In point of fact, his comments in this
session were of a piece with his many other denigrations of established
religions, notably Christianity but also Islam and Hinduism. (This is
perhaps not surprising; only six years previously he had been a member
of Jack Parsons' black magic coven.) He also comes up with the generic
name of the MEST beings:
LRH: ... These entheta beings are controlled over by religion. I think
there was an experiment one time that was a religious experiment.
MSH: You dropped. Needle's dropping
LRH: Big experiment on religion.
MSH: Is that when Christianity came into being?
LRH: That's an entheta operation. No drop?
MSH: Slight.
LRH: It's got to be an entheta operation.
MSH: Is it?
LRH: Entheta - The entheta is actually, like anything that is under
duress, these entheta beings - we shouldn't be calling them entheta
beings - we ought to be calling them Targs... That's the proper name.
MSH: Crash!
LRH: Targs - Some of them are Targs. There are several other kinds.
There are other kinds than Targs.
MSH: Where did you get the name - Targ?
LRH: That's common in a lot of theta languages. It means slave.
Entheta slave.
MSH: You got a drop
LRH: Lower order slave. Body holders - horse holders - boot
polishers. Entheta is really [unintelligible]. I guess there may be
some other prison planets out in this galaxy.
MSH: Are there any other planets which are [unintelligible].
LRH: I think flying saucers right now that's coming to dump off more
theta beings - ah, dump off more entheta, entheta-ed beings. Targs.
MSH: Mmm.
LRH: What they're dropping down here is Targ ridden. It's a disease -
somebody gets Targ ridden - gets unbalanced. The thing to do is not so
much how to know how to get rid of the Targs but how to straighten out
Targs. - No drop?
MSH: No drop - Targ doesn't want to be straightened out.
----------
What I find particularly fascinating about this bizarre auditing session
is that it shows exactly how Hubbard came up with his ideas. Prof.
Martin Gardner wrote an essay on Dianetics in his classic book "[Fads
and Fallacies] In the Name of Science" (1953) (an online version is at
http://wpxx02.toxi.uni-wuerzburg.de/~cowen/essays/gardner.html) in which
he analysed the flaws inherent in Hubbardian auditing:
Perhaps the most revealing parts of Dr. Winter's book ["Dianetics: A
Doctor's Report", Dr. J.A. Winter, 1951] are the records of his own
dianetic sessions - revealing because they indicate with unmistakable
starkness the manner in which the auditor suggests to a patient what
sort of things he is supposed to recall. The patient, it must be
remembered, in the vast majority of cases, is already familiar with
dianetic theory... The therapist's questions are of such a "leading"
character that even Dr. Winter admits they "encourage fantasy."
Hubbard himself admits that many patients indulge in fantasies about
their uterine experiences. "The patient tells about father and
mother," he writes, "and where they are sitting and what the bedroom
looks like, and yet there he is in the womb." Hubbard rejects the
theory "that the tortured foetus develops extrasensory perception in
order to see what is coming next." This is a good theory, he admits,
but must be rejected in view of the fact that the foetus has no mind
and therefore lacks clairvoyant powers.
A Dianetics "patient" undergoing auditing would typically recall a
variety of incidents, some undoubtedly genuine buried memories and some
patent fantasies, such as the aforementioned uterine experiences.
Transcripts of Dianetics auditing sessions reprinted in the "Research &
Discovery Series" volumes show that there was a great deal of free
association going on in the "patient's" mind, albeit in many cases
guided by the auditor's leading questions.
The Dianetics movement eventually broke up when Hubbard insisted on
auditing "past lives", which had even less plausibility than so-called
"sperm dreams" in the uterus. He and other supporters - many of whom
were, significantly, science-fiction readers who had read his original
article on Dianetics in "Astounding Science Fiction" in June 1950 -
reported unearthing memories of past lives on Earth and in outer space.
A collection of Scientologists' accounts of past lives was eventually
published in "Have You Lived Before This Life?" (1960), which for my
money just pips "A History of Man" for the title of weirdest book ever
published by Scientology. The accounts, which really are hysterically
funny, include a those of a man who fell in love with "a robot decked
out as a beautiful red-haired girl", another man who recalled being run
over by a Martian bishop driving a steam roller, the later critic Cyril
Vosper's recollections of life as an intergalactic walrus which perished
after falling out of a flying saucer and the story of "a very happy
being who strayed to the planet Nostra 23,064,000,000 years ago". Freud
would have had a field day.
It's easy to see from this lecture how such bizarreness originated. Put
together a science fiction fan (and writer, in Hubbard's case) and an
auditor. Add a large dose of free association and a scientifically
unproven theory of what E-meter readings represent. Voila - the result
is a stream-of-consciousness science fiction story with biofeedback, as
measured by the E-meter, as the editor. It did not matter that it would
not have passed muster as fiction, let alone as scientifically proven
fact. Hubbard believed that his foundation stone - the ideas of the
thetan and that thought could be detected electronically - was
completely secure. The "Battle of the Universes" tape shows vividly how
elaborate was the superstructure which he built so casually on such
fragile foundations.
--
| Chris Owen - chr...@OISPAMNOlutefisk.demon.co.uk |
|---------------------------------------------------------------|
| THE TRUTH ABOUT L. RON HUBBARD AND THE UNITED STATES NAVY |
| http://www.ronthewarhero.org |
Warrior
Feisty says...
Wow! Thanks, Feisty, for this post. And thanks especially to Chris
Owen for such an illuminating and succinct essay.
Warrior - Sunshine disinfects
http://warrior.xenu.ca
Dave Bird
>
>
>From: Chris Owen
>Subject: ESSAY: Hubbard's research methods revealed
>Date: 2000/01/22
This is definitely a keeper, because this point is one which often
arises in debate.
--
FUCK THE SKULL OF HUBBARD, AND BUGGER THE DWARF HE RODE IN ON!!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
8====3 (O 0) GROETEN --- PRINTZ XEMU EXTRAWL no real OT has
|n| (COMMANDER, FIFTH INVADER FORCE) ever existed
.................................................................
A society without a religion is like a maniac without a chainsaw.