- Scientology nearly ready to unveil Super Power
-
- In the works for decades, the closely guarded spiritual
- training program
will be revealed in Clearwater.
- St.
Petersburg Times - North Pinellas
- By ROBERT FARLEY, Times
Staff Writer
Published May 6, 2006
CLEARWATER — Matt Feshbach believes he has super powers. He senses danger
faster than most people. He appreciates beauty more deeply than he used to. He
says he outperforms his peers in the money management industry.
He heightened his powers of perception in 1995 when he went to Los Angeles
and became the first and so far only “public” Scientologist to take a highly
classified Scientology program called Super Power.
Where in L.A. did he do this
?
“Just in Los Angeles,” is all Feshbach will say. Super Power is that
secret.
Under wraps for decades, Super Power now is being prepped for its eventual
rollout in Scientology’s massive building in downtown Clearwater. That will be
the only place worldwide where the program, much anticipated by Scientologists,
will be offered.
A key aim of Super Power is to enhance one’s perceptions — and not just the
five senses we all know — hearing, sight, touch, taste and smell.
Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard taught that people have 57 “perceptics.”
They include an ability to discern relative sizes, blood circulation, balance,
compass direction, temperature, gravity and an “awareness of importance,
unimportance.”
Church officials won’t discuss specifics of Super Power. But Feshbach and
another prominent Clearwater Scientologist who, like Feshbach, is a major donor
to Super Power’s building fund, provided some details in interviews with the St.
Petersburg Times. A group of former Scientologists who worked for the church on
a campus in California where the program was in development also described
elements of it.
Super Power uses machines, apparatus and specially designed rooms to exercise
and enhance a person’s so-called perceptics. Those machines include an
anti-gravity simulator and a gyroscope-like apparatus that spins a person around
while blindfolded to improve perception of compass direction, said the former
Scientologists.
A video screen that moves forward and backward while flashing images is used
to hone a viewer’s ability to identify subliminal messages, they said.
Hubbard promised Super Power would improve perceptions and “put the person
into a new realm of ability.” He believed it would unlock abilities needed to
spread Scientology across the planet. For Feshbach it’s like nothing he has
ever done in Scientology.
“I got it. I loved it,” he gushed.
Feshbach, 52, and his two brothers became famous in investment circles during
the 1980s as the kings of short selling stocks — essentially betting which
stocks will tank. At one point, the California-based Feshbach Bros. managed
$1-billion for clients.
Feshbach now lives in Belleair, where his wife, Kathy, runs a Scientology
mission. Because he donated millions to the Super Power building fund, he was
invited to undergo the program.
It’s geared toward creating a “more competent spiritual being,” he said. “I’m
not dependant on my physical body to perceive things.”
He offered this anecdote:
He had just finished his perceptics training and was at the Los Angeles
airport, preparing to fly home to Tampa Bay.
He stood at a crosswalk with perhaps 20 others, including a woman and her
son, an antsy boy 6 or 7 years old.
As the light turned green, the boy bolted into the street, ahead of his
mother. Feshbach perceived a pickup truck bearing down on the boy, driven by a
young woman.
He yelled and saved the boy’s life by a quarter of an inch, he said.
Coincidence? Feshbach doesn’t think so. No one else saw the pickup, he says.
He believes that, through the Super Power program, he elevated his perceptive
abilities beyond those of the others at that crosswalk. His enhanced perceptions
have played out numerous times since, he said.
Super Power takes “weeks, not months” to complete, said Feshbach. He would
not discuss the specific machines and drills that former Scientologists said are
used to enhance perceptions.
The perceptics portion of Super Power is one of 12 “rundowns” in the full
program, Feshbach said. But it clearly is a key aspect.
Details of Super Power training have been kept secret even from church
members. Like much of Scientology training, details aren’t revealed until one
pays to take the course.
Asked about Super Power, church spokesman Ben Shaw provided a written
statement: “Super Power is a series of spiritual counseling processes designed
to give a person back his own viewpoint, increase his perception, exercise his
power of choice, and greatly enhance other spiritual abilities.”
Shaw would not say how much the program will cost. Upper levels of
Scientology training can run tens of thousands of dollars.
He declined to provide further insight into Super Power. “It’s not something
I’m willing to provide to you in any manner,” Shaw said.
Scientologist Ron Pollack, who donated $5-million to the Super Power fund
after making millions in hedge funds in the 1990s, said he got a sneak peak. The
head of fundraising for the project showed him a photo of “some high-tech thing”
developed by engineers in southern California that offers different aromas on
demand. It’s for a drill to enhance one’s sense of smell, he said.
Pollack said he has no idea how Super Power will be set up, but is excited
about the parts on ethics and perceptics, which he likened to a “trip to
Disney.”
Former Scientologists Bruce Hines and Chuck Beatty, once staffers at the
church’s international base in Hemet, Calif., said that while on punishment
detail, they made chairs of various sizes — ones big enough for a giant, others
too small even for a child — that were set up in a room designed to hone one’s
sense of relative sizes.
Hines also said the Super Power program, which
Hubbard wanted rolled out in 1978, met with delays during the 20-plus years that
it was being piloted on church staffers.
One setback occurred when the church checked back on the staffers who had
been through Super Power. It turned out, Hines said, many had left the church —
hardly the expected outcome.
“The fact that it was around in 1978 and it’s still not worked out 28 years
later, that’s pretty significant,” Hines said.
Hines, who said he once
performed Scientology’s core practice of auditing on celebrity Scientologists
Kirstie Allie, Anne Archer and Nicole Kidman (she no longer is a Scientologist),
worked at the California facility until 1993 and left the church staff in 2003.
He and other ex-Scientology staffers are convinced that church brass delayed
completion of the big building in Clearwater because the Super Power program was
not finished. The exterior was completed three years ago, then construction
stopped.
“The building was getting done faster than the tech program itself,” said
Karen Pressley, a former church staffer at the same California campus, who left
the church in 1998.
“This is a flap of magnitude in Scientology management,” Pressley
said.
Shaw said those ex-members are just wrong.
“These people know absolutely nothing” about the Super Power pilot, he
said.
Scientology processes are technical and cannot be understood out of context,
Shaw said. “If someone is interested in Scientology, they should read a book and
find out for themselves what Scientology is and thus begin their own spiritual
journey,” Shaw said.
Super Power is ready, he said, and 300 staff members are being trained to
deliver it.
Construction delays in Clearwater, Shaw said, are due to a recent explosion
of church expansion worldwide. The church has spent hundreds of millions to
purchase and renovate properties. Last year, it purchased nearly 1-million
square feet of buildings in 18 cities around the world.
That expansion, by far the largest in church history, diverted the church’s
attention, he said. Plus, he said, Scientology leaders have been compelled to
redesign the building’s interior repeatedly to make it a crown jewel.
The Super Power program will be ready to go the moment the new building is
completed, he said. Scientology officials promise that will be
2007. |
