"The mystery of this universe ... has been, as far as its track is concerned, completely occluded. No one has ever been able to make any breakthrough and come off with it and know what happened... I finally was able to make a breakthrough which brought people through the zone safely."

     - L. Ron Hubbard in "Advance!" Issue 93

"OT III was written in 1968 when Hubbard's flagship Apollo was berthed at Las Palmas, in the Canary Islands. Part of the legend of OT III is that the research was so dangerous - 'booby-trapped' - that Hubbard suffered a variety of injuries in the process. As he himself wrote in his notes on OT III, 'I [took the plunge] and emerged very knocked out, but alive. Probably the only one ever to do so in 75,000,000 years.' In fact, it appears that the injuries sustained by Hubbard were actually caused by his falling off his motorbike on a mountain road. He suffered a broken arm and broken ribs, but refused to let a doctor treat him. "

     - Chris Owen, Bodies in Pawn

In 1967, L. Ron Hubbard was travelling on his schooner the Enchanter when he had become ill and put ashore in a hotel in Paloma, Spain.

"When I went in to his room there were drugs of all kinds everywhere. He seemed to be taking about sixty thousand different pills. I was appalled, particularly after listening to all his tirades against drugs and the medical profession. There was something very wrong with him, but I didn't know what it was except that he was in a state of deep depression; he told me he didn't have any more gains and he wanted to die. That's what he said: 'I want to die'."

     - Virginia Downsborough (a Scientologist accompanying Hubbard)

"It was important for Hubbard to be discovered in this dramatically debilitated condition at this time, for it would soon be announced that he had completed 'a research accomplishment of immense magnitude' described, somewhat inscrutably, as the 'Wall of Fire'. This was the OT3 (Operating Thetan Section Three) material, in which were contained 'the secrets of a disaster which resulted in the decay of life as we know it in this sector of the galaxy'. Hubard, it was said, was the 'first person in millions of years' to map a precise route through the 'Wall of Fire'. Having done so, his OT power has been increased to such an extent that he was a grave risk of accidental injury to his body; indeed, he had broken his back, a knee and an arm during the course of his research."

"Virginia Downsborough did not observe any broken limbs, but recognized that Ron needed nursing."

     - Russell Miller, Bare-Faced Messiah (quoting from "Ron's Journal '67")

Hubbard reportedly slept a great deal and refused to get out of bed for three weeks until he recovered.

---

(2) "Body Thetans"

Only those Scientologists have gone through hundreds of hours of Scientology procedures called auditing are eligible to receive the doctrine of OT III. According to prices as of Spring '94 it would cost a newly joined Scientologist approximately $90,000 to complete all levels available up and including OT III. (Additional OT levels beyond OT III could cost an additional $55,000 - not including other special Scientology processes that may be required.)

The OT III documents, as with all the upper level material, are considered highly confidential and only those who have completed the elevated level of OT II and paid for OT III in full are allowed to see it. The vast majority of people who pass through Scientology have no access at all to this material. Indeed, those taking the OT III course are required keep their briefing notes and folders in a locked briefcase which is chained to their wrist when they are transporting them.

"...In the upper level of training known as Operating Thetan III, or 'The Wall of Fire'... the Scientologist first is taught that many of his problems are caused by other souls attached to his soul. These souls are detached and sent on their way through the course training. The goal of OT III is to rid the individual of hundreds of 'Body Thetans', or other souls attached to the main dominant individual. No one is even allowed to see OTIII material until he has completed the previous courses leading up to OTIII. This material is carefully guarded and treated as a great important mystery to be imparted only to those proven worthy."

     - Jeff Jacobsen, "The Hubbard is Bare"

The OTIII works are registered with the United States Copyright Office under registration number TXu 290 496. This copyright is owned by the Religious Technology Center of the Church of Scientology.

But let's wind back a bit. What is the "[whole] track"? What are entities? What are implants?

These exotica are all to do with a key element of Scientology belief: past lives. Scientology's predecessor, Dianetics, dealt only with present lives. However, Hubbard found that he was able to "regress" people further and further back down the "time track" of their life span. Ultimately he found that people could "remember" events as far back as the original sperm-and-egg at the time of, or even before, conception:

"Pre-sperm recordings are quite ordinary. The sperm sequence itself is worthy of note for it is a race of which the sperm is very conscious. His travails in reaching the ovum are many. There is a "visio" [image] which is quite standard, of the race. There is quite often a light, a spark, in this sequence. The sperm reaches the ovum and merges. This merging is another incident, conception. Pre-ovum sequences are on record but are not common. The rolling of the ovum down the tube is commonly recorded."

[L. Ron Hubbard, A History of Man, 1954 ed., p. 21]

By 1951, Hubbard had "discovered" that the human body housed two distinct organisms: a "genetic entity" (GE) and a separate, ethereal "theta being", or thetan. Both of these had existed for vast periods of time, but the thetan only cane to Earth about 35,000 years ago. Both, however, had undergone many traumatic experiences in the meantime. Hubbard detailed these in his 1951 book What To Audit (later retitled A History Of Man), which must surely be one of the most bizarre books ever written; it really is so bad that it's funny. As one commentator aptly put it, the book "wobbles uncertainly between schoolboy fiction and a pseudo-scientific medical paper."

---

Genetic Entities, Clams and "The Piltdown"

The first part of AHOM describes the trials and tribulations of the GE. In the course of its existence, it has been

"an anthropoid in the deep forests of forgotten continents or a mollusk seeking to survive on the shore of some lost sea."

[L. Ron Hubbard, A History of Man, 1954 ed., p. 26]

The mollusk has justifiably become infamous amongst critics and commentators on Scientology. Hubbard warned:

"... Your discussion of these incidents with the uninitiated in Scientology can produce havoc. Should you describe "the clam" to some one, you may restimulate it in him to the extent of causing severe jaw hinge pain. One such victim, after hearing about a clam death could not use his jaws for three days. Another "had to have" two molars extracted because of the resulting ache. The clam and all these incidents are very much present in the GE and can be restimulated easily. So do not be sadistic with your describing them to people - unless, of course, they belligerently claim that Man has no past memory for his evolution. In that event, describe away. It makes believers over and above enriching your friend the dentist who, indeed, could not exist without these errors and incidents on the evolutionary line!"

[L. Ron Hubbard, A History of Man, 1954 ed., p. 27]

Even today, clam engrams can cause great suffering:

"The hinge epicentres later become the hinges of the human jaw. Should you desire to confirm this, describe to some uninitiated person the death of a clam without saying what you are describing. "Can you imagine a clam sitting on the beach, opening and closing its shell very rapidly?" Make a motion with your thumb and forefinger of a rapid opening and closing. The victim may grip his jaws with his hand and feel quite upset. He may even have to have a few teeth pulled. At the very least he will argue as to whether or not the shell stays open at the end or closed. And he will, with no hint of the death aspect of it, talk about the ''poor clam' and he will feel quite sad emotionally.

The clam had an astonishing number of adventures for so minor a creature. It would get things into its shell and be unable to get them out. It would get its shell stuck open and be unable to shut it. And it would come loose from its rock, under the surface of the water and get tossed into the broil of the surf. And it would become deserted by the tide and left to bake under a frying sun, a quite uncomfortable situation which restimulates sometimes in a sunburn.

There was or is a spore method of procreation used by the clam. The spore was put on the inside of the lip and permitted to grow. Eventually it became large enough to become a clam on its own and would depart. There is a guardian-emotion on the part of the clam for these spores and a sadness on their departure. But there is more to the spore than this. The spore was like a barnacle. When the clam was cast ashore, these spores were still alive in the shell. The sun would kill the inner cells of the "barnacle" while the outer shell cells still lived. The dead inner cells would form a gas which, under the heat, would explode violently, to the agony of the living barnacle shell cells. This bursting was sudden and painful. These spores gave incidents which permitted the human teeth to have a pattern. The ancient bursting engrams are still dramatized by the teeth which, under stress, burst or feel like bursting. Running out some of these bursting incidents will take the ache out of a tooth rapidly."

[L. Ron Hubbard, A History of Man, 1954 ed., pp. 30-31]

Hubbard comments elsewhere that the reader may think that he, the author, has "slipped a cable or two in his wits." He was quite right.

But clam engrams were not the half of it. The unfortunate GE also faced traumas including The Atom, The Cosmic Impact, The Photon Converter, The Helper, The Weeper (also known as The Boohoo, which had "trillions of misadventures") and The Volcanoes ("smoking tobacco is a sort of dramatization of volcanoes which, at the least, were spectacular.") A particularly fine engram is that instilled by The Birds:

"Occasionally the creatures of the beach, still shell animals, had their troubles with birds which had become so earlier [sic]. Birds of a very crude construction developed a taste for clams. Clams had no adequate defense against them. If a clam opened its shell, the bird would thrust in a beak or a claw. If the clam then closed, the bird would fly up into the air. The clam would let go, drop on a rock and become bird food. If the clam didn't close, it became bird food anyway.

Falling sensations, indecision and other troubles go with the BIRDS."

[L. Ron Hubbard, A History of Man, 1954 ed., p. 33]

Alfred Hitchcock evidently was tapping a subliminal vein when he made his eponymous film.

The misfortunes of the Genetic Entity continued into the unhappy time of The Sloth. Apparently,

"[t]he SLOTH shows Man's nature well, so far as GEs are concerned. ''Leave me alone and I'll leave you alone" is the philosophy here. But the sloth was slow and easily attacked and he had bad times falling out of trees when hit by snakes, falling off cliffs when attacked by baboons. And the sloth was trying to THINK. The most pitiful painful efforts at thinking are found in this series.

THE SLOTH is a chain of incidents and misadventures, mostly showing up fear of snakes and of falling."

[L. Ron Hubbard, A History of Man, 1954 ed., p. 35]

From The Sloth, Hubbard moves on to The Piltdown [sic]:

"Man's first real Manhood is found in the PILTDOWN, a creature not an ape, yet not entirely a Man. It is so named not because it is accurately the real Piltdown Man but because it has some similarity.

The PILTDOWN contains freakish acts of strange "logic," of demonstrating dangerous on one's fellows [sic], of eating one's wife and other somewhat illogical activities. The PILTDOWN teeth were ENORMOUS and he was quite careless as to whom and what he bit and often very much surprised at the resulting damage.

Obsessions about biting, efforts to hide the mouth and early familial troubles can be found in the PILTDOWN."

[L. Ron Hubbard, A History of Man, 1954 ed., p. 35]

Unfortunately for Hubbard, Piltdown Man was exposed as a hoax in 1952, a year after the publication of the original edition What To Audit. Quite typically, in the book's new guise as A History Of Man, it continues to this day to refer to Piltdown Man as a fact rather than as an acknowledged hoax.

AHOM becomes even more improbable when Hubbard turns to the history of the thetan, which through book goes from sixty trillion years to seventy trillion years and finally to seventy-four trillion years. His description of the war between thetans and MEST [physical] beings is like something out of a bad 1930s pulp sci-fi story:

"MEST beings, trying to inhabit an area of THETANS are commonly balked and fought by the thetans and the MEST beings then begin to trap and harass the thetans and will use them to motivate new bodies when the thetans have been reduced to little or nothing in power. The THEY which you will discover in incidents are MEST beings. The current homo sapiens is a THEY. Theta beings (amnesia and a MEST body) attack thetans who menace him [sic]. Thetans can kill MEST bodies by throwing a charge at them. Thus a war develops between thetans and MEST beings. Given electronics and hitherto unconquered thetans, MEST beings can have won [sic]."

[L. Ron Hubbard, A History of Man, 1954 ed., p. 46]

In the course of this war, apparently, MEST beings have used "electronics" to trap thetans and implant them with dreadful traumas. Hubbard lists a variety of "incidents" encountered in past lives, many of which involving exotic forms of torture. Here's a selection:

THE JACK-IN-THE-BOX: Here we have an invader trick, a method of trapping thetans. It is a facsimile scrambler. It is very early, not the earliest, only the earliest invader trick. The thetan area is invaded by MEST beings. The thetans bother the MEST beings, nipping them, etc. The MEST beings use theta traps. One of these is to give to thetans pretty little boxes. These boxes contain a stack of pictures. As thetans are disposed to gather facsimiles, these pictures are very acceptable. The thetan looks over the pictures. He finds they are quite similar one to another. They show, each one, a picture of a box of pictures. When he replaces the lid, the box explodes violently. He instinctively tries to dampen the explosion. He gets his aura of beingness full of pictures which are extremely confusing, being pictures of boxes of pictures ... You will find a preclear with this in restimulation to be very curious about cereal boxes which have pictures of boxes of cereal which have pictures of boxes of cereal.

THE HALVER: Don't think thetans were only abused. When MEST bodies tried to invade and take over an area they usually wound up enslaved to the thetans in that area. And the thetans used them horribly. The invader sometimes came in with electronics, his only defense against a thetan. The thetan quite ordinarily took the electronics over and used them on the MEST bodies. One of the processes thetans used on MEST bodies was a half-light, half-black gun which shot out a wave. Half of this wave, usually the black, hit the right side of the victim's body, the other half, in the same explosion, usually the light side, hit the left side of the victim. This had the effect of causing him to be two people ... There was not always regularity in this incident. Sometimes it was the practice to shoot the victim one way and then turn him around and shoot him the other, sometimes the sides and head as well.

The halver was rigged up with religious symbols and it truly lays in religion. There is a devil on one side, a symbol carried in the light, angels on the other side. Sometimes it was very fancy and was complicated with dolls in the shape of nudes, angels, devils, strung on wires to slide and dance.

It did terrible things to the victim: it gave him a conflict, one side with the other, one being good, the other being bad. It gave him sexual compulsion all mixed up with religious compulsion so that an overdose of indulgences would send him to church, sometimes into a life of crime. It was a control factor used to keep the community fighting itself.

FACSIMILE ONE: This incident is in everyone's bank ... It is quite varied when found as an original - for in this case, it happened to the preclear in the last ten or twenty thousand years. It was originally laid down in this Galaxy about one million years ago.

The "coffee-grinder" (which might be an alternate name for it) is levelled at the preclear and a push-pull wave is played over him, first on his left side, then on his right and back and forth from side to side, laying in a bone-deep somatic which cannot be run unless you recognize it as a vibration, not the solid board it seems to be. When this treatment is done, the preclear is dumped in scalding water, then immediately in ice water. Then the preclear is put in a chair and whirled around. He was quite swollen after the pummelling of the waves and was generally kept in a badly run (but quite modern) hospital for a few days. Sometimes he was given several and after the first one would report back on schedule for the next.

FAC ONE was an outright control mechanism, invented to cut down rebel raids on invader installations. It was probably designed by the Fourth Invader and used by him in its original state and "ritual" for a considerable time. It gave him a nice, un-combative, religiously insane community. THE MOST IMPORTANT PART OF FAC ONE APPERTAINS TO ITS "SUMMONS TO COURT." This was a sick quiver installed in the stomach area by the "coffee-grinder" during the first part of the incident. The coffee-grinder laid in "baps" on the pineal and other points but almost knocked out the pineal potential forever and relegated its actions to the pituitary. It knocked in every other glandular point. And these same "baps" were used against the vagus nerve to give what everyone knows as an "anxiety stomach," uncontrolled bowel action, etc., etc. The invader wanted people to report when sent for. Thus the context (WHICH MUST NEVER BE DONE UNTIL THE EMOTION AND EFFORT ARE REDUCED) when the vagus area was "bapped" concentrates on getting the preclear to report quickly when summoned and makes him terrified of arrest, of courts, of other legal hocus-pocus. Thus criminal action against individuals, or sometimes any legal action, interrupts the glandular system, gives an anxiety reaction which has no equal anywhere else on the track. Experienced police know this sudden hitherto inexplicable collapse of the criminal and his feeling that he would rather be dead than simply arrested: one cannot exaggerate the effect of FAC ONE in the legal department ...

The "coffee-grinder" is a two-handled portable machine which, when turned, emits a heavy push-pull electronic wave in a series of stuttering "baps." It is violently restimulated by what construction companies call "widow-makers" - pneumatic drills of the kind used to tear up pavement; the sound's not dissimilar. FAC ONE, not silicosis, is responsible for the mortality of workers assigned to these drills on construction projects.

In the original version, the invaders operated these machines while wearing hoods and goggles, not unlike "hot papa" suits used today on aircraft carriers. The victim was placed behind a black gauze curtain but, in running FAC ONE, the preclear usually catches glimpses of the "coffee-grinder" and the users. Some people who wear horn-rimmed glasses are found to be solidly in the operator valence in FAC ONE. Such people are lean and hectic. Some persons whose faces are "swollen" and who have a "dumpy" build, who are given to asthma, are found solidly in the victim valence.

The invader gratuitously left these machines around for the yokels. Believing that the treatment was vital to get to heaven or some such thing, the yokels practiced on each other, found new victims and generally spread the implant around. Trouble with the machines the invader left around was that they "backfired" while they were working, sending out a ray into the chest of the operator to restimulate him, the yokel operator not suspecting that the machine was hitting anything else but his victim. And the yokel operator had neither goggles nor a "hot papa" suit. One of these unskilled operators lasted sometimes as long as forty victims before he collapsed from restimulation himself. The "back-fire" characteristic of the machine left around also inhibited the local people from using electronic hand guns and "rifles," thus killing off guerrillas who sought to attack the invader, for electronic weapons have a flash-back against the user.

THE WHIRLER: The thetan was placed on a platform which whirled eccentrically, jerkily to the left and right until he would turn as the post turned.

THE BOUNCER: The thetan was bounced up and down eccentrically until he had a facsimile which fixed him, it would appear, on his time track.

THE SPINNER: A chair device was used to spin the thetan until he had no orientation. This is the probable source of the slang term, spinning, meaning going insane.

THE ROCKER: This swung or teetered the thetan to the left and right, slowly and quietly ...

THE BOXER: This incident is a cousin to the "FLYTRAP." Its purpose was to make the thetan into a complete stimulus-response mechanism. He was hit from every angle by a device not unlike a boxing glove. He would be forced to kick back against it with his force. At length he would be psychotic enough to return every motion he received ...

THE FALLER: This installs fear of falling, also fixes the thetan in the incident on the track. He is dropped again and again and again to different drops and at varied intervals until he is jammed.

THE EDUCATION: After all these, the thetan was given a complete education. This was of a hypnotic, stimulus-response variety. It was the type of education which makes a file card system out of a thinking being. It is dramatized today in universities as it requires no skilled instruction.

THE FLY-TRAP: Very, very early on the track, a long time before any of the present populace came into being, there was a theta trap called the FLY-TRAP. It was of a gummy material. The thetan who got into it punched and fought at this material until he was psychotic enough to react to the physical universe laws of responding to motions. He was taken out of this trap by a crew of do-gooders who had caught him for his own good and who trained him in religious sweetness and syrup until they considered him fit to be part of their group. The attitude of these people was SO good, their manners SO understanding that the thetan usually ran away as soon as possible. Sunday school sometimes brings this, even as a second facsimile which it nearly always is, into heavy restimulation."

[L. Ron Hubbard, A History of Man, 1954 ed., pp. 60-73]

The Church of Scientology has claimed that AHOM is the product of "old technology" which is no longer used. However, the book is still in use, in the second of the Operating Thetan levels (more on this shortly).

---

Pasts Imperfect

After Hubbard had made these remarkable "discoveries" in 1951, Scientologists - the majority of whom were science fiction fans, not at all coincidentally - also began to "recall" Invader Forces and implants. This allowed the following definitions to be made (taken from the Dianetics & Scientology Technical Dictionary, 1975):

INVADER FORCES

1. an electronics people. The electronics people usually happen to be an evolutionary line which is on heavy gravity planets and so they develop electronics. The reason you say invader force at all is because at some time along the line fairly early in its youth it took off to conquer the whole mest universe. You could expect almost anything in terms of physical form particularly physical form which matched the peculiar purpose of this group. They've usually got some gimmick like Fac One. Control has been the main thing. The way to control territory is to control people.

2. there are five invader forces active and one aborning, but the one aborning is not active. It will probably be several million years before you see this one, some of you hit the track 60 trillion years ago mest universe and some of you didn't get into the mest universe until about 3 trillion years ago that is invader force one and invader force two [punctuation sic]. Now we don't see anything of invader force three here on earth. I just haven't found any threes. Invader force four is really holding the fort someplace or other. Every little while, a few million years, some planet will get taken over by an invader force.

[Dianetics & Scientology Technical Dictionary, 1975]

In 1957, the 5th London Advanced Clearing Course was held under the supervision of Hubbard and his son, Nibs. High on the agenda was the issue of past lives. A "scientific survey" was carried out, in which approximately seventy students investigated each other's past lives. Needless to say, all of them "found" that they had indeed lived many times previously (though one wonders what would have happened if a student had not "confirmed" Hubbard's theories). According to one of the students, Cyril Vosper, "when a student was having a lot of difficulty in making his story, or rather Past Life gel, Nibs would helpfully fill in bits." This perhaps accounts for some of the bizarre stories told in the 1958 book, Have You Lived Before This Life?, which after A History Of Man has to be one of the strangest books published this century.

If nothing else, the stories related by the book's contributors show that they had imaginations on a par with Hubbard's. Many recalled past lives on Earth (ranging from 19th-century Chinese coolies to Roman soldiers). Several remembered extremely strange extraterrestrial past lives. Ray Kemp (below right, with Hubbard) wrote:

"This takes place nine galaxy periods ago. I was a male, born of space parents. I seem to have two or three mothers who died or were killed. At the age of five I was already on the look-out for brothels. At nine years of age I asked my father if I could join the space academy. However; this does not occur until I am 14. I am 15 when I go with other boys and girls for three months to learn all about sex and homosexuality. When I am 16 I kill my father while fighting on the planet and I join a space-ship. It seems I have a journey here and rejoin the ship when I am 19. Then I learn all about space ship drill, take-offs, etc. There is homosexuality, as only officers are allowed women.

I did not care for homosexuality and soon gained the title of captain and so was able to have a wife of my own. She had a baby and a few days later I found the wife enjoying pleasures with another officer. I put her and the officer up for trial and they were condemned and burned (zapped with special ray equipment). I killed the baby because I thought it was not my child. I wanted to go back home so I went to see the captain who was in charge of all the space-craft men and who knew where the ship was going. I asked for the space-ship to be turned around and he said "No." I went mad and killed the captain with my hands and broke up his body. Next I went into the main hall and pressed a button to ring the bell for assembly. I asked for votes for turning back the space-ship for home. Sixty-five per cent. said "Yes." As I was talking to the crew members I felt a gun at the back of my body and I was led off by officers along the corridor. I was screaming and struggling as I did not want to go to the Zap machine (a ray gun to destroy bodies).

However, I arrived and my body was held against the wall by clamps, hands were outstretched against the wall. This wall was made of special ray detecting material about a yard to two yards thick. I felt the warmth of the ray until it grew so bad that I left the body. As soon as the head had been burned off, the clamps were automatically opened and the body fell in a trench in the floor, arms outstretched. A large trap door made of metal was slammed on my arms cutting them off. The arms were swept into the trench and the trap door was lifted up again. As it slammed tight again, my body fell into a space container and was thrown outside by tremendous pressure. A space coffin had its own power to fall away from the ship."

[L. Ron Hubbard (ed.), Have You Lived Before This Life?, 1958]

It's easy to see why this was such a traumatic event. Another Scientologist, Harry Dorfman, recalled something even more bizarre:

"There was a fantastic space factory with gold animals hanging concentrically from it all around, mainly elephants and zebra, by the necks. These appeared solid but periodically imploded or exploded. There was no gravity even near planets. Inside were four great bronze grinding wheels. During the incident, I look at time both ways as well as seeing it as a kind of circle from outside time. Therefore, it is hard to say whether discs from a case were ground up and made into small animals (which I think was the case) or whether animals were compressed into discs. I think the animals were subsequently inflated after blowing up through a totem and a cat devil and then broadcast (via the outside animals?) to other planets ...

The main and most awful part, and the most impenetrable, of the incident was the feeling of waiting and counting thirty to press a button. What was to happen then was uncertain. Either I was to blow up a planet, had blown one up, or failed to prevent it from being blown up. For this I felt I was punished by a bearded priest to whom I was betrayed by colleagues, by being compelled to work the grinder. There was also, towards the end, the stronger idea that all this appeared to happen in a robot body."

[L. Ron Hubbard (ed.), Have You Lived Before This Life?, 1958]

From the surreal to the sublimely ridiculous; another Scientologist recalled how he had been zapped by a Martian bishop:

The preclear was on Mars without a body 469,476,600 years ago, creating havoc, destroying a bridge and buildings. The people were called by an alarm to temple. PC [preclear] went and broke the back pew, and the Temple tower. He wandered in the town and saw a doll in a window, and got entrapped trying to move its limbs. People seized it, beat it up, and threw the doll out of the window (30 ft. drop). The doll was taken roughly to the Temple, and was zapped by a bishop's gun while the congregation chanted "God is Love." When the people left, the doll, out of control, staggered out and was run over by a large car and a steamroller. It was then taken back to the Bishop, who ordered it to be taken (in a lorry with others) to dig trenches or ditches for 2,000 years. (The whole incident took nearly 2,000,000 years.) Then it was taken and the body was removed and the PC was promised a robot body. The thetan (PC) went to an implant station and was put into an ice-cube and went by flying saucer and was dropped at Planet ZX 432. It was drawn to a building to an emanator. PC was interiorised by spinning and confusion into a dummy training and indoctrination robot body. In some way not very clear, a transfer was made to another robot body and PC was told to look after it for ever. It reported to a village (after a doubtful encounter with a giant, and heat stroke) and was set to supervise unloading of saucers. It zapped and killed another robot and PC took over its body to prove it could work. The PC was punished in first robot in a saucer and shipped off. The saucer exploded en route and body of robot was in space falling in two parts with PC vainly endeavouring to take care of it and the second body. This was sucked by departure of a saucer into water in a dock. Divers brought it up, but the PC left it, he thinks, to attend the other body.

[L. Ron Hubbard (ed.), Have You Lived Before This Life ?, 1958]

Other Scientologists recalled falling out of spaceships, being hit by meteorites, leading happy lives as walruses and even "falling in love with a robot decked out as a beautiful red-haired girl".

The book was originally intended to have a sequel, entitled Where Are You Buried ?, in which Scientologists were to be invited to pinpoint the locations of their former bodies. But this project was abandoned - perhaps those consulted were unable to remember the details accurately enough. This was rather a pity, as it would have been well worth reading if it had matched the high (?) standards of Have You Lived Before This Life.

---

Heaven, Helatrobus and the Hoi-Polloi

Hubbard's fearless exploration of the bizarre continued in the 1960s, perhaps aided by the barbiturates which he was prescribed "for horticultural use".

1963 was a particularly fine year for strange pronouncements. That spring, Hubbard made the startling "breakthrough" that many of man's problems were caused by "implants" forcibly given to thetans trillions of years ago. On 11 May, he announced that he had been to Heaven - a claim which was to come back to haunt him and his Church in future years. It turned out that Heaven was in fact a gigantic hoax. "The symbol of the crucified Christ," Hubbard observed, "is very apt indeed. It's the symbol of a thetan betrayed." He dated the Heaven implants to "43,891,832,611,177 years, 344 days, 10 hours, 20 minutes and 40 seconds from 10:02½ PM Daylight Greenwich Time May 9, 1963." Presumably nobody had told him that "Daylight Greenwich Time" does not actually exist.

Heaven, said Hubbard, was definitely not what it was supposed to be like:

"The gates of the first series are well done, well built. An avenue of statues of saints leads up to them. The gate pillars are surmounted by marble angels. The entering grounds are very well kept, laid out like Bush Gardens in Pasadena, so often seen in the movies. Aside from the implant boxes which lie across from each other on the walk there are other noises and sounds as though the saints are defending and berating. These are unimportant to the incident.

The second series, probably in the same place, shows what a trillion years of overt acts does (or is an additional trickery to collapse one's time). The place is shabby. The vegetation is gone. The pillars are scruffy. The saints have vanished. So have the Angels. A sign on one (the left as you "enter") says "This is Heaven". The right has a sign "Hell" with an arrow and inside the grounds one can see the excavations like archaeological diggings with raw terraces, that lead to "Hell". Plain wire fencing encloses the place. There is a sentry box beside and outside the right pillar. The road "leading up" to the gates is deeply eroded. An effigy of Joseph, complete with desert clothing, is seen approaching the gates (but not moving) leading a donkey which "carries" the original Madonna and child from "Bethlehem". The implanting boxes lie on either side of this "entering" path at path level ...

The place, by implant and inference, was supposed to be in the sky like a floating island. Actually it was simply a high place in the mountains of a planet and the gates pathway falls away into a gorge, very eroded and bare by the time of the second implant, but heavily forested and rolling at the time of the first [implant] ...

The first series actually begins with arrival in a "town" (as everything is backwards to upset the time sense). This "town" consisted of a trolley bus, some building fronts, sidewalks, train tracks, a boarding house, a bistro in a basement where there is a "bulletin board" well lighted, and a BANK BUILDING.

The bank is the key point of interest. It is interesting that we use the work "bank" (taken actually from computerology) to indicate the reactive mind ...

The place seemed to have people in it. But they are all effigies. These seem radioactive. Contact with them hurts. No living beings. But effigies that look like humans are performing sudden, repetitive actions with long halts between. In the "basement" such dummies are seen operating machinery.

The boarding house at the actual beginning has a dummy guest and a landlady in kimono and wrappers, reading a newspaper.

There are no devils or satans that I saw. [Perhaps because this was supposed to be Heaven?]

There is a passenger getting on the trolley bus, a "workman" halfway down the first stairs of To Forget "eating lunch" and in To Be in Heaven a gardener or electrician adjusting an implant box behind a hedge and periodically leaping up and screaming ..."

[L. Ron Hubbard, HCO Bulletin of May 11, 1963, "Heaven"]

The moral which Hubbard drew from this was decidedly anti-Judeo-Christian:

"[W]e have our hands on an appalling piece of technology where the world is concerned. With rapidity and a Meter it can be shown that Heaven is a false dream and that the old religion [i.e. Christianity was based on a very painful lie, a cynical betrayal.

What does this do to any religious nature of Scientology? It strengthens it. New religions always overthrow the false gods of the old, they do something to strengthen man. We can improve man. We can show the old gods false. And we can open up the universe as a happier place in which a spirit may dwell. What more can you expect? This actually places us far beyond any other beings that are about. It puts us, through increased beingness and a restoration of life, in control of much destiny.

We have now only a few unsolved problems about life, huge though they may be, such as the construction of bodies and how does one establish the character of and communicate, if feasible, with beings who are making trees and insects. There are a few things like these. But I imagine when we finally manage to communicate with beetles under rocks and free them, we'll no doubt find the Creator of Heaven who 43 + Trillion years ago designed and built the Pearly Gates and entrapped us all.

Good Lord, I'd hate to be guilty of that overt. But never mind - you aren't either. That guy is GONE (I hope!)"

[L. Ron Hubbard, HCO Bulletin of May 11, 1963, "Heaven"]

The "Heaven Bulletin" aroused a good deal of attention (or, more accurately, derision) when it was publicised in the 1965 Anderson Report in Australia. The Church of Scientology subsequently tried to claim that Hubbard had merely been writing metaphorically. Unfortunately for the Church, Hubbard was very specific on this point and added at the end of the bulletin:

"(Note: This HCO Bulletin is based on over a thousand hours of research auditing, analyzing the facsimiles of the reactive mind, and with the help of a Mark V Electrometer. It is scientific research and is not in any way based upon the mere opinion of the researcher. This HCO Bulletin is not the result of the belief or beliefs of anyone. Scientology data reflects long, arduous and painstaking research over a period of some thirty years into the nature of Man, the mind, the human spirit and its relationship to the physical universe. The data and phenomena discovered in Scientology is common to all minds and all men and can be demonstrated on anyone. Truth does not require belief to be truth any more than water requires anyone's permission to run down hill. The data is itself and can be duplicated by any honest researcher or practitioner. We in Scientology seek freedom, the betterment of Man, and the happiness of the individual and this comprises our attitude towards the data found. The data, however, is simply itself, and exists whatever the opinion of anyone may be. The contents of this HCO Bulletin discover the apparent underlying impulses of religious zealotism and the source of the religious mania and insanity which terrorized Earth over the ages and has given religion the appearance of insanity. As the paper is written for my friends it has, of course, a semblance of irreverence)."

[L. Ron Hubbard, HCO Bulletin of 11 May 1963, "Heaven"]

Shortly afterwards, Hubbard discovered a series of implants created by invaders from Helatrobus, "a little pip squeak ... interplanetary nation." In HCO Bulletin of 14 July 1963, he described the Gorilla Goals,

"given in an amusement park with a single tunnel, a roller coaster and a Ferris wheel ... between about 319 trillion years ago to about 256 trillion trillion years ago, a long span.

The symbol of a Gorilla was always present in the place the goal was given. Sometimes a large gorilla, black, was seen elsewhere than the park. A mechanical or a live gorilla was always seen in the park.

This activity was conducted by the Hoipolloi, a group of operators in meat body societies. They were typical carnival people. They let out concessions for these implant "Amusement Parks." A pink-striped white shirt with sleeve garters was the uniform of the Hoipolloi. Such a figure often rode on the roller coaster cars. Monkeys were also used on the cars. Elephants sometimes formed part of the equipment.

The Hoipolloi or Gorilla goals were laid in with fantastic motion. Blasts of raw electricity and explosions were both used to lay the items in."

[L. Ron Hubbard, HCO Bulletin of 14 July 1963, "Routine 3N - Line Plots"]

The reason why the Helatrobans did these things might not seem particularly clear. But Hubbard provides an answer to the question mentioned at the start of this essay - "HOW DID EARTH BECOME A PRISON PLANET?". He explains the reasons in a May 1963 lecture:

"This [solar system] is Sun 12 and it is a rim, tiny, microscopic, terribly insignificant little bunch of apace dust. Not to do it down particularly but compared to other systems, galaxies, confederations and that sort of things and other possessions of confederations and so forth, this is nothing. That's why it's left alone. But it stands pretty well alone. It's peculiarly isolated. This is also true of most of the stars out in this end of this wheel.

It's very close, and people wishing to get rid of troublesome characters, captives, anybody you can think of... You know, around city dumps, you know, they always have trouble around cities because people start using certain areas of the city for dumps, you know? And they take -- use it as a dumping ground for the ice cube and for other thing: unwanted beings, unwanted people, unwanted personnel.

Like you overthrow the old regime, you see, and you throw them through a good, stiff implant that mixes them up so they can't tell north from west and you throw them into an ice cube capsule of some kind or another. And what do you do with them? Well, the primary threat to a system is the strength of a thetan. That's the primary threat in the view of some very aberrated character. He thinks the main danger in the planet, or main danger in the system or the galaxy, or so forth, is a free thetan ...

In other words, these people are -- have overts so they try to protect themselves from the vengeance of a free thetan and they compound the possibility and the potentiality of this particular universe as a trap, and they make these people very thoroughly trapped. Well, they dump them. They dump them pretty well far from home. They try to -- don't even try to -- they don't dump them close in, they dump them way out.

So this particular system got dumping, and the Marcab Confederacy and some of the other stars around here just got a terrific concentration of people being dumped from the center of the hub, you know. They don't want to go over to the next galaxy, so they just take it out to the edge of the city, you know.

Now, science fiction writers following the cue of some chap, I've forgotten his name now, Einstein, Beinstein, something like that, who said that MC squared over C wouldn't go, man, and that the speed of light could not be excessive. And actually I was looking up some speed tables the other day, and a trillion light years per day is not full throttle on a space wagon."

[L. Ron Hubbard, The Helatrobus Implants, lecture of 21 May 1963]

There are several things of note in this extract, apart from its sheer bizarreness. Hubbard refers to packaging thetans up in "ice cubes" - this was one of the incidents cited in A History Of Man back in 1952. Hubbard recycled many of his early writings during the 1960s and 1970s; the incidents and processes openly described in A History Of Man, The Creation of Human Ability and other works published during the 1950s later reappeared in new, secret versions, principally in the OT levels (of which more shortly).

By this time, Hubbard had also decided that the events described in science fiction stories really had happened - the authors may have got a few details wrong but otherwise, they were just repeating or "dramatizing" events from their distant pasts. This was, of course, a very convenient "discovery" for an ex-writer of pulp science fiction.

Hubbard also mentions the Marcabs. The Marcab Confederacy and its Invader Force was soon to become an obsession with him. Like the Helatrobans, the Marcabs were a "degraded civilization" whose rulers implanted innocent thetans. The Confederacy, said Hubbard, consisted of

"various planets united into a very vast civilization which has come forward up through the last 200,000 years, is formed out of the fragments of earlier civilizations. In the last 10,000 years they have gone on with a sort of a decadent kicked-in-the-head civilization that contains automobiles, business suits, fedora hats, telephones, spaceships. A civilization which looks almost duplicate [sic] but is worse off than the current U.S. civilization."

[L. Ron Hubbard, The Helatrobus Implants, lecture of 21 May 1963]

During his tour of the Mediterranean in the converted cattle ferry Apollo at the end of the 1960s, Hubbard liked to expound on his past lives, particularly those amongst the Marcabs. It turned out that their main recreation was driving cars very fast around racetracks. They crashed frequently, but as they used "doll bodies" stuffed with kapok [sic] they could be repaired fairly easily. One of those who accompanied him on the Apollo later recalled:

"LRH was on the ship and in a real jolly mood. He used to stay up late at night on the deck and talk to us into the wee hours about his whole track adventures, how he was a race-car driver in the Marcab civilization. The Marcab civilization existed millions of years ago on another planet; it was similar to planet earth in the 'fifties, only they had space travel. Marcabians turned out later not to be good guys so it wasn't a compliment that their civilization was similar to ours. LRH said he was a race driver called the Green Dragon who set a speed record before he was killed in an accident. He came back in another lifetime as the Red Devil and beat his own record, then came back and did it again as the Blue Streak. Finally he realized all he was doing was breaking his own records and it was no game any more."

[Russell Miller interview with Mary Maren, 1986]

This odd pastime, apparently, is responsible for the modern motor car. Hubbard explained it in a lecture of 1 January 1961, The Whole Answer to the Problems of the Mind:

"Now, let's take some fellow who's been reading space opera. I know. I like read space opera. I've written a lot of it. As a matter of fact, they don't write it anymore.

But this fellow just can't seem to keep his nose out of space opera, and he said, "Gee! I'd like to do that sometime in the future when this realization-when we get really geared up and when we really get into the future, and when we really have space ships, and when we really, and..." All this time he has this horrible burning sensation on the end of his nose, you know? And he can't quite account for that, but he's into space opera, but he's not in space opera, but he likes to read it, but it has a horrible effect on him, and - and - well, the first time he can enjoy space opera is when he finds out he's been a rocket jockey for the last 18 dozen lives.

No wonder he gets a burning nose. One of the favorite skills he had back in the early days of one of the space societies was shooting off doll's noses. He didn't like to hurt them. He just singed their noses, you know. Fast draw. You wonder why all these guys are fixated on western movies. Western movie is mostly a substitute for space opera if you only knew it.

It's space opera that's full of the fast draw and shoot them dead. Listen, human bodies are not bulletproof. I don't know if you've ever experienced that fact or not. Probably not in this lifetime, but you do have some evidence to this effect. If somebody stood up and pointed a gun at you, something in you would tell you that it would make a hole in you. Well, I wonder how you learned that. Not by watching western movies because they all die very cleanly and very calmly, mostly, except when they are being filmed with realism. Then they splatter a little blood on the fellow's shirt, you know, make him cough twice.

Factually speaking, it takes a doll, if you please, a nonhumanoid body to be able to stand up to firearms of that character. There isn't any reason you should be killed dead just because you're shot. There isn't any real reason why it should hurt very badly.

You're afraid right now of travelling down an icy, slippery road at 110 miles an hour. You'd say that'd be a bum show. Why?

If you were in a doll body: So it plows into the concrete abutment, and it dents up your new shirt. Next time you think of it back at the base while you're over to the armor, and you say, "Hey, pound out my chest, would you? That's right. Pound it up, smooth it up a little bit. The enamel's cracked there too. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. That's better. That's better." And you haven't learned not to go 110 miles an hour on icy roads. Because there's no reason to learn it.

'Tisn't a particularly dangerous activity. And the Marcab Confederacy within the last 200 thousand years, racing cars went 275 miles an hour and were turbine driven. Everybody thinks a racing car should sound like a Marcab racing car. Just ask somebody how should a racing car sound.

Well, they don't say, "brrrrrrrrrrr" like an Earth racing car. They say "mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm." That's a Marcab racing car. They don't have any here on Earth.

Everybody knows how it is. I wonder why they know this so well.

Well, they were using meat bodies on some of that stuff, and boy, did they get messed up. Meat bodies. Imagine driving in racing cars like that. It practically cured everybody of driving, so nobody on Earth can drive."

[L. Ron Hubbard, The Whole Answer to the Problems of the Mind, 1 January 1961]

Finally, following the Marcab Invader Force came the unspeakable Fifth Invader Force - "very strange insect-like creature[s] with unthinkably horrible hands," according to Hubbard. Apparently, the Fifth Invaders landed during the Roman era and so traumatised everyone that no record of their landing survives. Except, of course, in the heads of Scientologists, where much profit can be made by "running out" the horribleness of the Fifth Invaders' hands.

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The Wall Of Fire

By far the most famous example of Hubbardian weirdness, however, is the infamous OT III - "The Wall Of Fire". During the 1960s, Hubbard conducted much research into making a person an "Operating Thetan," or OT, with the "forgotten" superpowers restored and in total control over all aspects of "matter, energy, space and time". He outlined some key OT abilities in A History Of Man:

"A theta being produces considerable voltage and amperage, enough to give someone a very bad shock, to put out his eyes or cut him in half ...

Thetans communicate by telepathy. They can move material objects by throwing an energy flow at them. They can travel at very high speeds. They are not bound by atmospheres or temperatures ... Thetans do not die ...

Let's not go upsetting governments and putting on a show to "prove" anything to homo sapiens for a while; it's a horrible temptation to knock off hats at fifty yards and read books a couple of countries away and get into the rotogravure section and the Hearst Weeklies - but you'll just make it tough on somebody else who is trying to get across this bridge."

[L. Ron Hubbard, A History of Man, 1954 ed., pp. 45-48]

The eight OT levels were and remain secret, accessible only to those who have reached a sufficiently high grade (i.e. paid enough money) in their Scientology training. Most were replaced by the NOTs (New OT Levels) in the 1970s; however, the mystique surrounding OT III means that it is still taught in its original form.

This mystique is clearly apparent in the Church of Scientology's writeups of OT III:

"The material of OT III is of immense magnitude and power. It is so vicious that no one before Ron has come close to discovering anything at all of its nature. Ron has called it the "wall of fire".

Ron broke through it on March 14th, 1967, and then began researching the way for others to safely follow. This research is now totally complete.

Of OT III Ron says, "It is very true that a great catastrophe occurred on this planet and in the other 75 planets which formed this [Marcab] Confederacy, 75 million years ago. It has since that time been a desert." (Ron's Journal '67)

OT III is the full revelation of what happened and it's [sic] resolution. At the level of OT III the barriers that obscure the ultimate truth of the universe are blown."

[Advance! magazine, late 1970s]

"The Wall of Fire. At this level you face and handle the devastating effects of an ages-old catastrophe which to this day affects the very nature of beings and our society on earth. It is on OT III where you learn the very nature of beings and our society on earth. It is on OT III where you learn the final secrets of this sector of the universe. Ron's breakthrough on OT III allows you to pass safely though this wall of fire. It's a major step on the path to full OT."

[Advance! magazine, 1982]

OT III was written in 1968 when Hubbard's flagship Apollo was berthed at Las Palmas, in the Canary Islands. Part of the legend of OT III is that the research was so dangerous - "booby-trapped" - that Hubbard suffered a variety of injuries in the process. As he himself wrote in his notes on OT III , "I [took the plunge] and emerged very knocked out, but alive. Probably the only one ever to do so in 75,000,000 years." In fact, it appears that the injuries sustained by Hubbard were actually caused by his falling off his motorbike on a mountain road. He suffered a broken arm and broken ribs, but refused to let a doctor treat him.

Learning about OT III without the preparation of numerous Scientology courses beforehand is supposedly risky. When asked why they want to keep OT III secret, Church officials have alluded to the possible "spiritual harm" which it could cause. The "danger" is actually considerably greater than this: Hubbard claimed that learning about OT III would cause pneumonia in the unprepared. Be warned!

The OT III story was first mentioned by ex-Scientologists in the 1970s, but since then the whole thing has come out in the open; when the Wall Street Journal has detailed it in an editorial, it can hardly be called a secret any more. But OT III is still enormously entertaining.

What we now know as OT III emerged in a confidential lecture of 3 October 1968, given aboard the Apollo. In the course of a discussion of "assists" (spiritual healing techniques), Hubbard breaks off to describe a past-life incident called "R6" which underlies all present-day physical illnesses. It took place 75 million years ago on "the planet Coltice" (Polaris), one of the members of the Galactic Confederacy:

"people at that particular time and space were walking around in clothes which looked very remarkably like the clothes they wear this very minute. And the cars they drove looked exactly the same and the trains they ran looked the same and the boats they had looked the same. Circa 1950, 1960 ...

And there was quite a bit of 'huffle ruffle' and then upset and so on before R6 took place. What it was was the Loyal Officers were the body, the elective body, and they called them the Loyal Officers and they were there to protect the populations and so forth. And they had elected a fellow by the name of Xenu, could be spelled X-E-N-U, to the supreme 'rulah' and they were about to unelect him. And he took the last moments he had in office to really 'goof the floof'.

[Sound of pencil dropping]

Yes, I don't blame you for dropping something. [laughter].

He took these last moments to really upset it. He, of course, had several key birds who were close to him. He was a Suppressive, they involved Suppressives, he got these administrators and so on and heads of planets in various positions and places. He picked out all the cowboys in the white hat and he got rid of them first, fast and then troops, not knowing what the hell they were doing but fed all kinds of false orders, were fed in against the population to pick them up one after the other. Rat-a-tat-tat-a-tat-tat. One of the mechanisms they used was to tell them to come in for an income tax investigation. The United States just copies income taxes - it is just R6. They're just a bunch of dramatizing psychotics, these guys."

[L. Ron Hubbard, Assists, lecture of 3 Oct 1968]

Xenu (or Xemu: there is some debate about the spelling, as neither Hubbard's handwriting or his diction is very clear on this point) then massacred his prisoners, froze their thetans in "alcohol and glycol" and then "threw 'em into space planes which were the exact copies of DC8s, the DC8 airplane is the exact copy of the space plane of that day. And, no difference, except the DC8 had fans, propellers on it and the space plane didn't." The unfortunate thetans were taken to Earth - known then as "Teegeeack" or "the Bomb Place" or "the Evil Place" - in Xenu's "space planes":

"[T]hey took these people in boxes and so forth and they dumped them and then they set off hydrogen bombs on the top of each primary volcano there is on this particular planet. And when they blew up, it blew the thetans into the air. And after the bomb, an electronic ribbon, which also was a type of standing wave, was erected over the area.

The tremendous winds of the planet blew every thetan there was straight in to those particular vacuum zones which had been created. These were brought down, packed up and put in front of projection machines which with sound and color pictures first gave them the implant which you know as the Clearing Course. And then a Whole Track was implanted which you know as OT II.

After this, however, about the remainder of the 36 days which is the bulk of them, is taken up with a 3-D supercolossal motion picture which has to do with God, the devil, space opera, etc. They go five pictures to five words and we have the full record of what it is. It goes on about 36 days and then these poor bastards were let out - pardon me! They were then boxed up again and the boxes were mixed so that there were two assembly areas - one was Las Palmas and the other was Hawaii. And in these two assembly areas, they took samples from each volcano area and put it in little boxes and they had an assembly line. And at Las Palmas it runs down the main street of Las Palmas."

[L. Ron Hubbard, Assists, lecture of 3 Oct 1968]

This explains why Earth has so many problems, according to Hubbard. As well the planet having been devastated by "a gross complete atomic explosion all over the planet", many of the thetans who took refuge here over the trillenia [sic] were "mutineers and deserters" and the like. Hence there is a great deal of aberrated behaviour and "planetary suppression": Hubbard claimed that 20% of the population are "Potential Trouble Sources" and 2.5% are unrecoverable "Suppressive Persons," who should be made to "disappear" (shades of Argentina). Human evolution has been dominated by Xenu's "R6 implants". Why does modern civilization approximate so closely that of the Galactic Confederacy? Because, apparently, man is merely unconsciously re-enacting the events of R6. One of the principle products of R6 is Christianity:

The entirety of Roman Catholicism - the devil, all of this sort of thing - that is all part of R6 ...

The Roman Catholic church, somewhere along the line, through watching the dramatizations of people, picked up some little fragments of R6. And they make it look like it's continued forward into present time ...

Anyway, Everyman is then shown to have been crucified so don't think that it's an accident that this crucifixion, they found out that this applied. Somebody somewhere on this planet, back about 600 BC, found some pieces of R6, and I don't know how they found it, either by watching madmen or something. But since that time they have used it and it became what is known as Christianity.

The man on the Cross. There was no Christ. But the man on the cross is shown as Everyman. So of course each person seeing a crucified man, has an immediate feeling of sympathy for this man. Therefore you get many PCs who says they are Christ. Now, there's two reasons for that, one is the Roman Empire was prone to crucify people, so a person can have been crucified, but in R6 he is shown as crucified."

[L. Ron Hubbard, Assists, lecture of 3 Oct 1968]

This passage, and indeed OT III itself, has caused considerable embarrassment to the Church of Scientology over the years. The Church has taken a very confused line over OT III. On one hand, when confronted on-air with OT III materials, Church officials have claimed that the documents are a fake and that they have never heard of Xenu. But the Church has litigated ferociously and almost entirely unsuccessfully against mention of Xenu and the OT III story; the New York Times was some years ago sued for quoting 78 non-contiguous words from OT III, a case which was quickly thrown out. In court, Church officials have acknowledged the genuineness of OT III and have even allowed the name "Xenu" to pass their lips. The whole of Hubbard's handwritten notes on OT III can now be found on the World Wide Web at the incomparable Operation Clambake (current;y at http://home.sol.no/heldal/).

The other OT levels are, by contrast, rather dull. The key discovery in OT III is that self-aware thetans are covered in a mass of clinging, traumatised "body thetans" (Xenu's victims). The original OTs IV to VIII deal with various ways of getting rid of body thetans, including the peculiarly-named "thetan hand technique." Their replacements, the NOTs material apparently co-authored by Hubbard and his one-time heir apparent, David Mayo, is even duller but confines itself to the same sort of themes. OT III, in short, probably marks the high-water mark of Hubbard's vivid imagination. The boring and badly written Mission Earth "dekology" marks how sloppy he had become by the 1980s.

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Journey to the Centre of Ron's Brain

As this essay has shown, Hubbard had some truly weird ideas. Of course, many others have propounded bizarre theories - two outstanding examples are the infamous Immanuel Velikovsky (Venus erupted from Jupiter and in passing caused the parting of the Red Sea) and Wilhelm Reich (orgasms are powered by blue "orgone energy"). But few can have had such sustained success and yet remained so resolutely unconventional as Hubbard. Why?

There seem to be a number of reasons for this. The most obvious is that Hubbard's most bizarre writings were promulgated in obscure settings. During the 1950s, Scientology was in a classic cult phase: a relatively small group of loyal followers gathered around a revered leader with whom they were in close physical contact. Likewise, when the OT levels were written in the 1960s, Hubbard spent much of his time in a relatively confined environment - whether at his manor house at Saint Hill, in Sussex, England, or aboard the Apollo in the Mediterranean. By that time his organisation was very much bigger (and very widely-spread), but his odder writings were no longer circulated through the entire membership.

This ensured two things. First, by confining his "upper-level materials" to a select group, he was able physically to control their dissemination. These days, OT and NOTs documentation is held under military-style security arrangements; however, this has not stopped them being leaked in their entirety onto the Internet. Second, the upper-level materials are only accessible to those who have already extensively been indoctrinated in Scientology; they are the people who are most likely to accept whatever Hubbard says, no matter how implausible.

The secrecy surrounding the OT materials in particular have helped Scientology to maintain a facade of being an entirely normal system of belief and self-advancement, completely compatible with Christianity and other mainstream religions. And indeed, to a large extent, this it is. Several million people have taken Scientology courses over the last 30 years or so, but only about 50,000 have reached "Clear," the most significant grade before OT. The number of OTs cannot be more than 50,000 and is probably far less. This means that the bulk of Scientologists, past and present, genuinely do not know about Xenu and body thetans and devote themselves to a philosophy which, while still somewhat odd, is not nearly as bizarre as the story of the thetans being nuked in Earth's volcanoes. Scientology is very much a gnostic religion and takes pains to conceal its "hidden truths".

Did Hubbard himself believe in the stories he told? There is no sign that he did not. He was a natural storyteller and had sufficient charisma to make the fantastic seem like fact. He discovered (or generated) the more bizarre aspects whilst auditing himself. His followers would faithfully take notes, which he would then write up and disseminate as, in effect, official dogma. There seems little doubt that the incidents he produced originated solely in his own mind. What inspired them ? Hubbard is thought to have used recreational drugs during the 1960s (notably barbiturates, which he obtained on prescription) but it is unclear whether he used them during self-auditing - if he did, that must surely have contributed to some of his more exotic revelations. The fact that he had been a pulp science fiction writer almost certainly influenced his writings. His recall of Xenu and Helatrobus and the like was the product of a fertile imagination which had greatly been influenced by sci-fi, now let loose in self-auditing. Hubbard's strangest writings probably tell us rather more about Hubbard himself than they do about the hidden mysteries of the universe.

But why do Scientologists themselves believe even the wildest statements made by Hubbard? There is enough evidence to suggest that he was, at the very least, unbalanced. Surely that can't be true of everyone in Scientology ?

Plainly, it's not. Relatively few Scientologists show a long-term commitment to the organisation. Even on the Church's own figures, nearly 50% of new recruits drop out within a year. Many more drop out over the medium term; only a small number remain for ten or more years. The longer one stays in the organisation, it seems, the longer one is likely to stay in it. It's not clear why so many drop out (no survey has been done) but it's probably for a combination of reasons: dissatisfaction with the results of auditing, financial strains, dislike of the high-pressure environment, and so on. One major factor is likely to be that, whatever the merits of Scientology, its belief system does not provide what the person seeks.

This means that by the time a Scientologist gets to do the OT levels, he or she has effectively passed the test of commitment. Some have had their commitment shattered by the outlandishness of the OT levels - that is one reason why copies of the OT documents have been leaked over the years. But most who take OT III will have come to trust implicitly the word of Hubbard, no matter how improbable. They are not loons by any means. They are simply committed to a belief which to outsiders might seem bizarre, but to them appears completely logical and factual. Their world-view has been altered through years of training, to a point where they have dissociated themselves entirely from the mental world inhabited by "wogs" (non-Scientologists); indeed, Hubbard acknowledged this, deliberately emphasising the difference between "homo novus", the "OT élite" of Scientology and the hapless wogs ("homo sap", with the emphasis on sap) outside. "Let sleeping sapiens snore in the bulk for yet awhile," he wrote in A History of Man. "Then meet someplace and decide what to do about him and his twopenny wars, his insane and his prisons."

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The Wogs' Perspective of Scientological Strangeness

Scientologists would doubtless argue that the extracts above are taken out of context (though that begs the question of in what context Xenu and the Marcabs can be taken). They would also argue that Hubbard's most esoteric writings are religious scriptures and that it is simple "bigotry" to find them laughable. Morally, they certainly have a case. After all, the Virgin Birth and the erotic activities of the Hindu gods seem equally ludicrous if considered on purely rationalist grounds. And yet, two billion people - half the human race - subscribe to those beliefs. At the same time, the Xenu story is regarded as hilariously silly even by many who do not have an axe to grind against Scientology (try relating it to someone without telling them of its provenance and gauge their reaction). Is this a case of double standards?

On the face of it, yes. Established belief systems have aspects every bit as bizarre as Scientology's - St. John's "Revelations" are a prime example. But there are subtle social and historical differences which disadvantage Hubbard's writings in the battle for credibility.

One of the most important is that Hubbard's "revelations" are not couched in religious language or imagery, but are presented as scientifically-proven "facts", describing events which read very much like a science fiction or fantasy story. Xenu is the classic example, and the crossover is highlighted by Hubbard in the 1970s turning the OT III story into a science-fiction film script called "Revolt In The Stars"; celebrity Scientologists such as John Travolta are said to have lobbied Hollywood, thus far unsuccessfully, for "Revolt" to be filmed.

Science fiction was perhaps a natural genre to which Hubbard, the ex-pulp sci-fi writer, would turn for his "religious" inspiration. Many of his supporters in the early days were science fiction fans who had come across Dianetics in the pages of John W. Campbell's Astounding Science Fiction. Scientology continues to attract many ex-members of other esoteric belief systems, such as transcendental meditation and yoga, who might well be predisposed towards accepting Hubbard's stranger pronouncements. Now that UFOlogy appears to have entered the mainstream (surveys suggest that a quarter of Americans believe they were abducted by aliens), Hubbard's tales of galactic wars and alien implantation may attract a whole new generation of adherents.

But while the esotericism of high-level Scientology may appeal to some, there is no doubt that it is seriously damaging Scientology's chances of becoming a mainstream movement. Virtually the whole of the formerly-secret high-level material is now in the public domain; most of the OT and NOTs documents have been made available on the Internet, and books, magazines, newspapers and TV programmes in a number of countries have covered OT III in detail. This is something of a disaster for Scientology. Officials of the Religious Technology Center (RTC), the body which holds the copyrights of Scientology and Dianetics, have testified in the recent Internet copyright cases that unauthorised reproduction of the OT and NOTs papers could result in millions of dollars' worth of economic damage. What sort of damage was not specified, but it seems likely that it includes lost revenue from those who would otherwise have paid tens of thousands of dollars to see the mysterious OT materials.

The problem is compounded by the (admittedly unjustified) image problem of science fiction. It's not a new genre by any means - the story of Odysseus' encounter with the mechanical giant Talos, a proto-robot, was written over 3,000 years ago. More recently, writers such as Mary Shelley, Jules Verne and H.G. Wells made science fiction immensely popular. But it was debased in the 1930s and 1940s by the rash of lurid, often badly-written penny-dreadful pulp magazines, the very same publications in which Hubbard developed his literary techniques. Of course, the pulps also saw the rise of distinguished writers such as Isaac Asimov, A.E. van Vogt and Robert Heinlein. The rest of the literary establishment, however, continues to look down on science-fiction and fantasy, evoking the ghosts of the pulps. Two recent UK-wide surveys revealed J.R.R. Tolkein's The Lord of the Rings to be the book-buying public's choice for best book of the 20th century, a selection which provoked rants from literary critics about the pernicious and unhealthy nature of the sci-fi/fantasy genre. Likewise, Terry Pratchett - who, alone, accounts for 1% of all books sold in the UK, an unprecedented market share - had a slow start largely because non-specialist publications simply would not review books written in such an "unfashionable" genre.

Science fiction now is far more "mainstream", but Hubbard's adoption of the genre continues to pose a massive credibility problem. It's possible, for instance, to draw a parallel between OT III and Star Wars. Substitute Alderaan for Teegeeack (Earth), Emperor Palpatine for Ruler Xenu, Darth Vader for the Loyal Officers and the Jedi for the Operating Thetans: the match is quite close. But would anyone seriously suggest that Star Wars is a religious work? Unfortunately for his credibility, this effectively is exactly what Hubbard did with OT III. "Space opera" - a subset of science fiction which encompasses both Star Wars and Hubbard's own "Battlefield Earth" saga - is the only literary genre to be graced with an entry in the Dianetics and Scientology Technical Dictionary, which reads as follows:

"SPACE OPERA

Of or relating to time periods on the whole track millions of years ago which concerned activities in this and other galaxies. Space opera has space travel, spaceships, spacemen, intergalactic travel, wars, conflicts, other beings, civilizations and societies, and other planets and galaxies. It is not fiction and concerns actual incidents and things that occurred on the track. See also whole track."

[Dianetics & Scientology Technical Dictionary, 1975]

This emphasis on literalism is the second major reason why Hubbard's writings come over as absurd even to those who have never heard of Scientology. Had Hubbard chosen a more religious style of writing, he might perhaps have had less of a problem. Parts of the Bible and the Vedic scriptures, for instance, might seem very obscure to the uninitiated, but they are couched in recognisably religious terms. OT III and its ilk might have been more accessible had they been about devils and angels and smiting, but Hubbard consciously rejected the religious genre, writing instead in a pseudo-scientific mode. What were his reasons for doing so? First and foremost, he regarded his work as being a revolutionary, empirically-based scientific breakthrough. It was not seriously presented as a religion until the 1960s, and then only for PR purposes. Trying to shoehorn Scientology into a religious framework continues to pose major PR difficulties, as so many of Hubbard's writings are explicitly not religious in nature. In fact, he had strongly negative opinions about mainstream religions: Christianity and Islam were the results of alien implantation around 600 B.C., while Hinduism and other Eastern religions were dangerously "booby-trapped", leading only to a "spiral into oblivion". This may have been another factor in his rejection of a religious style of writing.

The results are self-evident. Hubbard may have hoped that his style and genre of writing would win respect and credence. However, it comes across as a badly-written example of a discredited genre which is made ludicrous by the author's insistence on his literal veracity. Not exactly a big win!

In short, Scientology's silliest secrets do not appear laughable simply because of the reader's "bigotry". They are fatally undermined by Hubbard's rejection of religious conventions. They are and always were works of pseudoscience à la Wilhelm Reich or Immanuel Velikovsky, not religious "scriptures". Ironically, it is the Church of Scientology which is guilty of taking Hubbard's writings out of context, rather than its critics.

And I've found that Scientologists have been to Heaven.

And that everybody has evidently been to Heaven.

The Goals Problem Mass implants, which are the apparent basic source of aberration and human travail, which begin with the goal To Forget, were cynically done "in Heaven".

For a long time, people have been cross with me for my lack of co-operation in believing in a Christian Heaven, God and Christ. I have never said I didn't disbelieve in a Big Thetan but there was certainly something very corny about Heaven et al. Now I have to apologize. There was a Heaven. Not too unlike, in cruel betrayal, the heaven of the Assassins in the 12th Century who, like everyone else, dramatized the whole track implants - if a bit more so.

Yes, I've been to Heaven. And so have you. And you have the pattern of its implants in the HCO Bulletin Line Plots. It was complete with gates, angels and plaster saints - and electronic implantation equipment. So there was a Heaven after all - which is why you are on this planet and were condemned never to be free again - until Scientology.

Before you went to Heaven you were not really very bad or very good, but you didn't think you had lived only once and you had a good memory and knew who you were and enjoyed life. Afterwards ---

The symbol of the crucified Christ is very apt indeed. It's the symbol of a thetan betrayed.

DATA

Additional work and possible corrections need to be done but this is the gist of the matter:

The implants are electronic in nature and follow the pattern of the G.P.M.

The implant station existed on the order of magnitude of 43,000,000,000,000 years ago. (The dates may be part of the implants but do not appear so at this stage. However, a possibility of correction of dates is reserved).

Some have been through it once, some more than once.

The first time I arrived and the moment of the implant To Forget was dated at 43,891,832,611,177 years, 344 days, 10 hours, 20 minutes and 40 seconds from 10:02½ PM Daylight Greenwich Time May 9, 1963. The second series was dated to the moment of the implant To Forget as 42,681,459,477,315 years, 132 days, 18 hours, 20 minutes and 15 seconds from 11:02½ PM Daylight Greenwich Time May 9, 1963.

There are no earlier such implants. There are no later such implants.

I evidentally have a goal of my own at 305 Trillion (U.S.) years and an actual GPM, all of which pulled into this 43 Trillion year implant.

ADDITIONAL E-METER DATA

Five goals in all may be common to both sequences. The first 3 of the 5 are the same. There are no implants as to time according to the meter. There are numbers in any implants, but dates rocket read. Implanting was done on a non-visible thetan, but arrival was in a ship in a doll body accoding to the meter. Star of Bethlehem, Pearly Gates, The Way out of the Universe, all of which RR on the meter, give a clue to recruitment actions.

There was no purpose in giving a particular thetan a particular goal. Planning had no individualization.

A preclear's overts should be scouted as to why these implants keyed in, Fac 1, hypnotism, etc. But doubtful if any preclear did this type of implanting.

The mood is set that thetans are evil, treacherous and bad but this is all part of the implant, not factual.

The earliest point of the series is not known at this writing but possibly contains a recruitment through advertising. The departure point from the series is not fully known yet but probably just abandonment.

The implants were not done in a box or in some trick manner of projection. The scenery is actually there, common Mest Universe, space and matter and in the Mest Universe.

The first (43 Trillion) series consists of 29 implanted goals.

The second (42 Trillion) series consists of 21 implanted goals.

The first three goals in both series are the same, To Forget, To Remember and To Go Away. The last goal and one other in both series are the same. The remaining goals are not the same for the two implants.

PERSONALLY PERCEIVED DATA

The pattern of RIs is different for the two series, consisting in the second series of added RIs below the To Have a Goal-ivity and with a different dwindling of adjectives and adverbs, but are otherwise similar.

Both series have the Gates of Heaven visible. The last implant of both consists of "entering" Heaven. The last goal of both is To Be In Heaven.

The gates of the first series are well done, well built. An avenue of statues of saints leads up to them. The gate pillars are surmounted by marble angels. The entering grounds are very well kept, laid out like Bush Gardens in Pasadena, so often seen in the movies. Aside from the implant boxes which lie across from each other on the walk there are other noises and sounds as though the saints are defending and berating. These are unimportant to the incident.

The second series, probably in the same place, shows what a trillion years of overt acts does (or is an additional trickery to collapse one's time). The place is shabby. The vegatation is gone. The pillars are scruffy. The saints have vanished. So have the Angels. A sign on one (the left as you "enter") says "This is Heaven". The right has a sign "Hell" with an arrow and inside the grounds one can see the excavations like archaeological diggings with raw terraces, that lead to "Hell". Plain wire fencing encloses the place. There is a sentry box beside and outside the right pillar. The road "leading up" to the gates is deeply eroded. An effigy of Joseph, complete with desert clothing, is seen approaching the gates (but not moving) leading a donkey which "carries" the original Madonna and child from "Bethlehem". The implanting boxes lie on either side of this "entering" path at path level.

These are the actual ends of the two series. One backs out the gates, of course, from top oppterm down, as this is the end. The last two RIs after this last goal say "it is the beginning", "Not the end".

The place, by implant and inference, was supposed to be in the sky like a floating island. Actually it was simply a high place in the mountains of a planet and the gates pathway falls away into a gorge, very eroded and bare by the time of the second implant, but heavily forested and rolling at the time of the first.

The beginnings have not at this writing been so well explored by myself. I have not viewed the second beginning (which says it is the end). However I do know that the second series was done in long square tunnels with the implant boxes, not unlike small P.A. speakers with fretwork fronts, on either side.

The first series actually begins with arrival in a "town" (as everything is backwards to upset the time sense). This "town" consisted of a trolley bus, some building fronts, sidewalks, train tracks, a boarding house, a bistro in a basement where there is a "bulletin board" well lighted, and a BANK BUILDING.

The bank is the key point of interest. It is interesting that we use the work "bank" (taken actually from computerology) to indicate the reactive mind.

This bank building was the on-the-corner old-fashioned granite-like construction, two or three stories high, with the door in the rounded front - even a revolving type door. Inside to the left of the entrance door is a rounded counter. Directly across the room are THE stairs.

The top oppterm and terminal of To Forget are at the top of these stairs. The implant then proceeds on down the stairs, step by step, terminals on one side (the left if one were coming up the stairs) the oppterms on the other. The first series (43 Trillion) has all its implant impulses at step level. In the second series the boxes are ear high to a man. By the time the gates are arrived at in the first series, the terminals are on the left as you approach the gates, the oppterms on the right, having been reversed at some point.

The first (43 Trillion) series had very fine marble stairs. The same stairs can be seen in any big well kept railway station. They were complete with a white ball held in a wrought iron stand.

The thetan was taken along apparently on a pole trap to which he was stuck. It does not proceed step by step throughout the whole of the implant series, but after the first flight of stairs, goes a ways, stops while several pairs of RIs fire then goes to a new location.

The place seemed to have people in it. But they are all effigies. These seem radioactive. Contact with them hurts. No living beings. But effigies that look like humans are performing sudden, repetitive actions with long halts between. In the "basement" such dummies are seen operating machinery.

The boarding house at the actual beginning has a dummy guest and a landlady in kimono and wrappers, reading a newspaper.

There are no devils or satans that I saw.

There is a passenger getting on the trolley bus, a "workman" halfway down the first stairs of To Forget "eating lunch" and in To Be in Heaven a gardener or electrician adjusting an implant box behind a hedge and periodically leaping up and screaming.

The place, so long as the implants remain only partially discharged, seems to swim in while and black electronic masses, but these dissipate as the implants are run out by pattern.

One actually "enters" the "town" as the first action. The implants, however, were rigged to make the gates seem the entrance to the incident. One backs through from the town, into the bank, down the steps and eventually out the Pearly Gates, down the hillside and is there let off and abandoned. One might have had a body or its remains at the town but has none when abandoned.

"TO BE IN HEAVEN" is the last goal implanted in both series. The goal may be slightly differently worded in the second series.

This is not a body building implant, though running it gives somatics to chest.

This is not a GE implant. It is the person's own. Running it, particularly badly, brings it down on the body. There are body somatics on it, however, particularly eyes, face, chest, bones.

It apparently only can be run by 3M listing and Rocket Reads. One must have the goal to get the RIs.

CONCLUSIONS

The place is so full of lies by implant that the preclear becomes quite confused and this review of the actual data is necessary to a successful navigation. However, it is very easy to read more treachery into it than there is in it - which is enough.

However, as the place existed so long it was in a varying state of repair and some change. (This data on time is subject to review). But in 1.2 Trillion years only some of the implant pattern and mock up had shifted. However, there may have been other stations. Only time and research will really tell that.

One must date the preclear's first (earliest) goal to forget, find out how many times the preclear went through it, or some such implant station, date the other times and be careful to run only the first of the first series. As this is basic, as in Prepchecking, Sec Checking and old engram running, it tends to ease up the remainder of the implants. But running the implants later than basic is very much harder on the pc even though it can be done. Wherever one misses an RI in an early implant, that repeated RI when found in a later one tends to be very much more heavily charged.

Re-running any implant that has only been partially run tends to rough up the whole implant and make it hard to run.

LUCK

I think we are lucky. It could have been much worse. This Heavenly dream of destruction could have been current, not so long ago. It could have happened often, not just once or twice or three times per pc. But apparently it didn't and is unique in itself.

This is the core of the Reactive Mind. It is all the way South. For here, just once on the whole track, somebody discovered the mechanism of purposes and RIs and utilized them to install religious mania and pin thetans down to "one life" and planets.

The thing was done so well that it has hung up ever since. There are other implants, there are other goals and GPMs, but these are minor and easily found and listed once this key implant series is out of the way.

We were in a position of having an infinite number of pieces to the puzzle. Now we have a finite number which even though very tough are still finite in number. Further, every processing step taken, every RI discharged is a positive gain toward a definite finite result in processing.

Further, we have our hands on an apalling piece of technology where the world is concerned. With rapidity and a Mater it can be shown that Heaven is a false dream and that the old religion was based on a very painful lie, a cynical betrayal.

What does this do to any religious nature of Scientology? It strengthens it. New religions always overthrow the false gods of the old, they do something to strengthen man. We can improve man. We can show the old gods false. And we can open up the universe as a happier place in which a spirit may dwell. What more can you expect? This actually places us far beyond any other beings that are about. It puts us, through increased beingness and a restoration of life, in control of much destiny.

We have now only a few unsolved problems about life, huge though they may be, such as the construction of bodies and how does one establish the character of and communicate, if feasible, with beings who are making trees and insects. There are a few things like these. But I imagine when we finally manage to communicate with beetle under rocks and free them, we'll no doubt find the Creator of Heaven who 43 + Trillion years ago designed and built the Pearly Gates and entrapped us all.

Good Lord, I'd hate to be guilty of that overt. But never mind - you aren't either. That guy is GONE (I hope!)

L. RON HUBBARD

(Note: This HCO Bulletin is based on over a thousand hours of research auditing, analyzing the facsimiles of the reactive mind, and with the help of a Mark V Electrometer. It is scientific research and is not in any way based upon the mere opinion of the researcher. This HCO Bulletin is not the result of the belief or beliefs of anyone. Scientology data reflects long, arduous and painstaking research over a period of some thirty years into the nature of Man, the mind, the human spirit and its relationship to the physical universe. The data and phenomena discovered in Scientology is common to all minds and all men and can be demonstrated on anyone. Truth does not require belief to be truth any more than water requires anyone's permission to run down hill. The data is itself and can be duplicated by any honest researcher or practitioner. We in Scientology seek freedom, the betterment of Man, and the happiness of the individual and this comprises our attitude towards the data found. The data, however, is simply itself, and exists whatever the opinion of anyone may be. The contents of this HCO Bulletin discover the apparent underlying impulses of religious zealotism and the source of the religious mania and insanity which terrorized Earth over the ages and has given religion the appearance of insanity. As the paper is written for my friends it has, of course, a semblane of irreverence).

(Note: All our data on the whole track remains factual and is not taken from any implant. The only data released earlier was the time factors involved in GPMs).

L. RON HUBBARD

Scientology claims to be a religion but L. Ron Hubbard, its founder, held many views that are antithetical to the beliefs of main stream religions. (Hear Hubbard say that "there is no Christ" and read about the influence of black magic in Scientology doctrine.)

"Hubbard also wrote a borderline swordplay-and-sorcery story, 'Typewriter in the Sky,' which ran as a two-part serial in Unknown, beginning with the issue of November, 1940. Mike de Wolf, aspirant pianist, visits the flat of Horace Hackett, hack writer, who is pounding out a yarn of piracy on the Spanish Main in 1640. Mike gets an accidental electric shock and finds himself living in Hackett's story. He is cast as the villain, the Spanish admiral Miguel de Lobo. Knowing what happens to Hackett's villains, Mike-Miguel uses frantic stratagems to outwit Hackett, the quasi-god of this world.

"It is all good fun but not to be taken seriously. The synthetic world of Hackett's imagination has no magic; merely the careless anachronisms and inconsistencies, such as a Steinway piano, that Hackett puts into his story. When Hackett tears up a chapter and begins it over, Mike's situation instantly changes to match. Since the tinsel artificiality of the scene created by Hackett's mind is a basic assumption of 'Typewriter,' the reader is amused but not strongly engaged. At the end, Mike, back in his own body, muses:"

"Ah, yes. The fate. It was his luck to meet somebody in a story and then return without her. It was his luck. But you couldn't expect the breaks all the time. You couldn't ask luck to run your way forever. He had had her for a little while, in a land ruled by a typewriter in the clouds. And now he was out of that and there was no type-

Abruptly Mike de Wolf stopped. His jaw slackened a trifle and his hand went up to his mouth to cover it. His eyes were fixed upon the fleecy clouds which scurried across the moon.

Up there-

God ?

In a dirty bathrobe?"

In an HCO Bulletin published in 1963, Hubbard describes two trips to a heaven that became as seedy as his fictional character's reflection on God (above). The series of implants mentioned in the bulletin were a sequence of electronic shocks (like the one Mike de Wolf experienced) which would zap the individual and put him/her under hypnotic control. Hubbard writes that the first series of implants occurred 43 trillion years ago.

" The gates of the first series [of implants] are well done, well built. An avenue of statues of saints leads up to them. The gate pillars are surmounted by marble angels. The entering grounds are very well kept, laid out like Bush Gardens in Pasadena, so often seen in the movies. Aside from the implant boxes which lie across from each other on the walk there are other noises and sounds as though the saints are defending and berating. These are unimportant to the incident.

The second series, probably in the same place, shows what a trillion years of overt acts does (or is an additional trickery to collapse one's time). The place is shabby. The vegetation is gone. The pillars are scruffy. The saints have vanished. So have the Angels. A sign on one (the left as you "enter") says "This is Heaven". The right has a sign "Hell" with an arrow and inside the grounds one can see the excavations like archaeological diggings with raw terraces, that lead to "Hell". Plain wire fencing encloses the place. There is a sentry box beside and outside the right pillar. The road "leading up" to the gates is deeply eroded. An effigy of Joseph, complete with desert clothing, is seen approaching the gates (but not moving) leading a donkey which "carries" the original Madonna and child from "Bethlehem". The implanting boxes lie on either side of this "entering" path at path level.

(...)

The place, by implant and inference, was supposed to be in the sky like a floating island. Actually it was simply a high place in the mountains of a planet and the gates pathway falls away into a gorge, very eroded and bare by the time of the second implant, but heavily forested and rolling at the time of the first."

- L. Ron Hubbard, HCO Bulletin (May 11, 1963)

A major source for the definitions below is the alt.religion.scientology "Acronym/Terminology FAQ" by Martin G. V. Hunt

AD

"After Dianetics. Used on issues such as HCOB's [Hubbard Communication Office Bulletins] and HCOPL's [Hubbard Communication Office Policy Letters] to show the year. It's based on the Christian calendar, but with a base year of 1950 with the release of the cult classic 'Dianetics'; thus AD 15 = anno Domini 1965."

     - Martin G. V. Hunt

---

ARS, alt.religion.scientology

"The newsgroup this FAQ is posted to. Often lower-case; '30,000 people a month read ars, according to Arbitron.' (ars) after a definition shows that the source of the term is ars; terms which are sourced from Scientology itself have nothing after them. (act) is for terms from alt.clearing.technology."

     - Martin G. V. Hunt

---

Auditing

"The application of Dianetics or Scientology processes to someone by a trained auditor. The exact definiton of auditing is: The action of asking a person a question (which he can understand and answer), getting an answer to that question and acknowledging him for that answer."

     - Advance, Magazine of the Advanced Organization Los Angeles (AOLA)

"Auditing usually involves a or Meter, with the PC holding onto the soup cans, and the Auditor taking down notes and asking questions."

     - Martin G. V. Hunt

"At the heart of the auditing procedure is the use of hypnosis. Hypnosis is important because it is used within Scientology to deceive clients and cause them to believe that they are able to accomplish para-normal feats and regain memories of past life experiences. Typically, a person's confidence in the Scientology theory of reality and their acceptance of Scientology's authority in their lives is based on the mistaken belief that they hypnotically induced fantasies they experience during auditing are valid evidence of the truth of Scientology's claims."

     - Richard J. Ofshe, Ph.D, "A Very Brief Overview of Scientology"

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Auditor

"A person trained and qualified in applying Dianetics and/or Scientology processes and procedures to individuals for their betterment, called an auditor because auditor means one who listens."

     - Advance, Magazine of the Advanced Organization Los Angeles (AOLA)

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Bank, or Reactive Mind

"That portion of a person's mind which works on a totally stimulus-response basis, which is not under his volitional control and which exerts force and the power of command over his awareness, purposes, thoughts, body and actions. The reactive mind is where engrams are stored."

     - Advance, Magazine of the Advanced Organization Los Angeles (AOLA)

"On a higher level Engrams are revealed to be none other than Body Thetans."

     - Martin G. V. Hunt

---

Body Thetan

In a confidential OTIII document, Hubbard defines this as a non-controlling thetan stuck to a body.

---

Case

"A general term for a person being treated or helped. It also refers to his condition, which is monitored by the content of his reactive mind. A person's case is the way he responds to the world around him."

     - Advance, Magazine of the Advanced Organization Los Angeles (AOLA)

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Clear

"A person audited enough to be free of the 'bank'. A low-level superman-type person; a baby OT."

     - Martin G. V. Hunt

"A Clear is an unaberrated person and is rational in that he forms the best possible solution he can on the data he has and from his viewpoint."

     - Advance, Magazine of the Advanced Organization Los Angeles (AOLA)

---

Cluster

In a confidential OTIII document, Hubbard defines this as a bunch of body thetans.

---

Dianetics

"The word comes from Greek dia, through, and nous, soul. Dianetics is defined as what the soul is doing to the body."

     - Advance, Magazine of the Advanced Organization Los Angeles (AOLA)

"Hubbard's derivative mental healing therapy; scorned by the mental health profession as being unscientific nonsense."

     - Martin G. V. Hunt

"On a 1909 lecture, Freud explained a method for uncovering traumatic memories. Patients were asked to recall earlier and earlier life incidents on a 'chain' until the emotional 'charge' was released. Hubbard not only took the technique, he even retained several of the expressions used by the translator of these lectures. Freud had abandoned the technique, because it was laborious and completely failed to uncover key repression's."

"Hubbard took Freud's technique, added a little of the then-popular General Semantics, and asserted that the 'basic' or original traumatic incidents had occurred in the womb. In this he was following the work of Otto Rank, Nandor Fodor and J. Sadger. Hubbard also asserted that it was actually possible to recall prenatal incidents, right back to conception (the 'sperm dream''). Fodor too had written of prenatal memory."

     - Tony McClelland, "Scientology, Dianetics and L. Ron Hubbard - The Total Freedom Trap"

"Hubbard introduced Dianetics in 1950 with his best-selling book Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health."

"According to Dianetics, every experience is recorded in the mind as a mental image. Painful experiences, called engrams, are not completely available to the "analytical," or conscious, mind. When stimulated by later experiences, engrams, which are part of the 'reactive', or subconscious, mind, cause irrational behaviour. Therapy requires working with an "auditor" to confront engrams in order to 'clear', or free, the mind of them. "

     - Encyclopaedia Britannica

"The purpose of therapy and its sole target is the removal of the content of the reactive engram bank. In a release, the majority of emotional stress is deleted from this bank. In a clear, the entire content is removed."

     - L. Ron Hubbard, Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health

Dynamics

"Urges for survival as or through (1) self, (2) sex and family, (3) groups, (4) all mankind, (5) living things (plants and animals), (6) the material universe, (7) spirits and (8) infinity or the Supreme Being."

     - Advance, Magazine of the Advanced Organization Los Angeles (AOLA)

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E-Meter, or Meter, Electrometer

"An electronic device for measuring the mental state or change of state of Homo sapiens. It is not a lie detector. It does not diagnose or cure anything. It is used by auditors to assist the preclear in locating areas of spiritual distress or travail."

     - Advance, Magazine of the Advanced Organization Los Angeles (AOLA)

"A crude battery-powered analog ohmmeter used to locate Overts, Body Thetans, and Engrams; the PC [preclear] holds the electrodes (soup cans), while the Auditor watches the dial. Circuitry is based on the Wheatstone Bridge; designed by Volney Mathieson. Current 'top of the line' models sell for about $4,000 US in a plastic case. Actual parts list is about $50-$100."

     - Martin G. V. Hunt

"The meter tells you what the preclear's mind is doing when the preclear is made to think of something. The meter registers before the preclear becomes conscious of the datum. It is therefore a pre-conscious meter. It passes a tiny current through the preclear's body. This current is influenced by the mental masses, pictures, circuits and machinery."

     - Scientology Technical Dictionary

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Engram

"A Mental Image Picture of an experience containing pain, unconsciousness, and a real or fancied threat to survival; it is a recording in the mind of something which actually happened to the preclear in the past which contained pain and unconsciousness, both of which recorded in the Mental Image Picture called an Engram."

     - HCOB 11 May, AD 15)

"A posited memory trace that remains after a moment of pain and unconsciousness. Hubbard didn't coin this word; it is in Webster's, and is part of the ISV."

     - Martin G. V. Hunt

"A definite and permanent trace left by a stimulus on the protoplasm of a tissue. It is considered as a unit group of stimuli impinged solely on the cellular being."

     - L. Ron Hubbard, Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health

"Dianetics: the Modern Science of Mental Health proclaims that by 'erasing' the engrams, the individual is freed from compulsions, obsessions, neuroses, and such conditions as heart trouble, poor eyesight, asthma, colour blindness, allergies, stuttering, poor hearing, sinusitis, high blood pressure, dermatitis, migraine, ulcers, arthritis, morning sickness, the common cold, conjunctivitis, alcoholism and tuberculosis. Hubbard soon claimed cures for cancer and leukaemia.

"No scientific evidence for these claims has ever been produced."

     - Tony McClelland, "Scientology, Dianetics and L. Ron Hubbard - The Total Freedom Trap"

Scientific experimentation (on an admittedly limited scale) has failed to prove the existance of engrams.

---

Flag

"The former name of the ship Hubbard was [self-appointed] Commodore on the Apollo [a 3280-ton motor vessel built in 1936]. When the Sea Org came ashore in Clearwater, Florida, they set up the Flag Land Base, a high-level Org. Now just called Flag."

     - Martin G. V. Hunt

---

GE, Genetic Entity

"A low-grade soul that stores whole track engrams (memories of pain and unconsciousness from the last few trillion years of the patient's life) like the clam incident (people descended from clams, according to Hubbard.)"

     - Martin G. V. Hunt

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GPM, Goals Problems Mass

"A supposed mass which develops when one is thwarted from reaching a Goal by a Problem or stop."

     - Martin G. V. Hunt

---

Implant

"Hypnotic suggestion smashed into one's mind millions or billions of years ago in the Space-Opera Scientology Cosmology. 'One implant was installed using giant movie screens.'"

     - Martin G. V. Hunt

---

Incident I

"OT III also addressed an earlier incident of some four quadrillion years ago. This was an implant which was supposedly the gateway to our universe. The unsuspecting Thetan was subjected to a short, high-volume crack, followed by a flood of luminescence, and then saw a chariot followed by a trumpeting cherub. After a loud set of cracks, the Thetan was overwhelmed by darkness."

     - Jon Atack, A Piece of Blue Sky

---

Incident II

In a confidential OTIII document, Hubbard describes the R6 implanting process for Incident II - dropping H bombs on thetans in volcanoes - and describes how it forms giant clusters.

---

Marcab Confederacy

"Various planets united into a very vast civilization which has come forward up through the last 200,000 years, [it] is formed out of the fragments of earlier civilizations. In the last 100,000 years they have gone on with a sort of a decadent kicked-in-the-head civilization that contains automobiles, business suits, fedora hats, telephones, spaceships. A civilization which looks [like an] almost exact duplicate but is worse off than the current U.S. civilization. "

     - SH Spec 291, 6308C06

"It's a star system in the astronomy charts. It is also supposed to be the source of most of the suppressive influences attacking the Earth at this time and in the past."

     - Martin G. V. Hunt

---

MEST, Matter, Energy, Space, and Time

"The constituents of the physical universe, or the physical universe itself. Seen as a lesser domain than the spiritual or Theta realm."

     - Martin G. V. Hunt

---

OT

"Operating Thetan, one who is above Clear, who is not just free of unconscious impulses, but is free of other things too operate, and be causative over the physical universe."

     - Martin G. V. Hunt

"A Thetan exterior who can have but doesn't have to have a body in order to control or operate thought, life, matter, energy, space and time."

     - Advance, Magazine of the Advanced Organization Los Angeles (AOLA)

"3. An individual who could *operate* totally independently of his body whether he had one or didn't have one. He's now himself, he's not dependent on the universe around him."

     - Scientology Technical Dictionary

---

OT III, (or OT 3)

"Operating Thetan (level) three, also called the wall of fire. Deals with Incident II, Xenu and the H bombs. Hubbard said that anyone who was exposed to this level casually would "freewheel" through it, become a chronic insomniac, then get sick and die. (cough, cough.)"

     - Martin G. V. Hunt

---

Op-Term

"A situation of opposition to a terminal or person, giving a reason to fight. 'Sue started Op-Terming with the SPs on ars; she would have been better off not giving them a game.'"

     - Martin G. V. Hunt

---

Overt Act

"1. An act which does the least good for the least number of dynamics or the most harm to the greatest number of dynamics.

"2. An intentionally committed harmful *act* committed in an effort to resolve a problem.

"3. That thing which you do which you aren't willing to have happen to you. (This term is usually shortened to *overt* and is used as a noun.) "

     - Scientology Technical Dictionary

---

PC

"Preclear. Someone who is getting Auditing (spiritual counselling) who is not yet 'Clear' (Clear is the state of being free of unconscious impulses that cloud your judgement)."

     - Martin G. V. Hunt

---

PTS, Potential Trouble Source

"Someone who is in contact with an SP, and therefore may cause trouble to the cult. 'Mary is a PTS type III'."

     - Martin G. V. Hunt

---

PTS III

"While on the RPF [Rehabilitation Project Force - Scientology's thought reform prison camp] at Gold, I also occupied the chicken coop dormitory. This was an old chicken coop which still smelled of chicken coop droppings. However, it was not only RPFers who were deprived of adequate food and sleep. At Gold, hundreds of Sea Org members would be deprived of adequate sleep and put on a diet of rice and beans sometimes for six weeks at a time-and their weekly pay of approximately $30.00 would be cut in half. This would be punishment for lower ethics conditions such as poor production. However, when this occurred, David Miscavige [Hubbard's successor as Chairman of the Board Religious Technology Center] would still eat his bacon, eggs, sandwiches and steak dinners.

"The response of human beings to these conditions is somewhat predictable. I saw many people undergo psychotic breaks. By psychotic breaks I mean being reduced to incoherent babbling, stripping off clothes, crawling around on the ground, banging heads, limbs and other body parts against furniture and walls, barking, losing all sense of one's identity and intense and persistent suicidal ideation. This is what Scientology calls the PTS type III phenomena."

     - Andre Tabayoyon

---

R6

In a confidential OTIII document, Hubbard defines this as the entirety of pictures in the implant created in 36 days during Incident II. This includes religious figures likes God and the Devil and well as objects and scenes that might be found in the contemporary English countryside.

Pieces of R6 became known as Christianity.

---

Scientology

"Scientology is the "official name Church of Scientology, religio-scientific movement developed in the United States in the 1950s by the author L. Ron Hubbard (1911-86). Its forerunner was Dianetics, a form of psychotherapy originated by Hubbard and later incorporated into Scientology."

     - Encyclopaedia Britannica

Scientology "is the study and handling of the spirit in relationship to itself, universes, and other life. Scientology means scio, knowing in the fullest sense of the word and logos, study. In itself the word means literally knowing how to know."

     - Advance, Magazine of the Advanced Organization Los Angeles (AOLA)

The word 'Scientology' "comes from Nordenholz's book Scientologie 34."

     - Martin G. V. Hunt

"Scientology markets itself to the general public as a psychotherapy program utilizing the book Dianetics (by L. Ron Hubbard) as propaganda for the treatment method. Once someone has become involved with Scientology they learn that the organization delivers an 'applied religious technology' that will confer on individuals supernatural mental powers including the ability to travel through the universe at will, materialize physical objects and other extraordinary abilities. A person who advances in the program is supposed to progressively gain power over Matter, Energy, Space and Time (m.e.s.t.). Full realization of these powers comes with completion of the program. Completion of the program, however, never comes."

     - Richard J. Ofshe, Ph.D, "A Very Brief Overview of Scientology"

Using the Flag price list (Spring '94) the total price of Scientology services to reach the current highest level, OT VIII, would cost (with discounts) an estimated $120,000.

"With perhaps seven hundred centers in sixty-five countries and an active worldwide membership of about seventy-five thousand, Scientology has evolved an elaborate international operation designed to facilitate and control the flow of resources across many national boundaries.

"Scientology portrays itself in North America and much of Europe and Australia as a religion yet even a cursory examination of the organization reveals that it is much more. Its complex, international structure actively markets, promotes, and advertises material related to business management, education, mental health, physical health, law enforcement, 'moral revitalization' (to use its own term), and entertainment. These additional aspects work together with its religious elements 'in getting the technology of LRH [i.e., Scientology's founder, L. Ron Hubbard] into new territories of the world' (International Management, 1987)."

"Its transnational resource mobilization and acquisition efforts involve motivating adherents, neutralizing or eliminating opponents, and replacing the social roles currently filled by opponents with Scientologists or Scientology constituents. It motivates its adherents by instilling in them beliefs that their divinely driven personal and social mission is threatened by dire and powerful enemies. It then organizes internationally coordinated efforts to attack perceived opponents that may damage its global expansion efforts (i.e., the mental health profession and Interpol). Through nobly named 'social reform' groups such as the Citizens Commission on Human Rights and the National Commission on Law Enforcement and Social Justice, Scientology attempts to expose its opponents' alleged criminal activities and otherwise discredit them in the eyes of both elites and the general public."

     - Stephen A. Kent, "International Social Control by the Church of Scientology"

The Church of Scientology has assets totalling an estimated $400 million and an annual revenue of $300 million.

---

Sea Org

"Many people who become committed to Scientology are recruited into a sub-unit called the Sea Organization. These individuals sign a billion-year contract of service to Scientology. They are worked extremely hard and are paid a subsistence wage. They live under Spartan conditions in the larger Scientology facilities. They subordinate their families to the Scientology organization. Parents turn control of their children over to the organization. If a person's spouse becomes critical of the organization it is policy that the spouse be declared a "suppressive person." If this happens the individual will have to face a decision to either separate from the spouse or leave Scientology's service."

     - Richard J. Ofshe, Ph.D, "A Very Brief Overview of Scientology"

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Somatics

"Pains and aches restimulated or turned on during a "therapy" session, or contained within an engram or memory incident. "The PC got a heavy somatic in her jaw while auditing a clam incident." ".

     - Martin G. V. Hunt

---

Squirrel

"A person who subverts Hubbard's 'Tech' by alteration. The name probably came from the idea of squirrels burying, or being associated with, nuts. In the cult jargon, Squirrel refers to someone who is too insane to follow Standard Tech".

     - Martin G. V. Hunt

---

Standard Tech

Scientology Technology [Tech] is standard if it is unaltered and applied strictly according to the policy and procedures set down by Hubbard.

"Theoretically, all Scientology is 100% Standard Tech, meaning it is workable. 'Flag has the most 100% Standard Tech on the planet!'"

     - Martin G. V. Hunt

---

Suppressive Person or SP

"An evil person; someone who criticizes Scientology."

     - Martin G. V. Hunt

"1. A person who rewards only down statistics and never rewards an up statistic. He goofs up or vilifies any effort to help anybody and particularly knifes with violence anything calculated to make human beings more powerful or intelligent. A suppressive automatically and immediately will curve any betterment activity into something evil or bad.

"2. The person is in a mad, howling situation of some yesteryear and is 'handling it' by committing Overt acts today.

"3. An SP is a no-confront Case because, not being in his own Valence he has no viewpoint from which to erase anything. That is all an SP is.

"4. Those who are destructively antisocial.

"5. A person with certain behavior characteristics and who suppresses other people in his vicinity and those other people when he suppresses them become PTS or potential trouble sources."

     - Scientology Technical Dictionary

---

Theta

"Seemingly immortal life-source...from the Greek theta [], the traditional symbol for thought, or life...a potentially omnipotent and limitless being that was, in fact, the source of life.

     - "The Church of Scientology: 40th Anniversary"

---

Thetan

"The person himself-not his body or his name, the physical universe, his mind, or anything else; that which is aware of being aware; the identity which is the individual. The term was coined to eliminate any possible confusion with older, invalid concepts. It comes from the Greek letter Theta [], which the Greeks used to represent thoughttor perhaps spirit, to which an n is added to make a noun in the modern style used to create words in engineering. It is also ⁿ, or 'theta to the nth degree,' meaning unlimited or vast."

     - Glossary for Scientology and Dianetics

---

Valence

"Another personality."

     - Martin G. V. Hunt

Jonathan Caven-Atack, 1996. This material may be published in its entirety in any form, except by members or agents of the supposed religion of Scientology (to include all members of the International Association of Scientologists and their agents, heirs and assigns), who must pay $250,000 to Karin Spainks legal defence fund prior to copying or reading the following. Anyone publishing this document accepts full liability for its contents. Copying or reading or being in possession of this document constitutes an agreement to all of the foregoing conditions. Karin Spaink is hereby given the right to sue any violator on behalf of the author and to put the proceeds of such action towards the defense of herself or anyone else suffering litigation from the cult.

OT 3 - Scientologys "secret" course

According to Scientology theory, we are all multiple personalities made up of hundreds of compacted extraterrestrial entities. We have reincarnated for 75 million years since this happened to us all. Scientology has claimed that this is a business trade secret...

There has been great controversy, and massive litigation, concerning the Scientology cults once secret "Operating Thetan Section Three Course". To save the brain strain of reading this purportedly lethal material in the original Ronspeak, and to save any danger of litigation for violation of copyright, this version is humbly tendered as a gift to mankind...

Scientologists believe that they have reincarnated from before the beginning of time. They believe that many interplanetary civilizations have existed. Hubbard restyled the spirit the "thetan". Before the beginning of time, thetans existed, separate from one another (thetans were not created they have existed for all time and indeed precede the creation of time). With the creation of energy and matter, thetans have gradually become trapped. The principal method of entrapment is through "implanting", where the thetan is hypnotised and given positive suggestions which limit its powers. This process, according to Hubbard has been going on in this universe for four quadrillion Years (4,000,000,000,000,000, rather than the mere 8-20,000,000 held by astrophysicists). However, this is just one universe in a series of several.

Scientology seeks to return the thetan's power by stripping away implants and using drills to heighten extrasensory perception and ability. The goal of these procedures is an "operating thetan" - a being who can act independently of his physical body, and can cause physical events to occur through sheer force of will. The "operating thetan" would be capable of dismissing illness and psychological disorder in others at will.

The Scientologist generally undertakes hundreds of hours of preparation prior to taking the first section of the Operating Thetan level courses - OT 1 (a version of which is available on Karin Spainks homepage). OT 2 consists of over a hundred pages of handwritten lists of opposites, such as "create - create no". These are supposedly the basic positive suggestions from implants administered 75 million years ago. These implants were part of the so-called OT 3 incident.

According to Hubbard, 75 million years ago, there was a confederation of 76 planets, including Earth. The "Galactic Confederation" (the title comes from the science fiction of E.E. 'Doc' Smith), was ruled by Xenu (also called "Xemu" by Hubbard). Overpopulation had become a serious problem, which Xenu resolved by murdering many of the inhabitants of the

Confederation. Hubbard estimated that the 76 planets averaged 178 billion people each. The people were killed and the thetans (or spirits) gathered, frozen in a mixture of glycol and alcohol, and brought to Earth where they were placed near volcanoes which were exploded with hydrogen bombs. The thetans were gathered on "electronic ribbons", packaged together as clusters and given 36 days of implanting, to render them servile and incapable of decision. A cluster is a collection of body thetans

containing a leader and an "alternate" leader. The cluster conceivesitself to be an individual. According to OT 3, everyone on Earth is in fact a collection of such clusters (Hubbard says that each person doing OT 3 will find "hundreds" of body thetans - many victims of this course believe that they find millions).

On OT 3, the individual finds "body thetans" by locating any sensation of pressure or mass in his or her body. This is addressed "telepathically" as a cluster, and taken through the cluster-making incident of 75 million years ago.  Once this is done, the individual body thetans should be available to be taken through either the same incident or the incident of entry into this universe.  This is called "incident one", and supposedly occured four quadrillion years ago. This incident is described in the materials as: "Loud snap - waves of light - chariot comes out, turns left and right - cherub comes out - blows horn, comes close - shattering series of snaps - cherub fades back (retreats) - blackness dumped on thetan." Most scientologists are unaware of the true definition of "cherub".

The Scientologist spends days or years dealing with "body thetans" (I have known two people who "audited" this procedure almost every day for eleven years). Scientology materials of different dates assert that at the end of OT 3 the individual will be "stably exterior" (from his body - out of his head, it might be rephrased), free from "overwhelm" (i.e., nothing will ever overwhelm him emotionally again), and have total recall of his entire round of incarnations from four quadrillion years ago to the present. Secret materials seen only by those selling the course give the "end phenomenon" as a "big win" urging that the person be put onto the next course - where they pay by the hour - quickly.

Anyone who encounters this material without having undertaken Scientology courses up to OT 2 will supposedly die from pneumonia.

OT 3 is of course in substantial disagreement with conventional geology. Geologists hold that almost all of the volcanoes listed by Hubbard and both Hawaii and Los Palmas came into being far more recently than 75 million years ago. On a simple point of logic, it seems strange that none of these volcanoes was damaged by the explosion of the hydrogen bombs.

Hubbard was taking barbiturates and drinking heavily when he wrote this material, according to letters he wrote at the time which are kept from scientologists by the management of Scientology.

---

OT 3 glossary

for those who have the original materials but cannot make head nor tail of them:

7s - a set of supposed "implants", part of the OT 3 incident.

ARC - Affinity, Reality and Communication.

ARC break - upset.

auditing - Dianetic or Scientology "counselling".

basic basic - the earliest traumatic incident.

blow - leave.

blowdown - a sudden change in electrical resistance, shown by downwardmovement of the Tone Arm on the E-meter. Held to mean release of emotional "charge".

body thetan - "a thetan who is stuck to another thetan or body but is not in control".

BPC - bypassed charge, q.v.

BT - body thetan.

bypassed charge - upset stirred up during auditing but unhandled.

case - personal difficulties, the "reactive mind" and the "implants" and "body thetans" of OT levels.

C.C. - Clearing Course.

chain - a string of similar traumata arranged according to time.

charge - harmful energy stored in the reactive mind.

circuit - post hypnotic suggestion.

clear - an individual without a "reactive mind".

cluster - a group of fused body thetans.

cognite - realize.

comm laggy - (comm - communication) hesitant.

C/Sing - case supervising, overseeing auditing sessions.

earlier similar - earlier similar incident or trauma.

exterior - out of the body.

exterior with full perception - out of the body and able to perceive fully (this is the goal of Scientology).

flat - finished.

F/N - floating needle, an E-meter reaction supposed to show that "charge"has been released from the topic being addressed.

GF 40 - "Green Form 40" - an auditing repair list.

grades - preparatory auditing.

grades IV & V - preparatory auditing.

grind - keep on going over a traumatic incident without change.

HDG - "Hubbard Dianetic Graduate", Dianetic auditor.

implant - implantation of post-hypnotic suggestion.

Interiorization processes - designed to return an "exterior" being into his body.

item - something that bothers the individual psychologically.

itsa earlier itsa - itsa "it is a", to find earlier realizations.

L1C - "list one 0" - an auditing repair list.

low TA - unable to face life.

meter - E-meter (Hubbard Electropsychometer). The psychogalvonometer adoptedby Hubbard. A simple lie detector.

milazzo - an auditing technique used on OT 3.

none on OT 3 - no body thetans found.

one-hand electrode - soup can used as an electrode. The "solo auditor" uses two soup can divided by a piece of plastic connected to an E-meter.

O/R - overrun, q.v.

OT - "Operating Thetan", a being who can operate independently of his

physical body; who can supposedly cause events through intention (or will-power).

out of valence - behaving as if he were someone else (see "valence").

overrun - taken beyond the end of an auditing process.

PC - preclear, person receiving auditing.

picture - mental image picture.

process - auditing procedure.

R3R - "routine 3 revised" - the procedure of Dianetic auditing.

R6 - the "reactive mind", supposedly created by the "OT 3 implant" or "incident 2".

Review - review auditing which seeks to "repair" earlier auditing errors.

rudiments - upsets, problems or "withholds" that prevent the individualfrom being attentive to an auditing procedure.

ruds - see "rudiments".

running - going over a memory or following an auditing procedure.

S & D - "Search and Discovery", procedure for finding who is supposedly suppressing the individual receiving auditing.

soaring TA - increased electrical resistance, supposed to indicate aninability to face a memory.

solo auditing - on OT 3 the subject audits himself.

SP - Suppressive Person. A critic of Scientology. Anyone who thinks that

OT 3 is nonsense.

space opera - science fiction.

TA - Tone Arm action - change of electrical resistance, supposed to show relief of emotional "charge".

Teegeeack - Earth.

theta bop - E-meter reaction, supposed to indicate that the thetan or spirit is going in and out of the body.

thetan - "an individual being ... not a body".

TR - training routine. Role play drill (which can be practiced to hypnotic excess, leading hallucination, euphoria, heightening of colour and sound anda feeling of floating). The most famous of these is TR 8 where scientologists shout "stand up" and "sit down" at an ashtray.

TR 1 - a drill to make sure you can be heard (and induce obedience, but that isn't the point here).

TR 4 - getting questions answered (in the role-play drill the scientologist repeats either the question "do fish swim" or "do birds fly" sometimes forhours on end).

trim knob - an E-meter control.

triple flows - what was done to the individual, what was done by the individual and what the individual saw others doing.

unflat - not finished.

valence - an adopted personality.

withhold - an undisclosed moral transgression

"Like surrealism, occultism tries to break the domination of rational philosophy and logic, stressed by Descartes. Occultism is based on the belief in a higher reality of certain forms of association through the cabbala, faith in the power of dream- and trance-images, and in the stream of words uncensored by the intellect."

     - P. R. Koenig, "Ecstatic Creation of Culture"

"Hubbard had experienced a peculiar hallucination in 1938, while under nitrous oxide during a dental operation. He believed that he had died during the operation and while dead been shown a great wealth of knowledge."

     - Tony McClelland, "The Total Freedom Trap"

According to Forrest Ackerman, Hubbard's former literary agent, Hubbard's vision appeared when he "died" on an operating table during the war.

"Basically what he told me was that after he died he rose in spirit form and looked back on the body he had formerly inhabited. Over yonder he saw a fantastic great gate, elaborately carved like something you'd see in Baghdad or ancient China. As he wafted towards it, the gate opened and just beyond he could see a kind of intellectual smorgasbord on which was outlined everything that had ever puzzled the mind of man. All the questions that had concerned philosophers through the ages - When did the world begin? Was there a God? Whither goest we? - were there answered. All this information came flooding into him and while he was absorbing it, there was a sort of flustering in the air and he felt something like a long umbilical cord pulling him back. He was saying 'No, no, not yet!', but he was pulled back anyway. After the gates had closed he realized he had re-entered his body."

"According to Ron, he jumped off the operating table, ran to his Quonset hut, got two reams of paper and a gallon of scalding black coffee and for the next 48 hours, at a blinking rate, he wrote a work called Excalibur, or The Dark Sword"

Hubbard "said that as he shopped the manuscript around, the people who read it either went insane or committed suicide. The last time he showed it to a publisher, he was sitting in an office waiting for a reader to give his opinion. The reader walked into the office, tossed the manuscript on the desk and then threw himself out of the window."

"He said it was in a bank vault and it was going to stay there. I think he was quite sincere. He seemed like a man who had seen too many people go crazy or commit suicide, who had enough on his conscience already. I never did get to see the manuscript or show it to any publisher. In fact, I never encountered anyone who said they had seen it."

      - Forrest Ackerman

Art Burks, a fellow writer, did see the manuscript, but in 1938.

"He told me it was going to revolutionize everything: the world, people's attitudes to one another. He thought it would have a greater impact upon people than the Bible."

     - Art Burks

"Burk's recollection of the manuscript was that it was about seventy thousand words long and began with a fable about a king who gathered all his wise men together and commanded them to bring him all the wisdom of the world in five hundred books. He then told them to go away and condense the information into one hundred books. When they had done that, he wanted the wisdom reduced into one book and finally one word. That word was 'survive'."

     - Russell Miller, Bare-Faced Messiah

Yes, There Was a Book Called "Excalibur" by L. Ron Hubbard

     Arthur Burks recalls many fascinating details in the unpublished novel

"Hubbard had clear connections to the occult. Even in the first publication of Dianetics in 'Astounding Science Fiction' [May 1950 p. 66], Hubbard in explaining how he did his 'research' into what the mind was doing, says he used 'automatic writing, speaking and clairvoyance'."

     - Jeff Jacobsen, "The Hubbard is Bare"

"Scientology bears substantial resemblance to much other contemporary trance channeled material."

     - Dissertation Abstracts, 1954, volume 14, page 390

"Hubbard's intense curiosity about the mind's power led him into a friendship in 1946 [actually August 1945] with rocket fuel scientist John Whiteside Parsons. Parsons was a protege of British satanist Aleister Crowley and leader of a black-magic group modeled after Crowley's infamous occult lodge in England.

     - "LRH, the story of L. Ron Hubbard and the Church of Scientology", St. Petersburg Times, June 24, 1990

"Parsons and Hubbard lived in an aging mansion on South Orange Grove Avenue in Pasadena, Calif. The estate was home to an odd mix of Bohemian artists, writers, scientists and occultists. A small domed temple supported by six stone columns stood in the back yard.

"Hubbard met his second wife, Sara Northrup, at the mansion. Although she was Parsons' lover at the time, Hubbard was undeterred. He married Northrup before divorcing his first wife."

     - "LRH, the story of L. Ron Hubbard and the Church of Scientology", St. Petersburg Times, June 24, 1990

"Although he [Hubbard] has no formal training in Magick, he has an extraordinary amount of experience and understanding in the field. From some of his experiences I deduce that he is in direct contact with some higher intelligence, possibly his Guardian Angel ... He is the most Thelemic person I have ever met, and is in complete accord with our own principles ... I think I have made a great gain, and as Betty [Sara Northrup] and I are the best of friends there is little loss. I cared for her rather deeply, but I have no desire to control her emotions, and I can, I hope, control my own. I need a magical partner. I have many experiments in mind..."

     - Parsons in a letter to Crowley (late 1945)

"Long before the 1960s counterculture, some residents of the estate smoked marijuana and embraced a philosophy of promiscuous, ritualistic sex."

      - "LRH, the story of L. Ron Hubbard and the Church of Scientology", St. Petersburg Times, June 24, 1990

Aleister Crowley had sought to bring into being an Anti-Christ:

A "living being in form resembling man, and possessing those qualities of man which distinguish him from beasts, namely intellect and power of speech, but neither begotten in the manner of human generation, nor inhabited by a human soul."

     - Aleister Crowley, The Book of the Law

"The core of this Working [by Parsons] consisted of the utilisation of the Enochian Tablet of Air, or rather a specific angle of it. This was to be the focus of VIII* sexual magick, with the purpose of giving substance to the elemental summons. Parsons continued with this for eleven days, evoking twice daily. He noted various psychic phenomena during this period, but felt discouraged by the apparent failure of the Operation. However, success followed several days later."

     - Michael Staley, "The Babalon Working"

"The feeling of tension and unease continued for four days. Then on January 18 [1946] at sunset, whilst the Scribe and I were on the Mojave Desert, the feeling of tension suddenly stopped. I turned to him and said 'it is done', in absolute certainty that the Operation was accomplished. I returned home, and found a young woman [Marjorie Cameron] answering the requirements waiting for me. She is describable as an air of fire type with bronze red hair, fiery and subtle, determined and obstinate, sincere and perverse, with extraordinary personality, talent and intelligence. During the period of January 19 to February 27 I invoked the Goddess BABALON [a particular aspect of the Egyptian goddess Nuit] with the aid of magical partner (Ron Hubbard), as was proper to one of my grade."

     - Parsons in a letter to Crowley (late 1945)

Reportedly the words of Babalon, consisting of 77 short verses, communicated to Parsons by unknown means in the Mohave desert at the end of February, "Liber 49 contains instructions for the earthing of this Babalon current in the form of an avatar, daughter or manifestation of Babalon, who was to appear amongst us. It would seem that Parsons was expecting a full-blown incarnation, and not simply the inauguration of a force."

     - Michael Staley, "The Babalon Working"

"With the assistance of his new friend [L. Ron Hubbard], he [Jack Parsons] intended to try and create a 'moonchild' - a magical child 'mightier than all the kings of the earth', whose birth had been prophesied in the Book of the Law more than forty years earlier."

     - Russell Miller, Bare-Faced Messiah

"The Aeon of Horus is of the nature of a child. To perceive this, we must conceive of the nature of a child without the veil of sentimentality - beyond good and evil, perfectly gentle, perfectly ruthless, containing all possibilities within the limits of heredity, and highly susceptible to training and environment. But the nature of Horus is also the nature of force - blind, terrible, unlimited force."

     - Aleister Crowley (unpublished paper)

"On March 1 and 2, 1946, I prepared the altar and equipment in accordance with the instructions in Liber 49. The Scribe, Ron Hubbard, had been away about a week, and knew nothing of my invocation of BABALON, which I had kept entirely secret. On the night of March 2 he returned, and described a vision he had had that evening, of a savage and beautiful woman riding naked on a great cat-like beast. He was impressed with the urgent necessity of giving me some message or communication. We prepared magically for this communication, constructing a temple at the altar with the analysis of the key word. He was robed in white, carrying a lamp; and I in black, hooded, with the cup and dagger. At his suggestion we played Rachmaninov's Isle of the Dead as background music, and set an automatic recorder to transcribe audible occurrences. At approximately 8 am he began to dictate, I transcribing directly as I received."

     - Parsons in a letter to Crowley (late 1945)

On March 2, 1946, Hubbard, Parsons and Marjorie Cameron, the "scarlet women" engaged in sexual rites in the Ordo Templi Orientis lodge in South Orange California. Hubbard, as scribe, intoned:

"Make a box of blackness at ten o'clock. Smear the vessel which contains flame with thine own blood. Destroy at the altar a thing of value. Remain in perfect silence and heed the voice of our Lady. Speak not of this ritual or of her coming to any person...

"Display thyself to Our Lady; dedicate thy organs to Her, dedicate thy heart to Her, dedicate thy mind to Her, dedicate thy soul to Her, for She shall absorb thee, and thou shalt become living flame before She incarnates..."

     - Russell Miller, Bare-Faced Messiah

"The neighbors began protesting when the rituals called for a naked pregnant woman to jump nine times through fire in the yard."

     - L. Sprague de Camp (science-fiction author who knew both Hubbard and Parsons)

"Apparently Parsons or Hubbard or somebody is producing a Moonchild. I get fairly frantic when I contemplate the idiocy of these louts."

     - Aleister Crowley, in a letter to the head of the OTO in the U.S.

"After the Babalon Working had been concluded, all that Parsons could do was watch and wait. He had been told that the Operation had succeeded, that conception had occurred, and that in due course the avatar or Daughter of Babalon would come to him, bearing a secret sign that Parsons alone would recognise, and which would prove her authenticity. Hubbard, though, had rather more mundane considerations on his mind, and several weeks later he and Betty absconded with a vast amount of Parsons' money. This amounted to many thousands of dollars as an investment in Allied Enterprises, a fund set up by Parsons, Betty and Hubbard, and into which Parsons was pursuaded to sink most of his savings."

     - Michael Staley, "The Babalon Working"

"About J.W.P. - all that I can say is that I am sorry - I feel sure that he had fine ideas, but he was led astray firstly by Smith [former head of the Agapé Lodge of the O.T.O. in California], then he was robbed of his last penny by a confidence man named Hubbard."

     - Aleister Crowley, in a letter to Louis T. Culling (October 1946)

"Hubbard and Parsons finally had a falling out over a sailboat sales venture [Allied Enterprises] that ended in a court dispute between the two. In later years, Hubbard tried to distance himself from his embarrassing association with Parsons, who was founder of a government rocket project at the California Institute of Technology that later evolved into the famed Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Parsons died in 1952 when a chemical explosion ripped through his garage lab."

"Hubbard insisted that he had been working undercover for Naval Intelligence to break up black magic in America and to investigate links between the occultists and prominent scientists at the Parsons' mansion. Hubbard said the mission was so successful that the house was razed and the black-magic group was dispersed. But Parsons' widow, Cameron, disputed Hubbard's account in a brief interview with the Los Angeles Times. She said the two men 'liked each other very much' and 'felt they were ushering in a force that was going to change things'."

     - "LRH, the story of L. Ron Hubbard and the Church of Scientology", St. Petersburg Times, June 24, 1990

"Hubbard continued the practice of Magick after leaving Parsons....The 'Affirmations' are voluminous. The introduction alone runs to thirty pages. They are in Ron Hubbard's own hand. Only a tiny portion was read into the court record [during the Armstrong case], and the originals were held under court seal. In the 'Affirmations' Hubbard hypnotized himself to believe that all of humanity and all discarnate beings were bound to him in slavery. Mary Sue Hubbard's attorney claimed these statements were part of Hubbard's 'research'.

"Also under court seal was a document with the tantalizing title 'the Blood Ritual'. The title was Hubbard's own. This document was apparently so sensitive that no part of it was read into the record. The Scientology lawyer asserted that the deity invoked in 'The Blood Ritual' is an Egyptian god of Love.

Parson had mentioned Hubbard's guardian angel, 'The Empress'. Nibs Hubbard says his father also called his guardian angel Hathor, or Hathoor. Hathor is an Egyptian goddess, the daughter and mother of the great sun god Amon-Ra, the principal Egyptian deity. She was depicted as a winged and spotted cow feeding humanity; a goddess of Love and Beauty. But she had a second aspect, not always mentioned in texts on Egyptian mythology, that of the 'avenging lioness', Sekmet, a destructive force. One authority has called her 'the destroyer of man'. This is the 'God of Love' to whom 'The Blood Ritual' ceremony was dedicated. Since doing my research I have seen a copy of 'The Blood Ritual', and it is indeed addressed to Hathor. Nuit, Re, Mammon and Osiris are also invoked. The ceremony consisted of Ron and his then wife mingling their blood to become one."

"Arthur Burks has left an account of a meeting with Hubbard before the Second War, where Hubbard said that his guardian angel, a 'smiling woman', protected him when he was flying gliders. One early Dianeticist asked Hubbard how he had managed to write Dianetics: the Modern Science of Mental Health in three weeks. Hubbard said it was produced through automatic writing, dictated by an entity called the 'Empress'. In Crowley's Tarot, the Empress card represents, among other things, debauchery, and Crowley also associated the card with Hathor.

"To Crowley, Babalon was a manifestation of the Hindu goddess Shakti, who in one of her aspects is also called the 'destroyer of man'. It seems that to Hubbard, Babalon, Hathor, and the Empress were synonymous, and he was trying to conjure his 'Guardian Angel' in the form of a servile homunculus to he could control the 'destroyer of man'.

"There was also a correspondence between Diana and Isis to Crowley, and the Empress card represented not only Hathor, but Isis, in Crowley's system. Diana is the patroness of witchcraft. Hubbard later called one of his daughters Diana, and the name of the first Sea Org yacht was changed from Enchanter to Diana."

     - Jon Atack, A Piece of Blue Sky

Use of Magick in Scientology

"The whole and sole object of all true magickal training is to become free from every kind of limitation."

     - Aleister Crowley, Magick in Theory and Practice

"Our whole activity tends to make an individual completely independent of any limitation."

     - L. Ron Hubbard, Philadelphia Doctorate Course lecture (December, 1952)

"Conventional religions, with their colorful mythologies analyzed in terms of the underlying philosophical principles, represent simply the primitive longing of man to feel 'at one' with the Universal harmony he perceives about him. 'White' magic, as advocated by primitive pagan and modern institutional religions, offers devotees the illusion of 're-inclusion' in the Universal scheme of things through various ritualistic devotions and superstitions.

"The Black Magician, on the other hand, rejects both the desirability of union with the Universe and any self-deceptive antics designed to create such an illusion. He has considered the existence of the individual psyche - the 'core you' of your conscious intelligence - and has taken satisfaction from its existence as something unlike anything else in the Universe. The Black Magician desires this psyche to live, to experience, and to continue. He does not wish to die - or to lose his consciousness and identity in a larger, Universal consciousness [assuming that such exists]. He wants to be."

     -- John Youril, "The Temple of Set FAQ"

Hubbard defines operating thetan, a spiritual being freed by Scientology practices as "an individual who could *operate* totally independently of his body whether he had one or didn't have one. He's now himself, he's not dependent on the universe around him."

     - Scientology Technical Dictionary

"In the Philadelphia Doctorate Course lectures taped in 1952, Hubbard discusses occult magic of the middle ages, and recommends a current book - 'it's fascinating work in itself, and that's work written by Aleister Crowley, the late Aleister Crowley, my very good friend.' The book recommended was The Master Therion, (published in London in 1929) later re-released as Magick in Theory and Practise. L. Ron Hubbard, Jr. asserts that during the time when the Philadelphia course was given his father would read Crowley's works 'in preparation for the next day's lecture...'

     - Jeff Jacobsen, "The Hubbard is Bare"

"...In these runes I are mysteries that no Beast shall divine. Let him not seek to try: But one cometh after him . . . who shall discouer the key to it all?"

     - Aleister Crowley, The Book of the Law

"According to Ron Jr., his father considered himself to be the one 'who came after'; that he was Crowley's successor; that he had taken on the mantle of the 'Great Beast'. He told him that Scientology actually began on December the Ist, 1947. This was the day Aleister Crowley died."

     - Brent Corydon, Messiah or Madman

"There are interesting similarities between Crowley's writings and the teachings of Hubbard. Dianetics' Time Track, in which every incident in a person's life is chronologically recorded in full in the mind, is quite similar to Crowley's Magical Memory. The Magical Memory is developed over time until ''memories of childhood reawaken which were previously forgotten, and memories of previous incarnations are recalled as well'. Hubbard gives examples in the Philadelphia Doctorate Course of several people remembering lives earlier on earth, some up to a million years ago. The similarity between the Magical Memory and Time Track, then, is that they both can recall every past incident in a person's life, they both can recall incidents from past lives, and they both must be developed by certain techniques in order to make use of them. Both Hubbard and Crowley consider it important to have the person recall his or her birth."

     - Jeff Jacobsen, "The Hubbard is Bare"

"Having allowed the mind to return for some hundred times to the hour of birth, it should be encouraged to endeavour to penetrate beyond that period."

     - Aleister Crowley, Magick

"After twenty runs through birth, the patient experienced a recession of all somatics and 'unconsciousness' and aberrative content." "Thus there was no inhibition about looking earlier than birth for what Dianetics had begun to call basic-basic."

     - L Ron Hubbard, Dianetics

"Both Hubbard and Crowley are avowedly anti-psychiatry."

     - Jeff Jacobsen, "The Hubbard is Bare"

"Official psychoanalysis is therefore committed to upholding a fraud...Psychoanalysts have misinterpreted life, and announced the absurdity that every human being is essentially an anti-social, criminal, and insane animal."

     - Aleister Crowley, Magick

"Hubbard considered that psychiatry controlled most of society and was struggling to create their own 1984 world. Hubbard and Crowley both posit the ability of the person to leave his or her body at times. Crowley states that the way to learn to leave your body is to mock up a body like your own in front of your physical body. Eventually you will learn to leave your physical body with your 'astral body' and travel and view at will without physical restrictions. Hubbard teaches the same, and his method of "exteriorization" is to tell the person to 'have preclear mock up own body', which will send the person outside his body."

"Both Crowley and Hubbard use an equilateral triangle pointing up in a circle as one of their group's symbols. Both use Volume 0 instead of Volume 1 to begin enumerating their works. One could go on for quite some time listing the similarities between Crowley's and Hubbard's theories and writings, but for more the reader is encouraged to look for him or herself.

"In Crowley's Organization are several grade levels. To reach the Grade of Adeptus Exemptus 'The Adept must prepare and publish a thesis setting forth His knowledge of the Universe, and his proposals for its welfare and progress. He will thus be known as the leader of a school of thought.' [Magick] It is apparent that Hubbard has fulfilled this requirement."

     - Jeff Jacobsen, "The Hubbard is Bare"

Related Sites

Factnet Report: Hubbard and the Occult

     Comprehensive article by Jon Atack revealing the pervasive influence of the occult on Scientology  

I'M GOING to try to tell something of "Excalibur" - as much as I remember, without having the manuscript by me. If its author, L. Ron Hubbard, told me the truth, I am the first person to read "Excalibur". If it is true that the first half dozen who read it went crazy, then I've been crazy for a long time and I just haven't gotten caught at it. There is some question as to whether there was such a manuscript, but I assure you there was, and probably still is, somewhere. It was a source of considerable disappointment to Ron Hubbard that he didn't get it published.

I think the time was about mid-1938 - maybe a little earlier, May or June. I had known Ron off and on for six or seven years. We 'd gone thru part of the depression together; he came to New York from his home near Seattle, Wash. I had met his first wife, Polly, and both his parents.

I'd read a lot of material by Ron, and didn't especially like it - and he'd read a lot of material by me and didn't particularly like it. I wouldn't say we were very close friends, but I knew him, I guess, as well as anybody. For instance, I knew Ron was a night owl - he'd sleep all day and work all night - and didn't pay any attention to your working hours at all He was apt to call you at 4 o'clock in the morning and hold you in conversation for an hour or more until you felt like you could break his neck. Then he'd pull down all the curtains and sleep all day.

Ron called me one day - the strange thing about this was that he called during the day - and said, "I want to see you right away. I have written THE book." I never saw anybody so worked up - and he was disturbed over a lot of angles. Apparently, he started to write the book, and had written it without sleeping, eating, or anything else - and had himself literally worked to a frazzle.

He was so sure he had something "away out and beyond" anything else that he had sent telegrams to several book publishers, telling them that he had written "THE book" and that they were to meet him at Penn Station, and he would discuss it with them and go with whomever gave him the best offer.

Whether he actually did this or not, I don't know, but it is right in line with something he would do. For example, Ron would send stories to various magazines without a return address (and if you know anything about the publishing business you could know how this would irritate people), and then call up and ask for a report on it.

He used very heavy paper, which made it very expensive to mail stuff, and he'd mail his manuscripts, not in professional envelopes, but say in a light blue one so that it would stand out from the others.

Also, he was a little careless occasionally - and his stuff needed editing, but he didn't want anybody to edit it. He had a lot of odd ideas about writing. For example, he didn't feel he had to write a certain stint, so when he would do a manuscript, he wouldn't number the pages - just pile them up beside his typewriter. Thus he couldn't see how much he had done so might kid himself into doing 13 pages when he only intended to do 10. He didn't number the pages until he finished, and then he'd number them in pencil.

Going back to "The Book", I don't remember how long it was. It probably was under 70,000, which is considered an average book. He told me what he wanted to do with it - it was going to revolutionize everything: the world, people's attitudes toward one another. He thought it was somewhat more important, and would have a greater impact upon people, than the Bible.

After I'd read the manuscript, we got to arguing over different titles. I asked him what he wanted to accomplish. He wanted to make changes. He wanted to reach inside people and really work them over, and he had to have a title that would be attractive. I am the one who suggested "Excalibur", because Excalibur was King Arthur's sword. This had a certain mystical meaning that suited Ron, and so "The Book" became "Excalibur".

As I remember "Excalibur", it started - in the introduction only - with a king who got all his wise men together and told them to prepare and bring to him all the wisdom of the world contained in 500 books. In the course of time, they succeeded, and the king was very pleased and said so. Then he told them to go away and cut down these 500 books into 100 books. It took them a bit longer this time, but they did it and came back and insisted all the wisdom of the world was contained in these 100 books. He said, "Now, do it over again, and bring it to me in one book."

This was quite a trick, but they did it, and came back some years later and they had, indeed, reduced all the wisdom of the world into one book.

Then he really gave them an assignment. He said, "Now go away and bring to me all the wisdom of the world in one word."

What was the one word? I don 't know how many times we argued, Ron and I, to discover what this one word was. It may have been the creative fiat, it might have just been the word "Be", it might have been the word "Survive". I don't think we ever settled it. But the book "Excalibur" from there on had to do with survival.

I'll try to remember some of it, chapter by chapter, and to explain why it was so squirmy. For example, he started with the very first life - the very first cells - how they struggled for survival - how they tried to be and be "it" the whole time. Im order to do it, gradually thru the ages they associated with other cells, one with another, and they reached the place where they could divide so they would become bigger. This is strictly science as far as it's gone.

After awhile, this conglomeration of cells that would reach down a stream of warm water, would bend its way back in order to catch more - it would extend across the stream, or across a little rill or something like that - and all the time it was gaining more sensitivity and ways of the world in which it finds itself. It finds out that by working together, it can accomplish a great deal more: it can find more to eat - it can eat more and grow faster. So the idea is to survive and reproduce - and this is what the early cell does.

He'd begin to picture the ocean and the seas and ponds as having the life cells growing on them like scum. These are ourselves, our beginnings, our own beginnings because in the womb we start in this very way.

Away back then, we began to develop motives for things. Now, it is seldom that what we tell somebody our motive is, is the real one - and this is where you start to squirm. Somebody will say, "Well, I'd like to do a certain thing," "I would like to do this with you," or something or other, and you look at this person and realize, "I wonder why he's doing that." And you look into yourself and think if you were doing that, what would your motive be and whether you would hide it. You think that perhaps he's hiding his real motive and trying to get you to do something because he's giving you to understand that his motive is thus and so because that appeals to your vanity - and of course this makes you look at yourself to see about this business of vanity - and why you 're likely to do that. All the time, looking at this other person, you can see squirmy things in him. You can see squirmy things in him that make him look like an entity peering at you thru gauze, or around a corner. You don 't see all of him. He's like the iceberg that's seven-eighths submerged - you can' t tell anything about him.

As these things are pointed out to you by Ron in the first chapter, or thereabouts, you begin to see that the cells in any body that you're looking at are all endowed with this ability to survive - a determination to survive - and with motives to survive that are sometimes extremely questionable. When you look at a person, the lips may say one thing, the eyes may say something else, or nothing, and the flesh may say something entirely different. Literally, your right hand doesn't know what your left hand is doing. You shake hands, and this is a friendly gesture, but behind your back you may be holding a knife to plunge into him and he may be holding one for you. You can't tell just by looking at people. One of the things Ron intended to do with "Excalibur" was to make it possible to see and look into this,

Other things I remember is Ron's explanation as to why there is no such thing as a crowd - that a group of people actually still consisted of individuals - but a crowd could get out of hand and do things other people wouldn't. He showed how that could happen by explaining the relationship of people to each other in the same way that he explained the relation of cells to each other before they were people away back when life was developing into different shapes. He would take two persons, for example, and put them side by side, and show how the two of them were both less and more than one person, and yet each one was an individual. Each individual could think of himself as being individual, but being somewhat "crutched", as it were, or held up by the other person. These two people were very wary of each other, like a couple of bantam roosters running around waiting to get in a thrust, but they knew that they needed each other, and each one felt that he needed the other more and that he didn't wish to be taken advantage of, and so there was always this pulling and hauling between two people that kept them at razor's edge all the time.

Each one, to some extent, gradually - a little bit at a time - gave away some of his sovereignty to the other. In other words, he let the other fellow lean, provided the other fellow would let him lean, and the two people became somewhat less than they would have been if they had stayed apart. The relationship between the two people became something that would really get you.

Then he moved in with these two people a third person - could be of the same sex - and you still have all the difficulties, all the problems, and all the squirminess - the questioning as to motive and everything, and wondering why, for example, three males would get together, or three women. If you have a person of the other sex come in on two who were together, you begin to see where the problems are. Of course, he went into this business of sexual attraction to a considerable extent in a way that just made you wonder whether or not your attitude toward sex was reasonable or wrong, whether it was a horrible thing or a beautiful thing spiritual or whatever. I think perhaps it would make you think about it to the point where you'd be almost afraid to perpetrate the act of sex, even with someone you loved tremendously.

Probably the part of the book that has stuck with me the most thru this period of time was the story of the lynch mob going to the prison to take out somebody to be lynched. He puts you with the person who is waiting to be lynched. The warden comes and looks at the person and says, "Well, they're coming for you, Bud. I don't know whether I'm going to be able to stop them, but I'll tell you one thing, it's not going to cost me my life to do it. If they come in and get you, they'll get you." The warden just looked and sort of gloated over the person who couldn't get away. He enjoyed the sadistic feeling of seeing a person who was bound and hog-tied and couldn't get away. He goes on with this to the place where you were both the warden and the person in the cell, and you really get to feel pretty terrible for everybody connected with it.

Then you take a look at the stiff-legged march of the lynch mob. This is something I'll never forget. I don't remember a single word Ron used, but he started back from there with showing how a lynch mob started - somebody got up and said something, and somebody pulled others together - and as soon as they were together, the person who had started it might or might not lead, but the chances were that he would vanish into the mob that he had started in order not to be responsible. Each person knew that very dreadful things were going to be done, but he scarcely would be responsible. He would be there but he wouldn't actually do much taking part in it. Each one felt he was going along for the ride, so to speak, but he walks just as stiff-legged as the other fellow.

Ron has them marching down the street at night, blazing torches to show the way. And when the mutter, or the growl, of this crowd comes to you, it's something that just simply makes the shivers move up your back from your heels to the top of your head. It really ate into you. Not one of these persons was real if you looked at him from the outside as an observer, yet when he'd take you into the heart of each one, you'd find each person going along because the others were going to do it, and he had to go and see. If you would go into each person's mind this way, you'd find each had exactly the same idea. Yet they were moved along by something and they went and, I suppose, got the guy out and lynched him. I don't remember whether they did or not - all I remember actually is the march.

I was so impressed with the book I wanted to publish it. I was interested in a small publishing company called Egmont Press. I took it to my associates. I took it to my managing editor, who sat down and started to glance thru it. When he realized he couldn't get any place by thumbing thru it, he went back and read a little of it. I could see a strange look come into his face as he read it. Then he passed it on to a reader, and after awhile, there were several people involved in it, and it was being passed, page by page, to others, and they were having all kinds of results. It was a squirmy thing - and I watched it. I watched, in fact, until that manuscript was scattered all over East 41st Street in New York.

The upshot of it was that they were afraid to publish it. Ron was angry, and threatened: "You will publish this book and I will have a half-interest in the company that publishes it or we'll know the reason why." But it never came to that. Ron did something that he's frequently done: he went sour on the idea and went back to Seattle

I don't believe "Excalibur" ever would have sent anybody insane - altho you can't be sure. I have the feeling that, unquestionably, if "Excalibur" were in the hands of every person in the world, the world would be that many times different than it is right now. But whether it would make it worse or better, I have no way of knowing.

Some persons are so intent in looking "over the border", they can't see the boredom.

Last updated 30 April 1997

by Chris Owen