Scientology's Dark Messiah Ronald Hubbard-The Mystery, Myth, and Method Behind His Madness part 1
I have just finished reading a post at The Underground Bunker blog by Tony Ortega.
Why does Scientology lie about founder L. Ron Hubbard’s supposed war wounds?
Chris Owens has written many superb articles on Scientology and I recommend that anyone interested in the subject read as many as you can find.
Chris Owens brings up the myth that Ronald Hubbard was injured in combat in World War II and developed Dianetics and Scientology as a direct result of his miraculous recovery from his alleged war wounds which left him crippled and blinded.
The myth is a central idea in Scientology. That can't be overstated. But, it's not the only one, by far and not the most important one regarding the sacred status that Hubbard holds in the minds of his followers.
I want to point out the beliefs that were described to me by the Scientologists that I knew personally in my own twenty five years in Scientology. I was in from about 1988 to 2014.
I started out at a local organization called commonly an org. These are the organizations in major cities and often have in theory the ability to deliver services to the level right below the services exclusive to the Sea Org organizations that deliver services. In reality they often lack both the number of staff and the training necessary for those staff to deliver everything they are intended to deliver. The staff in these organizations were usually on either two and a half or five year contracts during my time in Scientology. There are exceptions but I won't get into all the details here.
This is being written to add a bit of perspective that I see expressed rarely by most ex Scientologists, certainly in most biographies and articles.
Hubbard played the role of a messiah to many Scientologists. Messiah has an origin and definition from Jewish religion and culture, it also has a definition that is broader that means a savior or promised or foreseen leader. Hubbard was not Jewish, he was treated as the savior of humanity by many Scientologists. This is not an exaggeration.
In Buddhism there is the idea of a person who has achieved personal spiritual awareness great enough to transcend the material plane and move on who has chosen to remain here to save others.
Scientology has a corresponding role for Hubbard. It was explained to me by several people. I want to emphasize this is what several Scientologists believe in, not exactly what you might find in the doctrine.
You can find many parts that imply that the beliefs that these people held are the natural conclusions that anyone should draw from studying Scientology doctrine and connecting the dots for yourself.
This in my opinion is actually by design.
Hubbard over and over explained numerous superhuman abilities that are supposed to be regained as one goes up the Scientology bridge and that he pioneered the bridge himself, so it's a natural conclusion for people to believe that Hubbard gained all these abilities for himself and in fact has even more that he either has not revealed or only discussed in confidential issues that he has restricted to unreleased upper level courses that are intended to be released at some point in the future.
I remember a person who was at one time a Sea Org member and the executive director at a local org. She explained to me her outlook which seems to have been held by a couple dozen or so Scientologists that I knew at the time, as a rough guess. This was back around 1990 or so.
She believed that Hubbard was an unusual being who recently arrived in this universe. Scientology has a very Gnostic core idea that spirits came to this physical universe and through existing here over the course of the equivalent to perhaps a billion human lifetimes deteriorated from a state of being a God, that had its own universe before coming to the physical universe and in that prior universe was all knowing and all powerful and that back in that universe was creating everything that existed by decision. If that universe was of a size comparable to the physical universe it could have had billions of galaxies with billions of stars and planets in each galaxy and living creatures and plants and everything else in this or any possible physical universe and been entirely the creation of the spirit that had that universe to itself. The idea is that each individual spirit served as the God of the entire home universe it had to itself. I use the pronoun "it" because Scientology doctrine has the specific claim that spirits have no gender and in fact any gender is either just a trait of a body or an assumed identity and not the true identity of a spirit.
The idea goes that through a particular series of misunderstandings and misadventures the spirit lost its God level abilities and awareness. But Hubbard is seen as far more recently arrived in this universe and far more capable than most people, as in very close to God in power and it is implied that he was much closer to this than the rest of us.
The Executive Director (ED) explained that Hubbard was blinded and crippled from his war wounds and in his research he cured himself from his wounds, restored his sight and took himself to clear in his research that would result in Dianetics.
The story goes that Hubbard gained more insight as he delivered Dianetics and from 1950 to 1952 he somehow magically had researched the abilities of a spirit and attained a godlike state and he could have left the physical universe in his enlightened state and instead chose to stay among us mere mortals to teach us how to get the results he did.
We are talking about the myth of Hubbard being able to leave the physical universe permanently and go back to being a God for eternity in his own universe, free from human flaws and suffering forever but choosing to stay in our universe that has pain and suffering, out of pure kindness and compassion and the kindness he has for everyone else.
So, right there he takes on the role of savior of humanity. He proposed that this universe is set up to trap spirits and cause them to become so degraded that they forget that they are Gods and most of their abilities and past and further to get trapped into being human over and over, perhaps a billion times, and finally to get so degraded they can't even be reborn as a human anymore and to be in amnesia, blind, and in pain, for eternity.
Yep, he warned that you are not only trapped in a cycle of pain and suffering as a human being, which some earlier religions have already proposed, he took it a step further, giving anyone who is not saved by Scientology a kind of personal hell to be afraid of, as it's hard to imagine any fate worse than being disembodied, blind, deaf, in pain and lacking awareness of who you are, what you are, and why you are suffering. And of course you have no way to escape this doom, other than Scientology. Convenient for his marketing!
So, the story goes that by 1952 Hubbard was able to discover within himself a way to regain Godhood.
Now the story gets kind of far fetched, but I personally don't believe in it at all now, though I like the people around me did for many years. So, just try to follow it and think of it as a fiction that other people believe in and just realize that those people may be thousands of Scientologists. No guarantees and I never got an exact number of people who believe all this.
So, supposedly Hubbard was auditing people and could see the thoughts of other people ( I know it's not easy to understand that lots of people believed this whole story) and he could telepathically awaken their spiritual abilities, so he had a walk in the park when he tried to get other people to reawaken their superhuman spiritual abilities. I remember that ED, we can call ED 1, told me that Hubbard could "see" the mental images (thoughts) of other people naturally, so he could do things in auditing that normal people couldn't.
So, his development of Scientology was explained as an effort to get other people to be able to get results in auditing and training comparable to what Hubbard himself could do by 1950 to 1952. Yep, the God maker was supposed to be both a God with a capital G himself and capable of personally making Gods out of others but realized that due to time constraints he would need to get others up to the job and routinely succeeding at both auditing people up to this state and up to training others to in turn do the job, making it so that people separated from Hubbard by several degrees of separation could do what he (allegedly) did.
The whole development of Scientology training, auditing, administration, was meant to be the heroic story of how the extra competent supreme being of Hubbard was overcoming the challenge of getting us lesser beings to be able to replicate his miracles and through an organization get others to do it as well.
The difficulties with Scientology were not attributed to Hubbard or his technology, both far too sacred for criticism, and instead it was to be understood that the poor quality of humanity was the obstacle, never any flaws in Hubbard as he was described as having none, and never any in his technology, as it would reflect poorly on him to suggest that his creation deserved criticism of any kind. No, none of that would have been acceptable. His students were blamed for any lack of results, conveniently for Hubbard.
In her estimation, ED 1 believed that Hubbard originally developed a path he followed from disabled man to superhuman in the years before 1950 as he recovered from his blindness and war wounds and that from 1950 to 1952 he ascended from superhuman to God and with Scientology sought to raise others to this state and to create a system that mere human beings could use to replicate his results.
The story goes that all the work from 1952 and on had this direction as Hubbard tried to develop a system so idiot proof that humans who Hubbard described as far, far, far, far beneath himself could have the tiniest fraction of the smartest and most aware fraction of humanity work as hard as they possibly could and bit by bit, on a gradual scale work themselves up to a level of ability, education, and awareness where they could follow Hubbard's directions and create the miraculous results that he did.
Look at it as saying that you are trying to get a person to do something reasonable, say you have a very drunk friend who is drinking far too much far too often and you are trying to help them to do beneficial things, like go home, take a shower, put on clean clothes, have some coffee and breakfast to help them wake up and sober up and the whole issue is that they are so drunk, so out of it, so oblivious that they are not capable of clear thinking and even listening to you. You are perfectly reasonable and your instructions are reasonable, the sad state of the poor wretch you are trying to help is the whole problem.
That's a core belief in Scientology. What makes Scientology hard is not any flaws in Scientology technology or indoctrination or Hubbard or his ideas or methods, but in the low state of the human beings and the society that he has to work with. It is a convenient excuse for any difficulties or failures in Scientology!
It's also an excuse for endless amounts of doctrine and method after method to sell to people, the problem is not the methods, it's that people are so severely degraded and out of it that more and more technology has to be developed to pull us up out of the depths of delusion that we are buried in. Of course it portrays us as almost hopeless and our savior Hubbard as more and more giving, devoted, effective, and heroic the more he extends the runway of courses and services we must purchase and complete in Scientology!
The story goes that Hubbard came to the degraded physical universe relatively recently and in this current lifetime as Ronald Hubbard he was able to pioneer recovery and develop Dianetics in the 1940s and Scientology initially to regain Godhood in 1950 to 1952, and further development was to help others and create organizations that are capable of recreation of his own results.
The myth goes that Hubbard in 1966 and 1967 carefully looked at portions of the whole track (entire memory of the spirit, which may go back hundreds of quadrillions of years to many earlier universes in the Scientology cosmology) to help others and he discovered a trap of hidden and booby trapped portion of the past, many millions of years ago and in other incidents that are linked to each other in some way and that Hubbard faced this hidden trap that was designed to cause everyone to behave in certain ways and never remember the past as well as either die or go insane if they were able to contact or recall these incidents to any degree.
This in essence describes the promotion of the upper courses, the confidential secret doctrine in Scientology called OT III and to get to this one must complete many other courses and get a lot if Scientology auditing usually, there are rare exceptions, but most people don't ever get to this point in Scientology and in fact probably 95 to 99% of the people in Scientology NEVER see the OT III materials while in Scientology.
The explanation that I gave is in part the promotional material that is allowed to be seen by all Scientologists and it is used to promise something that is essentially a mystery and encourages the individual Scientologist to use their own imagination to inspire them to reach for the mystery.
ED 1 believed that Hubbard overcame the traps that were placed in our distant past and she imagined that the only thing that could be on the upper levels was in her opinion whole track overts. Overts in Scientology represent evil acts, called sins in many other practices. Whole track overts would include things like blowing up planets, wiping out universes, destroying species and races, enslaving worlds and intergalactic empires, torturing spirits for billions or trillions of years and similar acts. Genocide and atrocities of unimaginable scale are on this list, things like destroying a galaxy with hundreds of worlds that each have billions of sentient beings are on the list. Star Wars and Dune and Star Trek have the idea but in Scientology it is on a far grander scale, for each individual spirit in their own history. And portrayed as cold blooded fact, not fiction.
Now the actual content of the upper levels, the OT levels from OT III to OT VIII are as far as I know primarily concerned with disembodied spirits from earlier planets and civilizations that are subject to telepathic exorcism and removed from the individual in Scientology. The introduction of these spirits from alien civilizations gives Hubbard a way to keep on selling more and more services to people who have supposedly removed the barriers to mental perfection in themselves and to endlessly find more and more of these things to remove.
After all, you can have an unlimited number of spirits tied to a person and an unlimited number of past incidents to overcome in your nearly eternal spiritual past.
But I must emphasize that the vast majority of people that I knew in Scientology never got to these secret, confidential, upper levels and so we had the odd situation of a couple dozen Scientologists who actually did OT III to OT VIII who know about the exorcism of ancient spirits from earlier civilizations on other planets and the majority of people at the org who were only guessing (incorrectly) what waits on the upper levels. They could listen to hundreds of taped lectures in Scientology on the OT abilities and whole track space opera stories and guests that this is the material taken up, but they were way off base if they didn't have the idea of exorcism as the main activity that awaited them.
So, you have the vast majority who think that Scientology is one thing and the elite who know that from OT III on you are getting into the exorcism of ancient spirits from alien civilizations and they interact in odd ways.
ED 1 believed that Hubbard overcame special traps to create OT III and it is called the wall of fire in Scientology and There is a second wall of fire on OT V and finally a third on the original OT VIII called the Anti Christ edition.
The promotional materials in Scientology describe the three walls of fire as special traps for spirits created long ago that you have to do the Scientology OT levels to overcome and regain your abilities as an immortal spiritual being and escape the fate of becoming a disembodied spirit that is permanently, eternally, blind, with no memories, no hearing, in pain and deaf and unable to ever escape that fate.
In Scientology the material covered in OT III was described as so dangerous that in researching it Ronald Hubbard almost died and his body barely survived the ordeal. In truth, he was a drug addict and alcoholic and had a motorcycle accident and inured himself but could not admit that was hurt riding a motorcycle, which happens to mere mortals.
The funny thing is that a drunk and drug addict who was already in poor health had a motorcycle accident and injuries that would take several months to recover and he retreated from reality into fantasy and portrayed himself as a hero and literally a savior of the human race, a savior from spiritual ruin and in fact one who would make us into Gods and give us an eternity as Gods! Pretty impressive as false promises go, if you are going to give empty promises why not go big?
The contents of OT III and much of the upper levels has a remarkable resemblance to the occult and in particular the work of Aleister Crowley and the occult text the OAHSPE and comic books about a character named Xemnu.
I must remark that I was skeptical about Scientology being based on the OAHSPE but ended up reading a very extensive analysis of the OAHSPE and the upper levels of Scientology and realized from that information and my own twenty five years in Scientology that the amount of similarities between Scientology and the OAHSPE and the strength of the similarities including concepts take verbatim such as the phrase wall of fire and many, many, many others that it is extremely likely that somehow Hubbard got ideas whether directly or indirectly that were already in the OAHSPE before Hubbard was born. The fact that over fifty concepts appear both in the OAHSPE and in Dianetics and Scientology and these are very specific and unusual ideas is well worth examining at length in my opinion. To be precise, these are ideas in the official doctrine of Dianetics and Scientology itself.
I published the series of blog posts OT III And Beyond: Sources Plagiarized From Parts 1, 2, and 3 at Mockingbird's Nest blog on Scientology diving deep into this topic.
So, in 1967 Hubbard created the myth of himself as the literal savior of humanity who bravely crossed the wall of fire in his research and nearly died, but persisted through the pain and torment, so others would not have to face this obstacle out of pure love for others.
In this way Hubbard took on a Christ like image in Scientology, but Hubbard of course is a petulant, belligerent, immature and ultimately jealous wannabe God and so-called God maker.
He has said both that there was no Christ in a taped lecture and on OT VIII the Anti Christ edition Hubbard claimed that Christ was a lover of men and young boys. I am no religious expert but believe it's difficult to both not exist and to be a paedophile.
But the people in Scientology that I knew genuinely saw Hubbard as a messiah. I recall one tape in which Hubbard said the closest he came to quitting was admitting that God himself couldn't do the job that Hubbard has done in Scientology! Quite modest to admit that you are superior to God! If that is not being humble, what is?
I recall another Executive Director that I knew who explained his perspective on Hubbard. Like many, many people in Scientology he considered Hubbard the smartest person who ever walked the earth, which is a sentiment echoed by tens of thousands of Scientologists, they routinely consider Hubbard the most brilliant, kind, and ethical person to ever live.
Executive Director 2 had the same idea that Hubbard had about Hubbard being superior to God. He explained that he believed that long ago, billions of years or longer, some spirit created this universe and had it as a kind of shared universe with multiple spirits having access to it, as opposed to different kinds of earlier universes and of the course the original universe that each spirit started out in as the only spirit present in which they were God, for how long? No one knows, it could have been an eternity or near eternity or it could have been a universe that was so different from our physical universe that all time was different from how we experience it.
A lot of Scientologists believe that either one powerful spirit, God, or several spirits together, long ago made this physical universe and somehow it got away from their control and degraded into a place that is extremely inhospitable to spirits and that they are trapped in and suffer greatly in.
ED 2 said that he thinks of God as the creator of this universe and that he believes God at some point got bored or disappointed with how this universe turned out and left. He sees God as sort of like a slum lord that has given up on his property and left the inhabitants to suffer whatever fate befalls them.
He sees it as a situation in which God abandoned his responsibilities and left everyone and everything in the universe. Of course in his eyes Hubbard came here to save everyone and pick up the hat that God dropped. He also oddly revered Hubbard as a perfect being. We have Scientology doctrine that describes the fact that other religions have told people to not do evil and that beings make mistakes and they need to know what to do when they have done this. He made it clear that all beings commit evil acts and they need to know how to deal with this afterwards, quite explicitly. Of course ED 2 had a different view.
I pointed out this to ED 2 and he simply said that there is no way Hubbard will ever do anything wrong. EVER. FOR ALL ETERNITY. If that's not blind devotion, I don't know what is.
Imagine if Jesus said that every single being does evil, and didn't exclude himself from that category and a loyal Christian said that he disagreed with Jesus Christ and knew that Jesus would never do anything wrong! That would be a pretty devoted Christian!
That's the mindset of numerous Scientologists.
We had a group of staff, maybe a half dozen to a dozen and a half over a period of a year or so and if you have ever seen the American version of the TV show The Office and seen how Dwight and Andy try to outdo each other at flattering their boss Michael Scott then you can see the same thing taken to absurd lengths in Scientology.
We would have a person say that Hubbard could clear anyone! Meaning cause a transformation in that person to a saner and more enlightened state! Then another person, not to be outdone another staff member said Hubbard could instantly transform ALL the people on earth and remove their reactive minds BUT they would be so disoriented by the sudden change that they would be confused, so they need to go through Scientology auditing and training to gradually change, so they can accept and understand the changes they are creating for themselves. This would go on and on with people recalling lectures in which Hubbard described various abilities that OTs are meant to have eons ago like moving planets and stars and creating them and creating life and causing evolution to occur and on and on and just about anything that any God or character in mythology ever did becomes an ability that we could assume Hubbard has attained and surpassed.
It really is hard to get across quite how powerful, perfect, brilliant, infallible and above human was seen as being.
Now, you might think that a few people felt this way and the vast majority of people in Scientology didn't feel this way. But it doesn't make sense. Lots of people used the same extreme terms and concepts to describe Hubbard and the same extreme black and white thinking about how great and never wrong, never limited by ignorance or experience or any other human limitations Hubbard was in all their speeches and written communication on Hubbard and I found this in several different regimes of a local org and we had different EDs and executives and course supervisors and auditors, at various times the staff turned over entirely with new people coming in and old leaving and in group after group after group the idea of Hubbard as messiah was taken for granted as a given, again and again and again.
I found this to be even more true in New York City in the Excalibur building, which is filled with Scientology Sea Org executives at the Continental level, and the same thing was true in Los Angeles at the International Training Organization and the Big Blue Building. I was there during a training for hundreds of students who were being trained to deliver a couple of courses and they have Sea Org members who are the most zealous and fanatical members.
You can look at the terms and framing used to describe Hubbard and the more familiar you are with Scientology terms and practices the more clear it becomes that Hubbard is revered by many thousands of Scientologists as a genuine messiah. They often balk at the description and say that they know Hubbard never said he was a messiah but he over and over and over IMPLIED that he must be the savior of mankind as he says that he alone created Scientology and that Scientology is the only hope for humanity and the technology is his exclusive creation. A creator and presenter of the only way to save mankind would by definition be a savior.
But Hubbard rather than say "I am a savior!", "I am God! Worship me!" took one step away from that and repeatedly described Scientology as infallible, always working when applied correctly, as raising the dead literally, as making the insane sane literally, as solving virtually every problem, as finding the real underlying truth in ever situation and being more true and more relevant to every single situation that anything or anyone can ever possibly experience, with no exceptions and you are left to connect the dots between the miracles that Scientology is supposed to provide and the status of the miracle maker himself in Hubbard!
We have quite a few ex Scientologists and ex Sea Org members who deny ever seeing Hubbard as a messiah but honestly you should not be on Scientology staff or in the Sea Org and should have quite a bit of trouble passing Scientology courses if you don't believe that Hubbard via Scientology is saving humanity. If someone is literally saving humanity by giving them a unique and miraculous technology then by definition that person is a savior.
If they are hesitant to use the term messiah because of an association with Judaism or Christianity they have to accept that a word can have more than one definition and messiah does.
I think that part of the reluctance comes from having to admit that you believed a pathological liar and con man was the messiah makes you look bad and that some people frankly are in denial about how thoroughly they were duped by Scientology.
I have seen numerous exchanges between ex Scientologists who claim they just "tried" Scientology without ever "really believing any of it" and were never fooled like other people! If you ask these people about their time in Scientology they may have spent five to ten to thirty years in Scientology.
One guy might have spent a half million dollars and hundreds of hours in Scientology auditing and hundreds of hours in Scientology indoctrination as part of his "skeptical trial" of Scientology!
Another person may have disconnected from their family, quit their career and spent fifteen years as a Scientology staff member and given up the love of their life, all their friends, their hobbies, even their pets and favorite music are set aside for Scientology, but remember, they "never really believed!"
We have many other similar examples, people endured horrible treatment, no pay, low pay, virtual slavery and on and on and after leaving say they were not really devoted and never really believed! I have to call bullshit for some of these people!
Only you know your own thoughts but it is not believable that ALL these people coincidentally gave up everything and devoted themselves completely to a cause and a leader they never believed in as a "skeptical trial!"
These people gave years of their lives, thousands of hours of labor, endured terrible treatment, and lost their families and their lives very often for Scientology and if they believed in Scientology enough to do that then why wouldn't they believe in Hubbard as well? It just is the only sensible explanation!
So, to sum up, a lot of people in Scientology believes in Hubbard as a savior, a man who transcended human limitations and chose to selflessly stay in our universe of pain and suffering that is highly inhospitable to spirits and dangerous to deliver eternal salvation to everyone.
He is portrayed as overcoming human limitations to heal himself from war wounds after serving heroically in World War II and finding a miraculous way to overcome being crippled and blinded. This sounds pretty good, but why not double and triple down? Hubbard additionally added the idea that he heroically faced something from the far past in his research on the OT III materials and faced the wall of fire and went through it, nearly dying and overcoming death itself to bring back a sacred method to free others eternally as spirits, this is his step into really overly being described as messianic by his deeds. He stepped it up in the materials for OT VIII the Anti Christ edition and obviously tried to both degrade Christ as a child molester AND elevate himself to be the real savior in a Lucifer role that saves humanity.
Ultimately his affirmations in my opinion are essential to decipher his intentions as these were his private self hypnosis commands for himself meant to only be seen by himself.
Ultimately I wanted to provide information to express how we in Scientology had a genuine belief that Hubbard was a messiah and that the belief was not centered on his alleged miraculous recovery from fictional war wounds, it is centered on his alleged transcendence of human limitations and his choice to stay mortal and further face and cross the three walls of fire on OT III, OT V, and finally OT VIII and his denigration and replacement of Christ as the savior of humanity. In his mythology, healing himself is merely the first of many alleged miracles, it's just a warm up to far bigger things that are the core of his identity in Scientology.
Scientology's Dark Messiah Ronald Hubbard-The Mystery, Myth, and Method Behind His Madness
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