Mockingbird's Nest: Scientology Conditions - Their Purpose and Practice (3) You and Your

Scientology Conditions - Their Purpose and Practice

Young Ronald Hubbard

Now there are some things in Scientology that have links and relationships that are often not obvious. But one thing that you get if you are indoctrinated in Scientology doctrine for decades and then leave is time. Time to reflect on your experience and sort out your feelings and beliefs and not face penalties for your actions.

While one is in Scientology it's very rare to get a chance to discuss this and take time to sort out what makes sense to you and what doesn't. And Scientology definitely forbids open discussion of these things and using ideas and models from other subjects to look at your own experience.

It also forbids looking at criticism and negative accounts of Scientology experiences from other people to make sense of it, but real people have been through similar experiences very often in Scientology and looking at their experiences and criticism should be no threat to Scientology if it is a legitimate subject and organization.

I ended up studying hypnosis in 2014 after I left Scientology after twenty five years (1989-2014) and read a couple of books, looked at quite a few others and read many articles and watched many, many videos from people who claimed to be experts on hypnosis. I also read numerous books on cults and psychology to understand the subject.

I am not a person who would give classes or hypnotize people but I certainly understand more than most laymen who don't study it as a profession.

I ended up finding out all kinds of things along the way and it was a very long way.

One thing worth noting is that lots of people who practice hypnosis or similar practices believe in hypnotic writing and things that go by various names like hypnotic language patterns and so on.

If you pick up a few books on hypnosis or NLP or the power of attraction and similar concepts you rapidly realize the authors of these books all seem to have the same techniques.

Many, maybe most of them, claim that by using their powerful communication system that you can persuade individuals to do almost anything including buying things. They usually, it seems, claim you can get a man to buy a car that he neither needs or wants. A lot of them openly claim you can get a woman to sleep with you if she is not remotely attracted to you without protest. That's rape in case it's not clear enough and some of these guys in their books are very open about it.

So, I am generally one to say that if a guy loves NLP or conversational hypnosis or some other type of covert persuasion method, by any name, that's a huge red flag and I would probably never get in business with him and especially would never be vulnerable to him in my personal life if possible. I give this as a very serious warning.

If they are not conflicted about using these covert techniques to make car sales or sell hypnosis courses or books, it's disturbing they use the methods that are marketed for getting women who want to say "no" to say "yes," even though the women don't want to.

One thing that is central to their efforts is their belief that a person can be manipulated by using the terms "you" and "your" quite frequently. The idea that using these terms over and over in speech and writing is persuasive is one I have seen in articles on hypnosis and powerful words. The degree to which they are effective is debatable, but the fact that lots of people who believe in the power of rhetoric or hypnosis to persuade people both believe in these words and use them to attempt to persuade people, is in my opinion well established by their own words and actions.

A lot of books on hypnosis and persuasion feature sections that are jam packed with the words "you" and "your," over and over again. In some cases "you" appears both at the beginning and end of a sentence and the words are used dozens and dozens of times in a few paragraphs.

I have seen it time and time again. When I first started looking at these books I would get annoyed that the author was trying to use covert hypnosis on me as the reader of their book!

I would go to a bookstore that carried such books and look at one after another and realized they were all chocked full of the unethical techniques they promised to teach!

Often a book would describe a technique, then I would see that that very book had it used within that very book, then the next and the next.

When you have a few of these things fresh in your mind with examples it is very easy to see them in the books. Sometimes an author would describe some techniques but use others, but the thing is once you have seen a few you recognize them in any variation.

It is kind of annoying to learn the technique and have the author think you won't recognize it or one that is similar right in front of you. But perhaps they think that anyone who studies the material that much is a good customer or avid wannabe hypnotist like themselves.

And I found ample evidence that Scientology founder Ronald Hubbard was a very knowledgeable hypnotist. He was a poor student in many other ways and a pathological liar and notorious plagiarist but in my opinion he studied and practiced hypnosis for many years.

I do not believe this because he said he did, but because I have found a tremendous amount of evidence that he did. Many of his contemporaries have given accounts of him using hypnosis effectively. In addition he has made hundreds and hundreds of statements about the subject.

I am not going to say that every single one is accurate, because they are not all true, but the degree to which a very, very high number of these statements are in agreement with ideas that appear in various schools of hypnosis is far too great to be coincidence.

Plainly he had to know a lot about hypnosis to be able to make these statements. Imagine if a doctor made hundreds of statements about very specific medical issues and another doctor said "well, he has some unusual ideas, but he has a very thorough education on medicine, despite those ideas." You can assume the person somehow got the knowledge, any other facts about them being as they may.

The work of Jon Atack in my opinion has well established this fact in his excellent articles on Hubbard such as Never Believe a Hypnotist and The Scientology Mythbusting series at The Underground Bunker blog by Tony Ortega.

The Affirmations of Ronald Hubbard shed even more light on this in several ways. For one thing they show his belief in and persistent reliance on hypnosis to be the foundation of his "psychology" as he called it.

For another they show he used the words "you" and "your" in several sections of his self hypnosis scripts. He could have either read these to himself aloud, thought these to himself, or played a recording of them over and over, either while awake or asleep, over and over again every day for decades.

Additionally, a Scientology critic at The Ex Scientologist Message Board (ESMB) ran the transcripts of several taped lectures by Ronald Hubbard through a program that gave number counts for the words used and he found that Hubbard very frequently used the words "you" and "your."

The critic known as Jachs claimed that Hubbard on The Philadelphia Doctorate Course lectures in 1952 (a very frequently studied series of taped lectures that are part of the foundation of Scientology) used the term "you" 20,878 TIMES IN 62 HOURS!

This was described in the blog post: Hubbard Hypnotist Part One: Now And You

Hubbard Hypnotist Part One: Now And You

It took me a very long time to really understand the techniques Hubbard was using and just how widespread they are in Scientology. I had to actually look at the conditions years later and take them step by step, one by one to see that they are used covertly even in the conditions.

I recommend that anyone who wants to understand the mind of a cult leader, or to understand the underlying foundation of Dianetics and Scientology read the affirmations and understand they were private self hypnosis commands intended to influence the mind of Ronald Hubbard and written by Hubbard himself. He likely used them many, many hundreds or thousands of times.

He quite likely bought into the idea that the words "you" and "your" used over and over again are especially persuasive, otherwise it would have made no sense to use them as he did. It's almost an absolute certainty that he knew that hypnotists saw these words as particularly potent in influencing people.

I have broken up the original very long blog post on this topic to make it more manageable as a series of short posts. This is the third in the series of short posts to address this.

I am going to include links to several articles at Mockingbird's Nest blog on Scientology that have either been quoted in this post, or that expand on the topics introduced here.