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Clams

Tilly

Patron
I was looking through my glossary of scn terms and it said:

Clams
to C
to index
Man descended from them according to "History of Man" by L. Ron Hubbard, and the incident gives us painful engrams (memories) of being dropped onto rocks by birds, and extreme jaw pain from the bivalve's hinge. This has been a running joke on ars for some time, with threads about clambakes, clam chowder, snapping clams, clams in .sig files, etc., although some now see it as a pejorative and have quit using it.


My husband keeps saying that someone forgot to close the back door at the insane asylum and that's how LRH got out.
 

TheOriginalBigBlue

Gold Meritorious Patron
The clam origin mythology is from "A History of Man":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology:_A_History_of_Man

Just for the sake of discussion, what would the earliest life forms have been in human evolution between an ocean going single cell organism and a mammal, assuming we weren't planted here already sufficiently evolved by aliens?

Personally I think LRH should have gone with something more like squirrels or aye-ayes but that was already being used as a pejorative, although it too would explain some tooth and jaw related issues and maybe even the Marty Feldman look commonly associated with Scientologists.
 

Tilly

Patron
Personally I don't believe in past lives. I guess I'd be up the creek without a paddle if I couldn't conjure up a past life. I can see how someone could go bat shit crazy in scn.
 

TheOriginalBigBlue

Gold Meritorious Patron
I still have the book but not going to go dig it up. Yes, clams were about the genetic entity as I recall also. But, thetans are trillions of years old and can be in anything so I suppose it isn't beyond Scientological logic that somewhere along the line thetans tried living as clams, especially if there wasn't much else around.

LRH has something for everybody. If you don't believe in past lives there is Dianetics. Scientology if you do and Targs and BTs for everybody else.

Scientology never had a monopoly on believing crazy stuff. By today's standards it should be very popular but at it's core it is ruthless and cruel and that isn't so popular.
 

Tilly

Patron
I still have the book but not going to go dig it up. Yes, clams were about the genetic entity as I recall also. But, thetans are trillions of years old and can be in anything so I suppose it isn't beyond Scientological logic that somewhere along the line thetans tried living as clams, especially if there wasn't much else around.

LRH has something for everybody. If you don't believe in past lives there is Dianetics. Scientology if you do and Targs and BTs for everybody else.

Scientology never had a monopoly on believing crazy stuff. By today's standards it should be very popular but at it's core it is ruthless and cruel and that isn't so popular.
Do thetans have bodies or are they just spirit?
 

strativarius

Inveterate gnashnab & snoutband
I do understand that, but, I'm trying to get a working knowledge of what scn teaches.
Well, that's a pretty tall order, you'd have to read a lot of Hubbard's books and listen to a lot of his tapes in order to do that. But if that's too detailed I'm sure there are overviews published here and there on the 'net.

You could start here perhaps.
 

Tilly

Patron
Well, that's a pretty tall order, you'd have to read a lot of Hubbard's books and listen to a lot of his tapes in order to do that. But if that's too detailed I'm sure there are overviews published here and there on the 'net.

You could start here perhaps.
What is supposed to happen to the earth that hasn't happened yet according to what LRH said, was it supposed to be cleaned up by now?
 

strativarius

Inveterate gnashnab & snoutband
What is supposed to happen to the earth that hasn't happened yet according to what LRH said, was it supposed to be cleaned up by now?
I'm not sure I fully understand your question, but the goal of scientology was to 'Clear the Planet', in other words to rid the human race of aberrated behavior so we could all live together in peace and harmony - a world without insanity and war etc. etc.

This fits in with Hubbard's MO, the setting of unobtainable goals, ie. Clear and OT, so that there is always one more level to attain, one more step to take without ever reaching a concrete end result.
 
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EZ Linus

Cleared Tomato
I believe he didn't just want to clear the planet. He wanted to clear a whole area of the Universe, didn't he? Ridiculous.

I didn't believe in past lives when I got in either. The auditor (counselor) has a way of pulling it out of you. Think of the sessions you do in Scientology like regression therapy. You are asked for earlier similar incidents, and you keep remembering back in time until you can't remember any further back.

Then, your auditor will keep asking you to remember anyhow. They will ask you what you are picturing there in your black, NON-memory--anything at all! Now, in comes your imagination. It will be processed as if it is a memory. The first few times you do this, you will think things like, I saw that in a movie, or I read that in a book. After a while, it doesn't matter anymore because you feel euphoric when you are finished with the session.
 

TheOriginalBigBlue

Gold Meritorious Patron
Do thetans have bodies or are they just spirit?
You say tomato...

LRH said that he had to use new words to avoid confusion with older or other concepts. Maybe this would be true in an honest effort but he also used nomenclature to create a ideological bubble. Scientologists work very hard to become adept at using this to an extreme where they are silly even to other Scientologists. But yes, "thetan" is essentially the same thing as a spirit.

Once you accept the premise of spirit it opens up a virtually unlimited potential of possibilities. How old are they, when and where and how did they start, are there other universes, how many lives do they live, can they die, what kinds of bodies or things can they live in, how many planets or alien civilizations have they lived in, what is their ultimate potential, etc, etc. I got into Scientology because I believed in spirituality and it seemed to coincide with my already existing orientation but that can be a problem if you haven't developed critical thinking skills, if your moral/ethical foundation is immature or untested, and especially if you are naive and susceptible to scams. Being intelligent or having a great imagination that enables you to recognize or envision potential can be a liability where Scientology is concerned.

Both believing in spirit or not believing in spirit present ethical dilemmas. If you believe in yourself as an immortal spirit then ethics can become relative. What is the importance of anything if it is all transient? And if you do not believe in spirit then what is the importance of anything if this is all there is? Scientologists become spiritually morally and ethically relativistic. This is why it is so important to have a system based on justice and LRH even provides that, but Scientology ethics is based on spiritual relativism, that, and shifting all responsibility for fault onto something or somebody other than Scientology or LRH. Once you accept that Scientology and LRH can only be right then by extension everything else can be wrong and all you need to do is provide a long detailed list of rational for why things are wrong.

This is one of the most interesting contradictions in Scientology - that it preaches open communication, freedom and independence while corralling people into slavery and then getting them to inflict slavery onto others.
 
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pineapple

Silver Meritorious Patron
I was looking through my glossary of scn terms and it said:

Clams
to C
to index
Man descended from them according to "History of Man" by L. Ron Hubbard, and the incident gives us painful engrams (memories) of being dropped onto rocks by birds, and extreme jaw pain from the bivalve's hinge. This has been a running joke on ars for some time, with threads about clambakes, clam chowder, snapping clams, clams in .sig files, etc., although some now see it as a pejorative and have quit using it.


My husband keeps saying that someone forgot to close the back door at the insane asylum and that's how LRH got out.
Not to imply that it isn't batshit crazy, but The Clam plays no significant part in modern scn. That was from circa 1952 when the e-meter was first introduced and LRH was really having a field day getting into past lives. Scios today (or in my day, the 1970's) don't believe man descended from clams. LRH later decided that evolution was an implant, a falsely implanted idea. While it's considered severely "out-tech" to label anything LRH said "old, not used now," that's what The Clam is: old and not used now (except by jokers and degraders like us).

Of course if a pc were to run a Clam incident in session today, the auditor would calmly accept it, as he would anything the pc said. The auditor promises not to invalidate or correct the pc's data.

As for your husband's remark about Hubbard and the insane asylum, no one really knows what Hubbard actually believed himself, and what it served his purpose to have us believe. Hubbard was crazy, but not necessarily in that way.

I think the purpose of all this far-out whole track stuff is ultimately to break down the preclear's ability to distinguish fantasy from reality, so that eventually he will accept whatever he is told by Hubbard, who is the supreme authority on everything. Hubbard's purpose, ultimately, was to make all men his slaves. I think sometimes he may have just said to himself, "Let's see what other crazy shit I can get them to believe."
 

F.Bullbait

Oh, a wise guy,eh?
Thetans do not exist. They are a figment of a psychotic science-fiction writer's imagination.
Ya.

The old man made that quite clear at the beginning:

"Axiom 1"

"Life is basically a static. DEFINITION: A life static has no mass, no motion, no wavelength, no location in space or in time."

Then after affirming that this does not exist, he confounds that statement by saying "It has the ability to postulate and to perceive".

Voila! Nothing becomes something: an it.

Isn't imagination great?


:)
 

TheOriginalBigBlue

Gold Meritorious Patron
Ya.

The old man made that quite clear at the beginning:

"Axiom 1"

"Life is basically a static. DEFINITION: A life static has no mass, no motion, no wavelength, no location in space or in time."

Then after affirming that this does not exist, he confounds that statement by saying "It has the ability to postulate and to perceive".

Voila! Nothing becomes something: an it.

Isn't imagination great?


:)
"A thetan is not a nothingness". Isn't that how it went?
 

TheOriginalBigBlue

Gold Meritorious Patron
Not to imply that it isn't batshit crazy, but The Clam plays no significant part in modern scn. That was from circa 1952 when the e-meter was first introduced and LRH was really having a field day getting into past lives. Scios today (or in my day, the 1970's) don't believe man descended from clams. LRH later decided that evolution was an implant, a falsely implanted idea. While it's considered severely "out-tech" to label anything LRH said "old, not used now," that's what The Clam is: old and not used now (except by jokers and degraders like us).

Of course if a pc were to run a Clam incident in session today, the auditor would calmly accept it, as he would anything the pc said. The auditor promises not to invalidate or correct the pc's data.

As for your husband's remark about Hubbard and the insane asylum, no one really knows what Hubbard actually believed himself, and what it served his purpose to have us believe. Hubbard was crazy, but not necessarily in that way.

I think the purpose of all this far-out whole track stuff is ultimately to break down the preclear's ability to distinguish fantasy from reality, so that eventually he will accept whatever he is told by Hubbard, who is the supreme authority on everything. Hubbard's purpose, ultimately, was to make all men his slaves. I think sometimes he may have just said to himself, "Let's see what other crazy shit I can get them to believe."
I pretty much agree with the point that the Clam story isn't dwelled on much by Scientologists. It is kind of a brief esoteric historical reference and there are probably a lot of Scientologists who haven't even read A History of Man. I never thought of it until I saw it being used as a euphemism for Scientologists on the internet. My assumption is that it was picked up on by Seventh Day Adventist types who also liked to say that "Thetan" was Satan with a lisp.
 

pineapple

Silver Meritorious Patron
I pretty much agree with the point that the Clam story isn't dwelled on much by Scientologists. It is kind of a brief esoteric historical reference and there are probably a lot of Scientologists who haven't even read A History of Man. I never thought of it until I saw it being used as a euphemism for Scientologists on the internet. My assumption is that it was picked up on by Seventh Day Adventist types who also liked to say that "Thetan" was Satan with a lisp.
And LRH used to say "Get thee behind me, thetan." :)
 
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