everfree
Patron Meritorious
It was almost inevitable that my path would cross that of Hubbard's. I was raised with dreams of peace on earth by a feminist hippy mom. I was a very bright kid, learned the Scientific Method at a very young age. I learned much faster than my peers in school. I would understand a week's worth of lessons in the first 20 minutes or so, then be bored out of my skull for days. I have always loathed having insufficient intellectual stimulation, it is very painful for me, I flounder. So even though I always knew all the answers, read at a college level by 11 or 12, got A's on all tests, and spent a great deal of time helping my peers understand, I hated school. It was a miserable experience for me, I felt alienated.
I didn't feel like I learned much in school, but on my own you couldn't stop me from learning. I did science projects, played with my chemistry set, took everything apart to see how it worked, had my nose in a book at all times, built radios. All on my own. No one ever had to tell me to study and learn. I was highly interested in physics and the other physical sciences, had aspirations of perhaps being a physicist, perhaps a astrophysicist. I learned about the theory of relativity as a teenager. I read philosophy for pleasure, many works of Plato. I read about mysticism like Carlos Castaneda. One of my heroes was Sci Fi Author Robert Heinlein, who was friends with Hubbard. Through him I learned of General Semantics and attempted "Science And Sanity" by Korzybski. In contrast to the misery I experienced at school, I took great joy in learning and in contemplating the great questions of life: who are we, where did we come from, what is out place in the universe, how do we really know anything etc etc.
When I was introduced to Scientology, one of the first things I really appreciated was the checksheet and corresponding self-paced study.
I could see that like me Hubbard was really smart and I immediately suspected he had similar experiences to me in school, which he had fixed with self paced study. I was really excited, because I knew that if I had had that in my school growing up, instead of feeling alienated I would have had a college degree when I was a teenager and got multiple advanced degrees as astrophysicist or maybe something else interesting may have caught my attention. I knew it! And I knew that there had to be other bright young students out there suffering similar fate and now I had a tool to fix it! It was very natural for me to become a Course Supervisor, because learning and teaching is what I'm all about.
It was a huge deal for me. I resonated with Hubbard. When I did the Student Hat and he described the education of Alistair Crowley devotee and rocket scientist Jack Parson's education as someone giving him some equipment and letting him have at it, I was super excited about that too because I knew if I had even had that that my life would have been so much better. This Hubbard fellow, he's pretty smart indeed.
But then there was something else I learned on Student Hat. On one of the tapes he takes a pot shot at Einstein, saying something like the speed of light can't be a constant, otherwise it wouldn't be split by a prism, so there may not even be anything to Einstein's work.
It is very true that the speed of light isn't a constant when it goes through a prism. Isaac Newton and others had pioneered optics and prisms back in the late 1600s and it was well known that light changed speeds while transversing differing media (air to glass, air to water etc).
The constant C in Einstein's famous equation E=MC(2) is the speed of light IN A VACUUM.
When I encountered Hubbard making this obvious elementary mistake it really threw me because I had known better since I was 12 or 13. I quickly came to terms that Hubbard wasn't infallible and sometimes criticized things that he really didn't understand and even though he was wrong it was at least a bright observation. He just wan't a physicist. No big deal, neither am I.
However, many years later I came into possession of an old copy of the Scn book "All About Radiation by a Nuclear Physicist and Medical Doctor" - the nuclear physicist of course refering to Hubbard. The inside cover says "L. Ron Hubbard, one of America's first nuclear physicists, famed author, and explorer, has comprehensively analyzed these facts..."
Even though he was missing most basic facts about nuclear physics that a smart teenager might know, he was representing himself as a nuclear physicist with the ability to speak authoritatively about it. He had actually taken one class on the subject in school, and I believe he got a D in the class.
This lead me to conclude that although he was quite bright, not only does Hubbard at least sometimes opine about things he knows not wot of, he has also represented himself as some thing that he is not, and has at least on this occasion pretended authority that he does not have.
Personally, I believe it is important to keep that in mind when evaluating Hubbard.
These were the things that first attracted me to Hubbard, and the things that first started getting me out again.
I didn't feel like I learned much in school, but on my own you couldn't stop me from learning. I did science projects, played with my chemistry set, took everything apart to see how it worked, had my nose in a book at all times, built radios. All on my own. No one ever had to tell me to study and learn. I was highly interested in physics and the other physical sciences, had aspirations of perhaps being a physicist, perhaps a astrophysicist. I learned about the theory of relativity as a teenager. I read philosophy for pleasure, many works of Plato. I read about mysticism like Carlos Castaneda. One of my heroes was Sci Fi Author Robert Heinlein, who was friends with Hubbard. Through him I learned of General Semantics and attempted "Science And Sanity" by Korzybski. In contrast to the misery I experienced at school, I took great joy in learning and in contemplating the great questions of life: who are we, where did we come from, what is out place in the universe, how do we really know anything etc etc.
When I was introduced to Scientology, one of the first things I really appreciated was the checksheet and corresponding self-paced study.
I could see that like me Hubbard was really smart and I immediately suspected he had similar experiences to me in school, which he had fixed with self paced study. I was really excited, because I knew that if I had had that in my school growing up, instead of feeling alienated I would have had a college degree when I was a teenager and got multiple advanced degrees as astrophysicist or maybe something else interesting may have caught my attention. I knew it! And I knew that there had to be other bright young students out there suffering similar fate and now I had a tool to fix it! It was very natural for me to become a Course Supervisor, because learning and teaching is what I'm all about.
It was a huge deal for me. I resonated with Hubbard. When I did the Student Hat and he described the education of Alistair Crowley devotee and rocket scientist Jack Parson's education as someone giving him some equipment and letting him have at it, I was super excited about that too because I knew if I had even had that that my life would have been so much better. This Hubbard fellow, he's pretty smart indeed.
But then there was something else I learned on Student Hat. On one of the tapes he takes a pot shot at Einstein, saying something like the speed of light can't be a constant, otherwise it wouldn't be split by a prism, so there may not even be anything to Einstein's work.
It is very true that the speed of light isn't a constant when it goes through a prism. Isaac Newton and others had pioneered optics and prisms back in the late 1600s and it was well known that light changed speeds while transversing differing media (air to glass, air to water etc).
The constant C in Einstein's famous equation E=MC(2) is the speed of light IN A VACUUM.
When I encountered Hubbard making this obvious elementary mistake it really threw me because I had known better since I was 12 or 13. I quickly came to terms that Hubbard wasn't infallible and sometimes criticized things that he really didn't understand and even though he was wrong it was at least a bright observation. He just wan't a physicist. No big deal, neither am I.
However, many years later I came into possession of an old copy of the Scn book "All About Radiation by a Nuclear Physicist and Medical Doctor" - the nuclear physicist of course refering to Hubbard. The inside cover says "L. Ron Hubbard, one of America's first nuclear physicists, famed author, and explorer, has comprehensively analyzed these facts..."
Even though he was missing most basic facts about nuclear physics that a smart teenager might know, he was representing himself as a nuclear physicist with the ability to speak authoritatively about it. He had actually taken one class on the subject in school, and I believe he got a D in the class.
This lead me to conclude that although he was quite bright, not only does Hubbard at least sometimes opine about things he knows not wot of, he has also represented himself as some thing that he is not, and has at least on this occasion pretended authority that he does not have.
Personally, I believe it is important to keep that in mind when evaluating Hubbard.
These were the things that first attracted me to Hubbard, and the things that first started getting me out again.