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A couple of Scientology reviews I never read before

Gib

Gib

Crusader
I stumbled on this blog today which I never read before (from 2012):

http://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/on-scientology-and-science-fiction-where-fiction-meets-religion

snip from it from the Rachel Aviv book review of Hugh Urban book http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n02/rachel-aviv/religion-grrrr:

"‘I’m just kidding you mostly,’ he said. ‘I don’t believe any of these things and I don’t want to be agreed with about them … All I’m asking is that we take a look at this information, and … let’s see if we can’t disagree with this universe, just a little bit.’"
Click to expand...

So Hubbard says he's just kidding about the material from 1954 lecture.

Has anybody run across that quote in Hubbards lectures or remember it?

Yah, saturday morning coffee to read the links and to follow along. Timelines are a little off on the reviews.
 
Francois Tremblay

Francois Tremblay

Patron with Honors
I really like Jason Colavito. He does a lot of great work debunking pseudo-scientific shows about UFOs and archaeology on TV. So you can see why he'd have some interest in Scientology, since it is, after all, a UFO cult... :biggrin:
 
Dulloldfart

Dulloldfart

Squirrel Extraordinaire
Gib said:
Has anybody run across that quote in Hubbards lectures or remember it?
Click to expand...

The quote in the article is

Hubbard told a group of doctoral students in Philadelphia in 1954 that his followers were more convinced of Scientology’s cosmology than he was. ‘I’m just kidding you mostly,’ he said. ‘I don’t believe any of these things and I don’t want to be agreed with about them … All I’m asking is that we take a look at this information, and … let’s see if we can’t disagree with this universe, just a little bit.’​

The quote is taken from the first PDC tape, 1 December 1952:

Now...uh...all this of course is is I'm just I'm just kidding you mostly. I don't believe that you've been in the universe seventy-six trillion years. I don't believe you have any past before birth. I...I don't believe that there's any reason whatsoever for this universe to be here except that some fellow called the devil or something that built it. Uh...I don't believe any of these things. And I don't want to be agreed with about them. It infuriates me to be agreed with about them. So I'm not asking for anybody to agree with me but I'm not asking for anybody to disagree with me either. All I'm asking is that we take a look at this information. And then go through a series of class assigned exercises - each one of you will get a mimeographed piece of paper. And that has a series of exercises on it. And it just says test this and test that. And it gives you a rundown actually on the complete subject. It is asking you to look for phenomena. And you'll complete that before we're finished here. Complete that in the evening or when you're off for the weekend.

It is a very interesting thing but all this phenomena is discoverable. So I'm not asking you to agree with me; I'm actually asking you to find out what you agreed with. And what you have been agreeing with all this time. In order to bring you to such a point of agreement that you're actually here and and think that you should only be here and in the MEST universe and so forth. And examine that track of agreement, so that then you can undo that track of agreement. In other words, let's see if we can't disagree with this universe just a little bit. Not necessarily to destroy the universe. The universe is a good thing. Uh...I know a lot of people that ought to inherit it.​

How I see it is Hubbard was asking the course attendees to not take what he said at face value but to discover things for themselves. On the surface that is eminently sensible, but I suspect Hubbard knew all along that they wouldn't be able to get anywhere near sorting out any of this esoteric stuff by themselves and so would just accept Hubbard's outlandish ideas whole. While thinking how amazing he was to be able to discover it all.

In the early 80s I was the course sup in the AO (Solo Tech Division) at Saint Hill. We got quite a few students doing the PDC Course in there while getting NOTs auditing. I had to assist some students with sorting out what Hubbard was talking about, so I got to dig quite deeply into some of those lectures. I got to be pretty good at sorting out Hubbard's statements, but some parts of those PDC lectures are simply gobbledegook. I used to think students who sailed through them with minimal problems were kidding themselves that they understood them, but it could just be that they knew it was nonsense and were merely playing the game because it was too uncomfortable to be honest about it all.

Paul
 
Elronius of Marcabia

Elronius of Marcabia

Silver Meritorious Patron
Doctorate Course :no::duh: ?

Here we go again, The Good DR WhoBird playing professor to a bunch
of dupes and paying WhoBird what 500$ a head ?

What kind of money is that in 1950's :omg:

How many asked for their money back and how many
just fooled themselves into thinking oh my gawd the professor
was so profound and enlightening!!!

Deep very deep pile of horseshit :angry: Dr WhoBird you fuckin quack :clap::yes:
and yes I bought that set of tapes and listened to all of them several times
over:duh::blush:.

Any chance I can get my 120$ back ?:roflmao:guess not :melodramatic::coolwink:
maybe lil davey of the whacky navy might give me one of his old shoes
that I could throw at him and holler out where is Shelley ? :thumbsup::eyeroll::yes::biggrin:
and how much of Dr WhoBirds cash did you drop at the casino ?

Excuse me davy this shoebox feels a little light, said The WhoBird :biggrin:
to which davy replied...."you must have as-ised it Sir :ohmy::biggrin:
 
Dulloldfart

Dulloldfart

Squirrel Extraordinaire
Elronius of Marcabia said:
No wonder the old fatfuck is grinnin ear to ear :yes:??
5k times how many dupes,errrrrrrrrr I mean doctorate course students :biggrin::coolwink: ?
Click to expand...

Per http://www.bridgepub.com/store/catalog/philadelphia-doctorate-course-lectures.html

It all culminated on December 1, 1952, when Mr. Hubbard arrived in Philadelphia, the first manuscript copy of Scientology 8-8008 in hand. The thirty-eight selected students eagerly crowded into the course room at the Foundation offices at 237 North 16th Street in downtown Philadelphia. As one student recalls, “None of us, even those who’d heard him lecture many times in Wichita and Phoenix, were prepared for the fantastic pyrotechnics of the evenings.”​

Accurate? Who knows? But 38 x $5000 = $190,000.

Paul
 
pineapple

pineapple

Silver Meritorious Patron
Dulloldfart said:
... snip ...
How I see it is Hubbard was asking the course attendees to not take what he said at face value but to discover things for themselves. On the surface that is eminently sensible, but I suspect Hubbard knew all along that they wouldn't be able to get anywhere near sorting out any of this esoteric stuff by themselves and so would just accept Hubbard's outlandish ideas whole. While thinking how amazing he was to be able to discover it all.
... snip ...
Paul
Click to expand...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rW8fDw8VzKI
 
Moosejewels

Moosejewels

Patron Meritorious
Dulloldfart said:
The quote in the article is

. I used to think students who sailed through them with minimal problems were kidding themselves that they understood them, but it could just be that they knew it was nonsense and were merely playing the game because it was too uncomfortable to be honest about it all.

Paul
Click to expand...
_____________________________

Paul, you say it so well. I used to think I was the dumbass in the academy so I played the game. Passing on to the next course and action. Then one day it really became real to me (took some years), and lo and behold, I realized that these people, as I, had no clue as to what they had just read or listened to, but they played the game. It had nothing to do with M/U's. As you said, much of it was gobbledegook. :yes:
 
Gib

Gib

Crusader
Moosejewels said:
_____________________________

Paul, you say it so well. I used to think I was the dumbass in the academy so I played the game. Passing on to the next course and action. Then one day it really became real to me (took some years), and lo and behold, I realized that these people, as I, had no clue as to what they had just read or listened to, but they played the game. It had nothing to do with M/U's. As you said, much of it was gobbledegook. :yes:
Click to expand...

Funny you say that and Paul. I was on course circa 2011/12, doing a course from the basics, forget now the name of the series. One day the course sup says to me, do you understand that stuff? I say "yah". The course sup says "I don't". I was confused to say the least at that statement.

You have to understand the course sup was OT8. I was thinking when the sup asked me, it was a test for M/U's. Some background, a month or so earlier I had received the Debbie Cook email and I was secretly researching the internet so I had to really put on that happy face, whats funny is because I was happy finding out the truth, things I always thought were off base, and finding out I was right with my own past observations and then at the time also reading other peoples stories.

A few long months later I stopped going on course, and a few months after that I find out the OT8 sup left staff and moved to a place unknown. I have a feeling the course sup also received the Cook email and was also researching the internet.
 
Dulloldfart

Dulloldfart

Squirrel Extraordinaire
Moosejewels said:
_____________________________

Paul, you say it so well. I used to think I was the dumbass in the academy so I played the game. Passing on to the next course and action. Then one day it really became real to me (took some years), and lo and behold, I realized that these people, as I, had no clue as to what they had just read or listened to, but they played the game. It had nothing to do with M/U's. As you said, much of it was gobbledegook. :yes:
Click to expand...

Gib said:
Funny you say that and Paul. <snip>
Click to expand...

In my post I was referring only to some of the PDC materials as gobbledegook. I felt I pretty much understood the rest of Hubbard's stuff, at least the stuff that was on courses. Understood what he was saying, not necessarily agreed with or thought it was sensible.

Moosejewels seemed to generalise my statement up to more of Hubbard's stuff than the PDC I was commenting on.

I continued sup'ing on and off until 1995. At no time did I think that students were deliberately signing off stuff they hadn't a clue about because it was the only way to get on. I (naively) assumed they thought they understood it, even at a superficial level.

Paul
 
Gib

Gib

Crusader
Dulloldfart said:
In my post I was referring only to some of the PDC materials as gobbledegook. I felt I pretty much understood the rest of Hubbard's stuff, at least the stuff that was on courses. Understood what he was saying, not necessarily agreed with or thought it was sensible.

Moosejewels seemed to generalise my statement up to more of Hubbard's stuff than the PDC I was commenting on.

I continued sup'ing on and off until 1995. At no time did I think that students were deliberately signing off stuff they hadn't a clue about because it was the only way to get on. I (naively) assumed they thought they understood it, even at a superficial level.

Paul
Click to expand...

No worries, I understood what you said. I listened to the PDC's when I was a rookie, before I joined staff, and had some 250 hours of dianetics auditing. Back in 1987. I wanted to go straight to the top, gleam and learn the secrets of the universe by Hubbard, right now, at the time. I figured since I didn't really fully understand the PDC's as a rookie, (although I did learn some things, which escape now), why, when I would get onto the OT levels of OT1-OT8, why I'd understand what Hubbard said in the PDC's. So I accepted the gradient approach. But, in my early years, I did go "up the pole", Hubbard created in my mind the ecstatic of achieving OT.
 
George Layton

George Layton

Silver Meritorious Patron
Dulloldfart said:
The quote in the article is

Hubbard told a group of doctoral students in Philadelphia in 1954 that his followers were more convinced of Scientology’s cosmology than he was. ‘I’m just kidding you mostly,’ he said. ‘I don’t believe any of these things and I don’t want to be agreed with about them … All I’m asking is that we take a look at this information, and … let’s see if we can’t disagree with this universe, just a little bit.’​


The quote is taken from the first PDC tape, 1 December 1952:

Now...uh...all this of course is is I'm just I'm just kidding you mostly. I don't believe that you've been in the universe seventy-six trillion years. I don't believe you have any past before birth. I...I don't believe that there's any reason whatsoever for this universe to be here except that some fellow called the devil or something that built it. Uh...I don't believe any of these things. And I don't want to be agreed with about them. It infuriates me to be agreed with about them. So I'm not asking for anybody to agree with me but I'm not asking for anybody to disagree with me either. All I'm asking is that we take a look at this information. And then go through a series of class assigned exercises - each one of you will get a mimeographed piece of paper. And that has a series of exercises on it. And it just says test this and test that. And it gives you a rundown actually on the complete subject. It is asking you to look for phenomena. And you'll complete that before we're finished here. Complete that in the evening or when you're off for the weekend.

It is a very interesting thing but all this phenomena is discoverable. So I'm not asking you to agree with me; I'm actually asking you to find out what you agreed with. And what you have been agreeing with all this time. In order to bring you to such a point of agreement that you're actually here and and think that you should only be here and in the MEST universe and so forth. And examine that track of agreement, so that then you can undo that track of agreement. In other words, let's see if we can't disagree with this universe just a little bit. Not necessarily to destroy the universe. The universe is a good thing. Uh...I know a lot of people that ought to inherit it.​


How I see it is Hubbard was asking the course attendees to not take what he said at face value but to discover things for themselves. On the surface that is eminently sensible, but I suspect Hubbard knew all along that they wouldn't be able to get anywhere near sorting out any of this esoteric stuff by themselves and so would just accept Hubbard's outlandish ideas whole. While thinking how amazing he was to be able to discover it all.

In the early 80s I was the course sup in the AO (Solo Tech Division) at Saint Hill. We got quite a few students doing the PDC Course in there while getting NOTs auditing. I had to assist some students with sorting out what Hubbard was talking about, so I got to dig quite deeply into some of those lectures. I got to be pretty good at sorting out Hubbard's statements, but some parts of those PDC lectures are simply gobbledegook. I used to think students who sailed through them with minimal problems were kidding themselves that they understood them, but it could just be that they knew it was nonsense and were merely playing the game because it was too uncomfortable to be honest about it all.

Paul
Click to expand...

After his first paragraph, along with the "exercises" he hands out " And it gives you a rundown actually on the complete subject(an actual rundown of the complete subject put together by whom?) he circles back to "the phenomena" So I'm not asking you to agree with me; I'm actually asking you to find out what you agreed with. He is setting them up to define what they "are agreeing with". He is back to his trick of "beware of __________, while he feeds them the very _________ that he has warned them about.
 
Jump

Jump

Operating teatime
George Layton said:
After his first paragraph, along with the "exercises" he hands out " And it gives you a rundown actually on the complete subject(an actual rundown of the complete subject put together by whom?) he circles back to "the phenomena" So I'm not asking you to agree with me; I'm actually asking you to find out what you agreed with. He is setting them up to define what they "are agreeing with". He is back to his trick of "beware of __________, while he feeds them the very _________ that he has warned them about.
Click to expand...


The hypnotic message seems to be - agree, agree, agreement, agree, think about your disagreement and just agree.
 
Little David

Little David

Gold Meritorious Patron
Today on The Underground Bunker:

In 2011, an Ohio State University professor named Hugh Urban came out with a book he titled The Church of Scientology: A History of a New Religion. We wrote about the book when it came out and interviewed the man.
Click to expand...

Urban’s book was not on our recommended reading list that we provided the other day, but not because it lacks importance. Urban’s book is significant because it’s an academic’s attempt to put together various court documents and other historical records to establish just what Scientology is. And even though Urban, like so many other academics, questions the value of testimony from Scientology defectors, he still provides a rather stark assessment of L. Ron Hubbard’s creation. Hubbard was a collector of ideas from various movements before him, and had cobbled something together that had taken on a life of its own, Urban explained.

We mention this today because recently, someone at the ESMB forum noticed that a review of Urban’s book byNew Yorker writer Rachel Aviv showed up in the London Review of Books in 2012, and it contained a rather startling quote from Hubbard. We remember when Aviv’s review appeared, but we can understand why, four years later, that quote caused a bit of a stir over at ESMB. Here’s the relevant paragraph from Aviv’s review…
Click to expand...


http://tonyortega.org/2016/05/16/di...s-what-he-admitted-about-scientology-in-1952/
 
chuckbeatty

chuckbeatty

Patron with Honors
Dulloldfart said:
In my post I was referring only to some of the PDC materials as gobbledegook. I felt I pretty much understood the rest of Hubbard's stuff, at least the stuff that was on courses. Understood what he was saying, not necessarily agreed with or thought it was sensible.

Moosejewels seemed to generalise my statement up to more of Hubbard's stuff than the PDC I was commenting on.

I continued sup'ing on and off until 1995. At no time did I think that students were deliberately signing off stuff they hadn't a clue about because it was the only way to get on. I (naively) assumed they thought they understood it, even at a superficial level.

Paul
Click to expand...


Paul

thankyou so much for your honest answers.

You ought to be interviewed by academics, you have an excellent grip of things and are literate enough to explain the details.

After all these years, it is disheartening that there isn't really more serious academic study of Hubbard.

You're a treasure of history Paul, going unnoticed, it's disheartening.

But again, the subject, Hubbard's subject, isn't exactly worthy of the time that people spent to become expert in it.

Anyways, thanks for all time Paul, your posts are the best in my opinion for accuracy and emphasis.

Chuck
 
Gib

Gib

Crusader
chuckbeatty said:
Paul

thankyou so much for your honest answers.

You ought to be interviewed by academics, you have an excellent grip of things and are literate enough to explain the details.

After all these years, it is disheartening that there isn't really more serious academic study of Hubbard.

You're a treasure of history Paul, going unnoticed, it's disheartening.

But again, the subject, Hubbard's subject, isn't exactly worthy of the time that people spent to become expert in it.

Anyways, thanks for all time Paul, your posts are the best in my opinion for accuracy and emphasis.

Chuck
Click to expand...

Here you go Chuck:

https://www.questia.com/read/1G1-373747937/the-seeker-consumer-scientology-and-the-rhetoric

https://www.uni-marburg.de/fb03/ivk/mjr/pdfs/2003/articles/breit2003.pdf

opps, forgot this one:

http://www.forum.exscn.net/showthre...sicientology&p=1074420&viewfull=1#post1074420

specifically this:

http://www.lisamcpherson.org/hayakawa.htm


"I have long felt that there are dangers to the writer as well as to the reader in pulp fiction. It did not occur to me until I read Dianetics to try to analyze the special dangers entailed in the profession of science-fiction writing. The art consists in concealing from the reader, for novelistic purposes, the distinctions between established scientific facts, almost-established scientific hypotheses, scientific conjectures, and imaginative extrapolations far beyond what has even been conjectured. The danger of this technique lies in the fact that, if the writer of science-fiction writes too much of it too fast and too glibly and is not endowed from the beginning with a high degree of semantic self-insight (consciousness of abstracting), he may eventually succeed in concealing the distinction between his facts and his imaginings from himself. In other words, the space-ships and the men of Mars and the atomic disintegrator pistols acquire so vivid a verbal existence that they may begin to have, in the writer's evaluations, 'actual' existence. Like Willy Loman in The Death of a Salesman, he may eventually fall for his own, pitch."

 
Gib

Gib

Crusader
Gib said:
Here you go Chuck:

https://www.questia.com/read/1G1-373747937/the-seeker-consumer-scientology-and-the-rhetoric

https://www.uni-marburg.de/fb03/ivk/mjr/pdfs/2003/articles/breit2003.pdf

opps, forgot this one:

http://www.forum.exscn.net/showthre...sicientology&p=1074420&viewfull=1#post1074420

specifically this:

http://www.lisamcpherson.org/hayakawa.htm


"I have long felt that there are dangers to the writer as well as to the reader in pulp fiction. It did not occur to me until I read Dianetics to try to analyze the special dangers entailed in the profession of science-fiction writing. The art consists in concealing from the reader, for novelistic purposes, the distinctions between established scientific facts, almost-established scientific hypotheses, scientific conjectures, and imaginative extrapolations far beyond what has even been conjectured. The danger of this technique lies in the fact that, if the writer of science-fiction writes too much of it too fast and too glibly and is not endowed from the beginning with a high degree of semantic self-insight (consciousness of abstracting), he may eventually succeed in concealing the distinction between his facts and his imaginings from himself. In other words, the space-ships and the men of Mars and the atomic disintegrator pistols acquire so vivid a verbal existence that they may begin to have, in the writer's evaluations, 'actual' existence. Like Willy Loman in The Death of a Salesman, he may eventually fall for his own, pitch."
Click to expand...

Here's another one:

http://ac-journal.org/journal/vol4/iss1/articles/frobish.htm
 
Gib

Gib

Crusader
O

Operating Wog

Patron with Honors
To me, this was at the heart of all the deception in Scientology:

Phase 1: You don't have to believe in Scientology. You don't have to agree with Scientology. Think for yourself. What is true for your is true for you. Just look at the data and look around you and see whether or not you agree. It's not faith, it's science. It's all about observable results.

Phase 2: Oh, you don't agree with the material in this book/bulletin/lecture, huh? Well maybe you don't fully understand with what he is saying. Let's look for some misunderstood words...

Phase 3: You disagree with this technology? Is there someone in your life who is against Scientology? It sounds like you're PTS. And probably you have some out ethics going on, too. We really need to clear this up.

Phase 4: You don't agree with my interpretation of policy??? Get down to the basement and do mest work for the next month! Then write your o/ws and do lower conditions.

Phase 5: You are declared a suppressive person for not following standard technology.
 
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