Lecture #10, October 3, 1968, Class VIII Course

Question answered by honorarykid in Scientology

Anonymous asked this question on 10/9/2000:

I have a question about Lecture #10, 1968. In extreme extract, and at the very beginning, Ron says:

Class VIII Course
Lecture #10
October 3, 1968
By L. Ron Hubbard®

You are going to run into this character starts going round and round and round and they say "the helicopter's going to cra-ash, it's going to cra-ash" and you're looking for a helicopter action. What the hell it's R6 boy and nothin' else. And I don't know, I think for about a day or two it takes this helicopter to crash in R6. Err, there's no helicopter there, the guy's frozen in alcohol and glycol, and sitting in a block, being given a big 3D Cecil B. De Milles special motion picture.

====

I'm curious. Was Hubbard positivly insane?

honorarykid gave this response on 10/9/2000:

According to to cosmology of Scientology as written by L. Ron Hubbard, this helicopter crash imagery comes from the 'R6' incident, which is one of the brainwashing "routines" allegedly run on us all, 75 million years ago (we're all immortal spirit beings) when we were being held captive in frozen glycol by the evil alien galactic ruler, Xenu.

As a Scientologist, one learns about this aspect of the religion at the course level called Operation Thetan 3. It requires many years of "training" and perhaps as much as $350,000.00(US) to reach the OT-3 level. The Church of Scientology never wanted any non-Scientologists to know the OT-3 story, but the cat is out of the bag, and there'll likely be no putting it back. It truly is a bizarre and fanciful story.

Hubbard's life and personality would probably make an interesting case study for some psychiatric or sociological dissertation.

From my reading of Jon Atack's "A Piece of Blue Sky" and Russell Miller's "Bare-Faced Messiah" it would appear that Hubbard grew up with sociopathic tendencies, lying, exaggerating, manipulating others. But he also seemed to need very much the approval of others (or at least he dreaded the disapproval of others), which is, according to my understanding, not typical of sociopaths.

Many people who knew him say that in the early years of Scientology and Dianetics, he was quite cynical, and showed a lot of contempt for his followers, which would indicate that he didn't think very highly of them.

But when I listen to some of the tape excerpts, it seems to me that he is willing to believe the gobbledygook stuff he is saying, even as he knows he's making it up out of whole cloth. He definitely seems to be getting some ego stroking from having a captive, sycophantic audience hanging on his every word.

LRH was also extremely sensitive about odors and scents, and with the presence of soaps in his clothing, perhaps indicating that he had some form of obssessive/compulsive disorder, phobia, or acute allergies or even some mild form of epilepsy.

He was definitely a megalomaniacal individual, with anti-social tendencies.

Near the end of his life, when he was frail and his health was not good, he really did believe that he was covered in Body Thetans (or BTS - BTs are the spirit beings of others who are stuck to us and our bodies). Hubbard did seem to really believe that David Mayo was auditing out of his Body Thetans and improving his health in the process.

Perhaps we can opine that LRH was a bizarre, badly deluded, eccentric sociopath. I'm not sure if that means he was insane. It seems he was always aware of, and able to look after his own narrow self-interests, such as in the late 70s, when he let Mary Sue alone take the rap for their combined misbehaviors in Operation Snow White.

Return to The Skeptic Tank's main Index page.