Scientology: A History of Man: Difference between revisions

Template:ScientologySeries The Church of Scientology bases most of their beliefs on human history from the information provided from the Church's founder, L. Ron Hubbard. In 1952, Hubbard wrote a book called What To Audit, which was later renamed A History of Man. This book is still in print from the Church of Scientology, although it currently does not appear on their online bookstore.

In the introduction of A History of Man, Hubbard claimed the book was "a cold blooded look at your last 60 trillion years." Beginner-level Scientologists are often unaware of this data, as they are often told that Hubbard's "History of Man" is an upper-level book. They are discouraged from buying it until they are already well-conditioned and indoctrinated into the Operating Thetan levels.

Spiritual Entities in Man

A History of Man explains that the human body is occupied by both a thetan and a 'genetic entity', or GE, which is a sort of low-grade soul located more or less in the centre of the body.

Thetans

Hubbard created an entire Space Opera cosmology, the essence of which was that the true self of an individual was an immortal, omniscient and omnipotent entity called a 'thetan'. In existence before the beginning of time, thetans picked up and discarded millions of bodies over trillions of years. "You are a Thetan, a spiritual being", Hubbard often said, "not your eyes, not your brain, but you." As one progresses to higher levels of Church doctrine, one is told that one must divest oneself of alien Body Thetans.

Genetic Entities

The “genetic entity" enters the protoplasm line some two days or a week prior to conception. Hubbard claims that there is some evidence that the GE is actually double, one entering on the sperm side. The GE carried on through the evolutionary line, 'usually on the same planet', whereas the thetan only came to earth about 35,000 years ago to supervise the development of the caveman into homo sapiens. Thus the GE was once 'an anthropoid in the deep forests of forgetten continents or a mollusk seeking to survive on the shore of some lost sea'. Hubbard claimed that his discovery of the GE 'makes it possible at last to vindicate the theory of evolution proposed by Darwin.

According to Hubbard, Thetans abandoned bodies earlier than GEs, it appeared. While the GE stayed around to see the body through to death, thetans were obliged to report to a between-lives 'implant station' where they were implanted with a variety of control phases while waiting to pick up another body, sometimes in competition with other disembodied thetans. Hubbard revealed that most implant stations were on Mars, although women occasionally had to report elsewhere in the solar system and there was a 'Martian implant station somewhere in the Pyrenees'.

The importance of the GE has been downplayed by the Church of Scientology in recent years, though it is still acknowledged. [4]

Scientology’s history of human evolution

Much of A History of Man is devoted to a pseudoscientific re-working of evolution, starting with 'an atom, complete with electronic rings' after which came a cosmic impact producing a 'photon converter', the first single-cell creature, then seaweed, jellyfish and the clam. There is no basis for any of Hubbard's claims in mainstream science, nor did Hubbard offer any hard data or analysis of why he believed this evolutionary order to be correct; it is simply proclaimed as fact.

Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard believed mankind descended from clams.

The Clam

The clam and its supposed eventual evolution into humans is what Hubbard claims explains some of the "engram" troubles most people suffer from. According to Hubbard, many engrams can be traced back to clams. The clam's big problem was that there was a conflict between the hinge that wanted to open and the hinge that wanted to close. It was easy to restimulate the engram caused by the defeat of the weaker hinge, Hubbard pronounced, by asking a pre-clear to imagine a clam on a beach opening and closing its shell very rapidly and at the same time making an opening and closing motion with thumb and forefinger. This gesture, according to Hubbard, would upset large numbers of people.

"By the way," Hubbard warns in A History of Man, "your discussion of these incidents with the uninitiated in Scientology can cause havoc. Should you describe the "clam" to some one, you may restimulate it in him to the extent of causing severe jaw pain. Once such victim, after hearing about a clam death, could not use his jaws for three days."

The Weeper/Boohoo

After the clam became the 'Weeper' or the 'Boohoo', a mollusk that rolled in the surf for half a million years, pumping sea water out of its shell as it breathed, hence its name. Weepers had 'trillions of misadventures', prominent among them the anxiety caused by trying to gulp air before being swamped by the next wave. 'The inability of a pre-clear to cry,' Hubbard explained, 'is partly a hang-up in the Weeper. He is about to be hit by a wave, has his eyes full of sand or is frightened about opening his shell because he may be hit.'

The Sloth

Hubbard's evolutionary sequence jumps from a primitive mollusk to a large mammal, the Sloth. Hubbard makes a point of observing that the Sloth "had bad times falling out of trees". Hubbard also mentions Sloths interacting with Baboons, even though his timeline indicates that Sloths are to evolve into apes.

The Ape

The next stage in human evolution was the ape, according to Hubbard. Somehow they no longer communicated with sloths now.

The Piltdown Man

The so-called Piltdown Man was the name given to fragments of a skull and jaw bone collected in the early years of the twentieth century from a gravel pit at Piltdown, a village near Uckfield, in the English county of Sussex. The controversial fragments were claimed by experts of the day to be the fossilised remains of a hitherto unknown form of early man.

Hubbard worked the Piltdown Man into his evolutionary timelines, stating that this anthropoid was the cause of a multitude of engrams, ranging from obsessions about biting to family problems. These could be traced back to the fact that "the Piltdown teeth were enormous and he was quite careless as to whom and what he bit." Indeed, so careless was the Piltdown Man, Hubbard recorded, that he was sometimes guilty of "eating one's wife and other somewhat illogical activities."

Unfortunately for Hubbard, just twelve months after A History of Man was published, it was revealed that the Piltdown Man had never existed: the supposed fossil remains of primitive man found in gravel on Piltdown Common in the south of England were exposed as a hoax. [5]

Human

Finally, the human form as we now know it, stacked full of thetans from all past evolutionary forms since the clam.

References

• Hubbard, L. Ron. A History of Man. New York: Church of Scientology. ISBN 0686307844.
• Hubbard, L. Ron (1988). A History of Man (reprint ed.). Los Angeles: Bridge Publications. ISBN 0884043061.

External Links

• Bare Faced Messiah, the True Story of L Ron Hubbard
• skepticfriends.org: "Evolution, Scientology Style"
• Xenu.net's Clam FAQ
• George Malko on Hubbard's theories