My Scientology Superpowers Challenge

In many of the videos I’ve made over the past few years about Scientology and in many of the comments to those videos, the subject of Scientology bringing about supernatural abilities and spiritual perceptions has come up. This is by design, since L. Ron Hubbard, the founder and self-named source of all of the principles and claims of Scientology, stated in many of his writings and lectures that Scientology would definitely and umistakeably increase one’s spiritual state of awareness and ability. I thought it’s time to challenge some of these statements.

We live in what some have called the “post truth” era where lies are spoken as easily as we breath and this kind of open door policy to deception is what allows destructive cults to flourish in the first place. Hubbard was a pathological liar and he made millions of dollars from gullible people who believed his lies for no other reason than they wanted a better life for themselves and their families and for everyone. Sure, you can laugh at Scientologists and call them idiots, but who among us has never believed lies we’ve been told?

The problem with Scientology is not with Scentologists who want to improve themselves or the world. It’s with people like L. Ron Hubbard and David Miscavige, who take advantage of them. Despite all the work we critics and journalists have done to expose Scientology, to this day people still fall for this nonsense and invest millions of their hard-earned dollars and waste years of their lives chasing a fantasy. As more of this has been exposed, fewer are falling for it and yet there are still people walking in to Churches of Scientology and being conned. The truth about this and what every other destructive cult out there is doing needs to be told and it needs to be heard. So let’s take a good hard look at what Scientology claims it can do and let’s look at why these are lies.

The Church of Scientology says it’s all about improving conditions in life and that’s a broad enough statement as to fit almost anything. I could claim to be able to get up easier in the morning or that I feel younger and more alive, and I could chalk that up to Scientology or I could just as easily and believably claim that it’s because I stopped eating Twinkies for breakfast. It seems to me that if you are dealing with, as Hubbard put it, the “living lightning of life itself,” that we could expect a bit more return on our investment of time and money than just some general promises of vague improvements. On its glossy website, the Church of Scientology answers the question “What does Scientology accomplish?” with this:

“When properly practiced, Scientology enables one to develop in all aspects of life, both spiritual and temporal. It addresses the individual and brings about greater happiness and self-confidence by increasing awareness and ability. It differs from other religious philosophies in that it provides the means through which a person can effectively resolve the problems and situations faced by themselves and others.

“A fundamental premise of Scientology is that Man is basically good and can improve conditions in his life. However, Scientology cannot promise to do anything by itself. Only the individual can bring about their own improvement by applying the teachings of Scientology to themselves and those around them.”

Well, this is a whole lot of word salad that doesn’t quantify to anything and doesn’t clearly or concisely promise any specific benefit. In fact, it even ends off stating that only you can bring about your own improvement, which is akin to saying that if you are sick, you are the only one who can make you better. While technically it’s true that your body is doing a lot of the work, it’s the medicine that makes it happen and we should be able to say something fairly reliable about good medication. The Church becomes a bit bolder when it describes the term “Operating Thetan.” This is a Scientology word used to describe the higher states of existence Scientology promises. Their website says:

“OT (Operating Thetan) is a state of spiritual awareness in which an individual is able to control themselves and their environment. An OT is someone who knows that they know and can create positive and pro-survival effects on all of their dynamics (parts of their life). They have been fully refamiliarized with their capabilities as a thetan and can willingly and knowingly be at cause over life, thought, matter, energy, space and time.”

That’s a tall order but what does it means to be “at cause” over life, thought, matter, etc. According to Hubbard, “cause could be defined as emanation. It could be defined also, for purposes of communication, as source-point.” (FOT, p. 77) So to be the source point for life, thought, matter and all the rest would basically put you in the same realm of power as most people’s concept of the Supreme Being or God. That’s a heady claim and I think if you could convince someone it were true, they’d be willing to spend just about any amount of money and invest any amount of time necessary to achieve that goal. But Hubbard didn’t just say “Hey, do Scientology and become a god.” He was quite a bit more specific over the years. Let’s take a look some of his claims, starting with what he wrote in his first book on this whole topic, Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health from 1950.

“[Dianetics] contains a therapeutic technique with which can be treated all inorganic mental ills and all organic psycho-somatic ills, with assurance of complete cure in unselected cases.” (DMSMH, first edition 1950)

In case anyone thinks this is bit vague or too generalized, let’s be very, ahem, clear about this:

“Dianetically, the optimum individual is called the clear…. A clear can be tested for any and all psychoses, neuroses, compulsions and repressions (all aberrations) and can be examined for any autogenic (self-generated) diseases referred to as psycho-somatic ills. These tests confirm the clear to be entirely without such ills or aberrations. Additional tests of his intelligence indicate it to be high above the current norm.

…

“A neurotic individual, possessed also of psycho-somatic ills, can be tested for those aberrations and illnesses, demonstrating that they exist. He can then be given dianetic therapy to the end of clearing these neuroses and ills. Finally, he can be examined, with the above results. This, in passing, is an experiment which has been performed many times with invariable results. It is a matter of laboratory test that all individuals who have organically complete nervous systems respond in this fashion to dianetic clearing.” (Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health)

I don’t think it’s reading too much into this to summarize it by saying Clears don’t suffer from any mental disorders. Their perceptions change too:

“Eyesight, when the stage of glasses is entered (not because of glasses), is deteriorating on the psycho-somatic principle. And this observation is about as irresponsible as a statement that when apples fall out of trees they usually obey gravity. One of the incidental things which happen to a clear is that his eyesight, if it had been bad as an aberree, generally improves markedly, and with some slight attention will recover optimum perception in time. (Far from an optician’s argument against dianetics, this assures rather good business, for clears have been known, at treatment’s end, to have to buy, in rapid succession, five pairs of glasses to compensate adjusting eyesight; and many aberrees, cleared late in life, settle down ocularly at a maximum a little under optimum.)” (Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health)

He also wrote that Clears don’t get sick. He said:

“For example, the common cold has been found to be psycho-somatic. Clears do not get colds. Just what, if any, part the virus plays in the common cold is not known, but it is known that when engrams about colds are lifted, no further colds appear — which is a laboratory fact not so far contradicted by 270 cases.”

In terms of memory, Hubbard basically describes a Clear as having eidetic memory. He wrote:

“As a standard of comparison, a clear is to the contemporary norm as the contemporary norm is to a contemporary institutional case. The margin is wide and it would be difficult to exaggerate it. A clear, for instance, has complete recall of everything which has ever happened to him or anything he has ever studied. He does mental computations, such as those of chess, for example, which a normal would do in a half an hour, in ten or fifteen seconds. He does not think ‘vocally’ but spontaneously.”

Now Dianetics was just the beginning. After Dianetics went bankrupt and tanked twice, not the least of which becasue no one was achieving the kinds of results Hubbard was promising, he developed a new religion which he called Scientology. This so-called “science of certainty” was all about “knowing how to know” and Hubbard upped the ante quite a bit when he started making claims about how we are spiritual entities, called thetans or theta beings, who have native powers and abilities far beyond what most people could imagine.

In 1952, Hubbard really went to town. He wrote a number of books including Scientology: A History of Man, whose opening line is “This is a cold-blooded and factual account of your last sixty trillion years.” Hubbard claimed that his research had revealed hitherto unknown or forgotten abilites we spiritual beings have and through the practice of Scientology auditing, we could remember and regain these abilities. Here are some selections from the chapter on this:

“A theta being is capable of emitting a considerable electronic flow. This is not done by using facsimiles [mental images] but is actually a creation of motion which we now know as ‘electricity.’ A theta being produces considerable voltage and amperage, enough to give somebody a very bad shock, to put out his eyes or cut him in half.

“The theta being, on his own, can instill anything on the emotional range into another being for each emotion is a wave length and wave characteristic.

“A theta being can be made visible by certain electronic flows; he can be pinned down by certain flows. The wave lengths of these flows are not known to Homo Sapiens at this time and methods of emission of them have not been invented on Earth.

“Thetans communicate by telepathy. They can move material objects by throwing an energy flow at them. They can travel at very high speeds. They are not bound by atmospheres or temperatures.

“A thetan, brought low enough to have a MEST [physical] body, may consider that he has been trapped by ‘time warps’ or that his universe is another dimension or some such thing. This is not the case. Thetans live in the same time stream with the difference that they can alter concepts of time and get future or past at will — it is THE THETAN who is altering his concept, not the time that is changing. So don’t go off on wild chases after fourth and fifth dimensions, time warps and other time-space universes: teleportation makes it look like these exist for the thetan. There is more to this but you don’t really need it in processing.”

Now after laying all this out, Hubbard then cautions Scientologists who start regaining these abilities need to take it easy and not unduly alarm the rest of us. Thetans have been in a kind of prison for trillenia here on Earth, stuck in the rut of living and dying and living again in an endless cycle we cannot escape from. As auditing frees thetans from these chains, they are still susceptible to the traps that got them stuck in the first place. Hubbard wrote:

“And so, may I make this simple request — don’t get spectacular until a few of the boys make it. You don’t want to be lonesome — and you’ll need reinforcements if a war gets declared on thetans here. The preclear may think he can do it alone if he gets cleared of a body — he’ll need more help and company than he thinks. So, again, as a final note on this chapter, let’s not go upsetting governments and putting on a show to ‘prove’ anything to Homo Sapiens for a while – it’s a horrible temptation to knock off hats at fifty yards and read books a couple of countries away and get into the rotogravure section and the Hearst Weeklies—but you’ll just make it tough on somebody else who is trying to get across this bridge. Let sleeping Sapiens snore in the bulk for yet awhile. Then meet some place and decide what to do about him and his two penny wars, his insane and his prisons.” (Scientology: A History of Man)

If you were to pressure a high level Scientologist to show off or demonstrate his OT abilities, he likely would fall back on this advice from Hubbard but I can tell you as a former Scientologist of 27 years that they aren’t hiding anything. Upper level Scientologists simply don’t have the ability to do any of the things I’ve laid out thus far.

Hubbard did a lot of work through the 1950s and 60s to try to develop procedures and techniques that would match up to the promises he had made in the early 1950s about the potentials of being an OT. Finally in the mid 1960s he developed what he called the OT levels, the contents of which are confidential for Scientologists until they pay their dues and membership fees and all the rest, but most of which is freely available on the internet. In a 1963 lecture, I thought you might be interested to hear Hubbard discuss how OT was really just a description of a theoretical state which he had not actually achieved or seen himself in his researches. He doesn’t admit to that as such. Instead, he talks about how easy and yet how difficult it is for a thetan trapped here on Earth to be able to do amazing OT things. Take a listen and see what you think:

“Now, in studying the power of an Operating Thetan, I have had very many pauses in my thinking. I knew intellectually the power of an Operating Thetan. This I knew and have discussed it, and you’ll find it in various books and writings and lectures and so forth about Operating Thetans. And we all know what we’re talking about when we talk about Operating Thetan. That’s what’s another weird thing, you see? Something that interdefines itself. But instead of just this intellectual appreciation of the data, I myself have in very recent weeks, have been exploring the actual potentialities of an Operating Thetan. And I was giving a demonstration the other day in the Instructor’s meeting. You take the cellophane off of a packet of cigarettes and set it down all by itself, and ask somebody to pick it up without denting it. And don’t let it dent even slightly. And he actually won’t be able to do it. If you don’t believe me, why, make it as an experiment sometime. It’s quite impressive. You think, well, you can get your fingers on it, and so on, you’ll always see a flutter of dent. You can’t handle it delicately enough to pick it up without denting it. It isn’t just the structure or fabric of it; it’s the fact that if you could actually exactly measure the exact pressure to put on that cellophane packet, you could pick it up without a dent occurring in it and without any collapse of its wall or side.

“That’s probably the basic problem of an Operating Thetan. And that problem itself may give him his time track. This is a wild bow, isn’t it? I mean, how do you make that connection of logique? Well, it’s this way: The power of an Operating Thetan is such that if he were to pick up a steel cylinder capable of resisting several hundred pounds to the square inch, he would have that same problem that you have with the cellophane.” (Lecture: The State of OT, May 26, 1963)

It’s an interesting use of what is called phobia induction within Scientology that Hubbard describes OT powers this way. He simultaenously is putting out there that these awesome abilities potentially exist yet he also sets up a kind of fear of achieving them because they are so powerful. Maybe it’s just me, but I do remember as a Scientologist that it was with no small degree of trepidation that I used to think about what could happen if these powers were to actually manifest for real. Perhaps this is another reason Scientologists aren’t as anxious as they could be to pick up objects with their mind or accurately predict the future.

But even more basic than that, Scientologists know that they are not achieving these kinds of super abilities and yet they keep on paying their money and doing their time. Why? Well, there are probably many reasons but for sure one of them is that Scientologists suffer from what is called the investment fallacy, also known as an escalation of committment. This comes from the observable behavior of people that when faced with increasingly negative outcomes from some decision or action or investment, they yet continue to behave the same way rather than change course. The decisions they are making may be obviously irrational, yet people will continue on that same path. There are various theories as to why people act this way in different contexts, but the bottom line is that we are just pretty irrational and once we’ve committed to something, we find it easier to stick with it because we have the false idea that change is bad or hard.

So what do Scientologists get out of Scientology? Well, sometimes a lot and sometimes not much. Most of it is very subjective and doesn’t relate to actual physical changes, cures for diseases or even doing substantially better in life financially. People who have a vested interest in something changing or improving can convince themselves that just about anything that happens to them is a result of their Scientology experience, even if you could prove conclusively that the actual cause of the improvement was from some other source. Objectively, this is just another fallacy in their thinking, but one that they are not going to easily recognize because they are being ruled by their emotional committment rather than sound reasoning. Let’s take a look at a video clip of actual Scientologists sharing what they are getting from Scientology:

(video clip of Scientology successes)

As you can see, these people are pretty psyched up and I can tell you from my own experience that these bouts of excitement are short lived. Scientology auditing produces a kind of euphoria and it can become addicting in its own right.

So now that we’ve covered some of the bigger and more important claims Hubbard made, I’m going to issue a challenge. I’ve recieved a lot of grief over the last few years from Scientologists both in and out of the Church who tell me that I’m wrong for challenging the workability of Scientology and that it’s not true that it’s all bad or wrong. Well, I never said it was all bad or all wrong, but I have said and will continue to say this:

Scientology is a fraud and a sham. L. Ron Hubbard made promises to his followers that they could achieve states of being and awareness which Hubbard never achieved himself and which cannot be achieved by anyone now. Not one Scientologist has ever made it honestly to the state of Clear as described by Hubbard in his seminal work, Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health. Not one Scientologist has ever achieved the state of Operating Thetan as described in Hubbard’s words earlier in this video. Not a single one.

I am so sure of this, that I challenge any Scientologist anywhere to prove me wrong. Show me one person who through the practice of Scientology auditing and training is now cause over life, thought, matter, energy, space and time. Show me one person who went Clear in Scientology who has an eidetic memory, who never gets colds, who suffers from no mental disorder or aberration and who computes mentally at a rate 10-20 times faster than the average human being. I’ve shown here that Hubbard did say these exact things. Show me that he’s right with just one person who can meet these criteria and I will shut down my YouTube channel, I will take down my book Scientology: A to Xenu and I will never utter another word about Scientology in public ever again. That is my end of the bargain. If you want to shut me down, just prove that Scientology does what it says it will do.

And with that laid down, now let me wrap up with this: Hubbard claimed Scientology was on par with the rest of the physical sciences. He said, in fact, that it was the one thing senior to life itself because it explains all of life. Yet Hubbard’s explanations have done all but nothing to cure actual psychosis or to rid people of cancer or leukemia or bronchitis or a host of other physical ailments. If Dianetics and Scientology can do these things, why aren’t Scientologists emptying out the hospitals and insane asylums of the world? If you Scientologists want to get more people on board with Scientology, use it exactly as it is supposed to be used and let’s see improved conditions in the big wide world. Let’s see Clears and OTs going out and ending war, ending disease, ending hunger and poverty and suffering. Let’s see Scientologists step up and do something positive for their communities. The only problem is that they can’t. Instead, they hide in their houses and their “churches,” they run away from anyone who challenges them or wants to discuss the topic critically and they continue to burn up their bank accounts paying for superpowers that are never going to manifest.

When an engineer builds a bridge, he uses exact principles of engineering and the bridge works. When an electrician designs a circuit board, he uses exact principles of electricity and the circuit works. When a Scientologist uses Scientology techniques on someone, that person may or may not get a positive result. More often than not, the results are disappointing and the person is told that the reason Scientology didn’t work is because they need more Scientology and they have to invest more money and spend more time at it for further no results. They end up on a hamster wheel to nowhere. That’s not how exact sciences work. That’s how con jobs work.

Thank you for watching.