Hey everyone, so with Halloween right around the corner, I thought it might be timely to talk about ghosts in Scientology. L. Ron Hubbard had a few things to say over the years about ghosts, or spiritual entities he referred to as thetans. In the world of Scientology, we are all not really our bodies but we are actually thetans who just inhabit and use bodies the same way that we put on and take off clothing, except of course that our bodies last for decades instead of just a day or two.
When I was in Scientology, I never had an out-of-body experience where I could see myself from the corner of the room and I never floated off and traveled around the city or country, as some Scientologists told me they had done. I was raised with the idea that we have a spiritual existence outside the realm of the physical universe and I just never even questioned Hubbard’s statements about it. Had I done so, I might have seen that some of his claims about it are a little far-fetched.
Now none of these ghost stories are particularly scary. What they really show is how you can build an entire philosophy and religion around nothing more than an assumption. Just look at how much time and effort and trouble has been experienced by Scientologists and former Scientologists over the years, and how all of it basically sprang from a simple but wholly unprovable assumption. But don’t take my word for that. Here’s Hubbard:
This first one doesn’t have any mass. It’s called a Thetan. A Thetan, by definition, is something without mass, without wavelength, and actually, without finite location. But a Thetan is our definition, or symbol use for what they used to call ghost, spirits, anything… elan vital, any of these various items of yesteryear. We have to call it something new because all of these things meant special things. For instance, somebody the other day, a colored person, was discussing with me whether or not ghosts still existed and I settled the argument rather easily. I said, “well, have you ever been a ghost?” and (feigning comm lag and shame), and I said, “well, I’m not ashamed of it – I have”. Well, that person doesn’t work for us any more (laughing).
Here is a specialized meaning to spirit. Ghost is an evil spirit that is partially materialized evidently, that is found in various locations where they will do the real estate the most damage (chuckle). That’s evidently a ghost. So, let’s just take all of these things that people refer to as spirits or something of the sort and let’s just cover that with this mathematical term. Thetan isn’t an esoteric or magic term, it’s simply mathematical. It is the Greek letter which stood for thought, but that is not quite precise either because thought is a product of a Thetan, not the Thetan. A Thetan is potentially able to produce thoughts, matter, energy, space, time and all the rest of it. So you get a basic production unit and therefore we are starting with an assumption.
Lecture: The Factors of Clearing – July 4, 1958
So as this grew, did Hubbard ever provide any evidence that we are all really just ghosts? Well, here’s a story which shows a lot of things, including how Hubbard went about doing research and also taking ideas from other Scientologists and making them his own:
A fellow out in California one night showed up. I was in Phoenix at a house out in the desert. It’s all been built up since, but it was a nice house then.
Coyotes mourned quietly every night. I like coyotes mourning every night. They sort of add to the, you know, the scene, add to the flavor of things when you’re researching spirits.
And the boy came at about, come to think about it, there’d been a little congress over there. A little meeting. And she came, and he sat down, well he knocked on the door, and he said, “Ron”, he said. “I’ve got something hot and I want to see you.”
Now I’ve heard this before. I hear this regularly. And I never say, “No. Don’t tell me.” Yeah. I will say factually, “We’ve had that for a little while”, or I will say, “That is darn interesting. I will look into it.” You know, I mean, it’s a communication line. I really am there. I mean, solidly hit me, I mean, when you write me a letter it does arrive here. I might not answer it at any length, but I normally get a reply back one way or the other. And I said, however, that night, since we’d just had a big meeting, and I was tired.
I said, “No.” And Evans knocks again. I say, “No, Evans.” I said, “Go away please. I’m tired. I’m exhausted.”
He goes out, and he lies down in the front yard on the couch. A couple of sun couches out there, sitting in the middle of the desert. He lies down, sun goes down, moon comes up, he’s still there. Somebody stuck his head out and said, “Evans, why don’t you go home? Ron isn’t going to see you.” And he said, “I’ve got to see him. I’ve got to see him.”
So finally after the TV programs were all over, and I had wakened, I happened to be passing by the window and I looked out in the front yard and the bright moonlight, and here was Evans Farber, still lying there, looking up at the moon, philosophically. And I said, “Why, that boy’ll catch his death of moonbeams, or something. I better go out.”
So I said, “Evans”, I said, “This is cruel of you. I have just been up about forty eight hours or something, and why can’t you see me about this some other time?” And he said, “It’s important, Ron. It really is.”
He said, “I can exteriorize thetans at will that you’ve been talking about.”
We’d been looking for a process that would. We knew it theoretically. We’d run into the phenomenon. We’d tried to do something with it. Not very much had occurred. And he turns up and he says he can exteriorize them by an auditing command. “Well”, I said, “Evans, that’s interesting.”
He had some kind of a theory behind it and quoted it out of Scientology 8-80, and told me exactly how it worked, that something or other happened. Or there was a little pre-advance release of the material, and he’d read it over, and he said, “All you have to say to them, is ‘Try not to be three feet back of your head’.” I said, “Is that so?” And he says, “Yeah, look!”, he says. He puts me down in the chair, and he steps back, and he says, “Try not to be three feet back of your head.” And I go, wwwhhh. I haven’t been able to get back in since.
Lecture: Spiritual and Material Requirements of Mankind – 31 Aug 56
Soon Hubbard was not only talking about ghosts but he start making claims that by getting out of your head, you could actually cure your body’s ailments and diseases just by looking them over. This is clearly nonsense because these exteriorization techniques have been around since the early 1950s and yet to this day, Scientologists die from a host of common diseases including what seems to be an unusual number of cancer deaths. Because Scientology was a new religion by this point, it was much harder to go after Hubbard for making false medical claims, so he got away with it. Again, you don’t have to take my word for it. Here’s what he said:
An individual is an energy production unit. Out of this we get the mythology, the legends, anything that you want that has to do with spirits, with ghosts, so forth. People talk about these things, and so on. Science today knows there’s no such thing as a ghost. It knows there’s no such thing as a ghost.
You see what it did is it makes this concept of the energy production unit ridiculous, and says that this ridiclous concept doesn’t exist – you know, ghosts, clanking chains, haunts houses. The truth of the matter is, man is not a body. This is a very easy thing to demonstrate, extremely easy to demonstrate.
How is it easy to demonstrate? You take somebody who’s not very bad off – who’s, let’s say, what we call a Step I – you tell this individual, “Be three feet back of your head.” This person would be in pretty good shape, see. This person is very sick. All the wonders of medicine have been able to do nothing for this person, see. The person is sick. You say, “Be three feet back of your head. Is there anything you’d like to patch up about the body? Oh, there is. The body’s sick. All right, well patch it up.” It’s patched up. He’s well the next day.
Lecture: SOP 8-D – 16 April 1954
I imagine that some people challenged Hubbard about his claims over the years, maybe not in a public forum but certainly in private. And here was Hubbard’s not-very-logical reply from a lecture appropriately called Superstition and Things That Go Boomp in the Night:
Now, we know ants eight feet tall do not exist, at least in this county. But let me assure you that we do not positively and completely know that witches, ghouls and things that go boomp in the night don’t exist. We don’t know that. Nobody has disproven the existence of the leprechaun. Nobody. No mathematician has ever bent his slipstick successfully around this problem or the head of a leprechaun.
…
I do know something, though, that is a very, very murderous sort of a philosophy. And that is to say flatly, completely and emphatically that something does not exist, when we have no way to prove that it does not exist. And I’d say that would be dangerous.
And I would say that sociology sitting there and saying there are no ghouls, demons and things that go boomp in the night is making an adventurous statement—far more adventurous than the statement I’m making right now, much more adventurous. It may be that every fifth human being you know is actually an alive, twisting, writhing, vengeful demon, bent only upon the destruction of those around him. This very well may be. That is not as adventurous a statement as ‘There are no demons of any kind anywhere,’ when we have not any means of proving there are not.
Do you see why that is an adventurous statement? That is a wild statement. But what I say to you is perfectly reasonable. It just may be that every third, fourth, fifth person we know is actually not really quite human, but may be a demon, see? I say that might be. We are free to experience it if it is true and not experience it if it isn’t. And that is a much greater freedom than taking, on Mama’s say-so in the middle of the night when she has been awakened, the fact that there are no witches and that no werewolves have been in bed with you — much more factual.
Lecture: Para-Scientology or Superstition and Things that Go Boomp in the Night – 20 April 1955
Hubbard himself certainly seemed to believe in his own claims. He even told ghost stories during his lectures in which he himself was the star, such as this one:
I remember one time I got struck by lightning down here in Sussex someplace, wearing armour. Stupid thing to do, you know. And I went sufficiently wog – Gormley Castle – I went sufficiently wog that I watched them put the body on the bed and take the armour off of it, and saw that it was going to be decently buried and so forth and so on. Just like it had nothing to do with me, you know? I don’t know how many volts there are in a lightning bolt, but it was more than I was able to generate at that time.
And I went back over the Channel, went down to Bavaria, where I was born that time. And walked in, fell over the scrub lady. She was busy scrubbing the kitchen floor, you know – scrub, scrub, scrub, scrub and I walked through her. Well, she was aware of the fact of something happening. I guess I was still wearing an engram full of lightning, see. She was definitely aware of something having happened and she kind of went, “Yeep!”
And I went over at the kitchen table and looked for a tankard – I was very thirsty! This was a very stupid thing to get, but you get things like this. You get thirsty and you get hungry and – and it’s miserable sort of thing. After a while you get so you don’t care and you say, “I can’t feel,” and you don’t get this anymore. Well, you’re fairly upscale, you get mad at losing bodies. It isn’t something you’re unemotional about. You get upset about it and so forth. But I was thirsty. And I walked over to the table. My tankard had been removed. So I came down with a fist on the festive board, trying to make a tremendous crash and attract some attention, and my fist went straight on through the boards.
I said, “Oh oh, (sigh) I’m a ghost again.” And I hadn’t realized from the moment the lightning hit right straight on through, that I had stopped living, see, the way people are supposed to live, see? I went out and there was a full moon. My sense of humour came back to me, fortunately, and I stood there and howled at the moon for a while.
Lecture: Axioms – Second Lecture – 16 April 1959
And Hubbard of course was a believer and practitioner of magic and the occult, as we know from his time before Dianetics was even formulated with rocket scientists Jack Parsons utilizing Aleister Crowley’s sex and blood magic to try to influence life and the universe. Here is an interesting quote from Hubbard about magic and its practice.
What happened many years ago in parapsychology was that people had a certain belief in ESP, telepathy, clairvoyance, clairaudience and so forth, and having these various beliefs, it was very easy for charlatans to take advantage of them.
There was, once upon a time, a philosophical school known as the magicians, and this philosophical school believed that you could postulate a cause and get an effect, and that was what it believed. They believed in a definite code, a philosophic code, along this line, and they did a very, very interesting job of it. They were just philosophers, they weren’t trying to do very much. But then very ignorant people around them— superstitious people— said, “You mean you could wave something in the air, or talk to a ghost or demon or make it appear or something of the sort?” Reality in those days included a world which was full of ghosts and demons.
One of these magicians one day (he must have been very tired) unfortunately said, “Yes, that’s what we mean,” and then the fakers, the charlatans, got into the field. Now, the symbolical language of the magician had to do with a wand, a cup, a disc and a lamp. This was symbology to them; they didn’t do things with wands, discs, cups and lamps. But the charlatans said, “Now, let’s see. You take this wand and you pass it over this cup.” A little stick passes over a hat and life comes out of the hat— a rabbit out of the hat. You have seen this; it is stage magic. That trick is almost a thousand years old. But it is symbolical; the wand is symbolical and the cup is symbolical. They are the male and female organs which produce life. The magic of man was what the whole field of magic was trying to figure out. What is this magic of life? We take two beings and we get a third being. And where does it come from? What is it all about? They were trying to riddle this out.
But the stage magician, instead of asking these philosophic imponderables, takes a hat (which is the cup) and a stick (which is his wand) and produces a rabbit out of the hat, and this never fails to get an audience; it never fails. That is the most interesting magic we have around us — the rabbit out of a hat, the child, the generations of time into the future; there are unnumbered generations going out.
Lecture: Time and Motion – 4 September 1951
I wonder what it was that Hubbard imagined he was conjuring with his hat and stick trick called Scientology. Whatever good he imagined he might have wanted to do, Hubbard’s vindictive nature and megalomania ruined any ongoing good his subject might have produced. Scientology’s legacy is one of abuse and shattered lives. Real happiness comes from getting away from it.
Happy Halloween everyone. I hope you have a frightfully good time and thank you for watching.