Life is But A Dream

Or: Enter the Matrix…

Hubbard’s crazy, confusing, conflicting teachings meant one thing, then another as he desperately attempted to create a religion.

Take his explanation of life, which is intricately bound to his teachings concerning the Thetan. Hubbard wanted very much for his religion/science of the mind to be the Bionic Man version; better, faster, stronger. He wanted his creation to take over any current form of standard therapy.

Here for instance he attempts to show how Scientology is superior to Psychology.

“Psychology, for instance, had worked itself into a dead end. Having no concept of the existence of an animating factor to life, it had degenerated into a practice devoted solely to the creation of an effect on living forms.” —https://www.scientology.org/what-is-scientology/basic-principles-of-scientology/the-thetan.html

According to Scientology, psychology has “no concept of the existence of an animating factor to life” which for the cult is the Thetan. What this means is that psychology has no understanding of what makes a body live and move through the world. Scientology believes that the body, including the brain, is just an inanimate object. The body being the vehicle that the Thetan uses and the brain simply being a conduit for the sending and receiving of messages between the Thetan and the rest of the world.

It’s a car with the Bluetooth hands free phone option included.

Psychology does not deal with the spiritual nor does it deal with the body per se.

Psychology is the study of the mind.

Psychiatrists, psychologists and others in this field understand that the mind is a complex, still mostly uncharted part of Man. The slightest changes in chemical or electrical function can have incredible effect upon the person. Trauma can change the way the mind perceives and reacts to the world around it.

The field of psychology is one of continual exploration and learning in order to provide the best care to those who suffer mental illnesses. It is not concerned with spiritual matters and makes no comment on the interaction between the spiritual and the psychological.

For Scientology the mind is separate from the brain, body and Thetan. The mind is a recording device.

It “accumulates recordings of thoughts, conclusions, decisions, observations and perceptions of the Thetan”.

Notice emotions are not mentioned.

The statement goes on to say that psychology “had degenerated into a practice devoted solely to the creation of an effect on living forms.”

This is true in that for the psychological community it is understood that the brain and mind are both partners in effecting and affecting the living body. Without proper brain function the body will not function properly either.

Someone who is severely underweight yet sees an obese person when they look at themselves has a mind/brain disfunction. Whether caused by a past trauma or a chemical imbalance or both, it is the psychological goal to correct the way the brain causes the person to perceive him or herself.

This is, indeed a “practice devoted to the creation of an effect on (a) Living form.”

The purpose of therapy through both medical and psychological means is to create an effect upon a person to correct, heal or restore the person to health.

These are good and necessary things.

Scientology wants the world to believe that the brain and body are lumps of tissue, animated solely because there is a Thetan that resides and operates in the skull.

According to Hubbard’s teaching, the Mind is the communication and control system between the Thetan and its environment.

The brain is a passive channel for the Mind and Thetan to communicate.

He refers to the Thetan as the “Creator of life itself”.

The problem with what Hubbard is trying to sell is that he creates a conflict for himself and his followers when he attempts to explain what “Life” is.

In Scientology The Fundamentals of Thought, chapter 2 Hubbard describes life as The Cycle of Action.

Of course he uses a lot of words to describe the birth, lifetime, death cycle; saying; “The actual cycle-of-action is as follows:

CREATE, CREATE-CREATE-CREATE, CREATE-COUNTER-CREATE,

NO-CREATION, NOTHINGNESS.”

Nothingness?

Poof!

Where did the Thetan go?

If one is to believe Hubbard’s version of the life cycle, there is nothing after the death of the person.

But wait.

If the person is actually the Thetan (Creator of life) how can there be No-Creation?

How can there be nothingness?

If there is nothing following no-creation, where do the new bodies the Thetan picks up come from? No-Creation means just that.

It is a cessation of creation.

Full stop.

Realizing he was trapping himself he then decided that No-Creation was actually an act in itself.

Hubbard was still in the trap of his own making, however.

He’d already defined No-Creation as an absence of any creative activity.

Now in the next breath he states that No-Creation is an act called destruction.

“Destruction is (in terms of action) a creation of something against a creation of something else (create-counter-create).”

Confused yet?

Simply stated, the Cycle-Of-Action (life) consists of creating our environment until we finally run out of ideas and then create the end.

Enter the Matrix.

Continuing his explanation of the life cycle he claims that in fact life as we know it is all just a figment of the imagination.

Hubbard tells his followers that life “Is” because Man believes it “Is”.

“This cycle is only an apparency. It is what we see, what we behold. what we believe. We consider (think, believe, suppose) that it is so and we then see it so.

A child is born. He grows, he reaches manhood, he grows old. He dies.

In Scientology it can be seen that none of these steps are necessary. One considers them so, and so they are ‘true.’ A man can grow old quickly or slowly. He grows old to the degree that he believes he is growing old. Because everyone ‘agrees’ that this is the way things are, they go that way. The cycle is not true. It is only apparent. It is apparent because we believe we see it. It is apparent because we agree that it should be so.”

So.

“A child is born. He grows, he reaches manhood, he grows old. He dies.

In Scientology it can be seen that none of these steps are necessary.”

Hubbard claims that the Cycle-Of-Action is “the most fundamental idea in Scientology”.

The most fundamental idea in Scientology is that life is simply an appearance of reality.

Everything we see, experience and live is just make believe because Man wishes it so.

If the cycle is not true, then where does the Thetan actually fit in?

If one is to believe that life is a cycle of false creations until it ends in destruction, and the Thetan is the only cognizant, sentient being then that would mean it is the Thetan creating the lie.

None of the steps of life are necessary.

Through all this chaos and confusion that Hubbard created in trying to define what life is, he apparently remembered that he was trying to create a religion.

At the very end of the chapter he acknowledged that he needed to fit God in somewhere. So he did, only to brush Him off as irrelevant to the subject.

“Creation in this work may be thought to exclude God. We are here considering only those things which Man or Man as a spirit can make or manufacture or think. The subject of who or what is doing the creation does not invalidate the cycle. This is a work on the subject of the mind, spirit and life. Not a work on the subject of the Supreme Being.

Lying is the lowest order of creativity.”

Why bother at all with God? The Thetan is Creator of Life itself, albeit a false and imaginary one.

Man, though made up of a body, brain, mind and Thetan, is in reality just the Thetan; the only sentient, intelligent part of the whole.

Hubbard claims that Scientology The Fundamentals of Thought is a work on the subject of the mind, spirit and life.

If the mind is merely a recording device, the Thetan (spirit) is creating false realities of which life is one then what is the point of Scientology in the first place?

There is nothing to audit because none of it is real.

Man’s existence is a lie, and “Lying is the lowest order of creativity”.