For those more interested in starting with a broad summary of L. Get to Know the Real You. Your first step to find out more can be as simple as a free Personality Test. Related Sites. Ron Hubbard.
What is Scientology? HOME L. Scientologists home How to Stay Well. What is the best book to read for an introduction to the subject? Are the books difficult to understand? Where can one get L. For an in-depth look at his life, visit www. Search review text. Just kidding Books Ring Mah Bell. Strolling through Barnes and Noble, I saw this book on the used rack, and picked it up out of curiosity.
Funniest thing I have ever skimmed. I love how L. Ron felt the need to define words throughout the book. Words like idyllic, procreate, tome, pallid and testosterone. What does he think of his readers to have to define such challenging words? Perhaps they are not intelligent enough to use a dictionary. I laughed out loud at this: Coitus Chain, lover. First incident, embryo Constipation chain.
Firsts incident, zygote Each incident building high pressure on child. Masturbation chain. First incident, embryo. Eighty succeeding incidents.
Mother masturbating with fingers, jolting child and injuring child with orgasm. No wonder the world is so screwed up. And no wonder this was in the used section. I certainly would not want this rubbish on my shelves. One word you don't need to define for your readers, L. Ron : crap. Otto Lehto. The reviews here are largely based on the bipolar division into the scientology apologists, on the one hand, and the anti-scientology bigots, on the other hand.
I consider myself neither. This book contains fabrications, inventions, unsubstantiated claims and outright falsehoods. It is the beginning of what, probably, started out as L. Ron Hubbard's conscious plan to start a cult based on himself, on his grandiose intellectual fantasies, and on his not-inconsiderable skills as a prose writer and armchair philosopher.
This book is an example of all of those things. Dianetics is the embryo out of which scientology grew. Such grandiose claims are, of course, without merit, but they are only one side of the coin. The other side of the coin - the one that fascinates me - is the story of "what could have been": namely, how great a philosopher and thinker L. The fabrication of physical "engrams" and the gnostic fantasy of the superhuman "clear" are only a twisted vesion of a true and perfectly reasonable philosophy hidden within the core of the book.
The average person supposedly has thousands of these engrams gumming up his or her works, but with the help of Dianetics' "science of mind," and a process called "auditing," anyone can have them removed from the reactive mind and become a "Clear. Auditing is the repetitive reliving of the engram-creating experience with the aid of a Dianetics auditor and while in a mild hypnotic trance.
The auditor is instructed to say "When I count from one to seven, your eyes will close. The most significant engrams, the theory holds, are formed prenatally, starting with the moment of conception. Any words overheard in an "unconscious" state, even pleasant ones, will become a particularly tenacious and unpredictable part of the engram, which is why you must never ever speak to a woman who has, for example, just fallen down in the street. Help her up, but don't say a word!
She might be pregnant! It shouldn't take anyone pages of gobbledygook to cover this material, so along the way it's easy to be distracted by Hubbard's numerous personal and writerly eccentricities.
I kept scouting the book for hints of something I'd heard about, the wacky science fiction mythology that lies at the inner sanctum of Scientology, though I knew it wouldn't appear per se in "Dianetics. Scientologists say they withhold this information because learning it can drive the unprepared person insane and give you pneumonia, but it's all over the Web, and it strikes me as far less likely to cause suffering than Hubbard's prose.
Critics say the church hushes up this story -- it involves an evil demiurge who, 75 million years ago, blew up billion souls with hydrogen bombs planted in Earth's volcanoes, trapped them on "electrical strips," brainwashed them and packaged them into clusters that now cling to every human being and mess with our bodies and heads -- for two reasons.
One is that the church needs a sufficiently dramatic payoff after stringing members along through years of courses and trainings, all costing upward of a quarter of a million dollars. The other reason is fear that revealing this fantasia of kooky stories might turn off potential converts -- but, hey, that never hurt the Old Testament.
Not only does "Dianetics" offer precious little sideshow appeal, it's impossible to read much of it without realizing that it's the work of a very disturbed man. Here's where things get less entertaining. Hubbard's grandiose preoccupation with "an answer to the goal of all thought," the reiteration of fantasies of perfect mastery foiled by invasive, alien forces engrams are described as "parasites" , the determination to envision the mind as a machine that can be brought under absolute control if only these enemies can be ejected -- all these are classic forms of paranoid thinking.
The alarm bells really start to ring when Hubbard describes colorblindness as caused by a "circuit" in a person's mind that "behaves as though it were someone or something separate from him and that either talks to him or goes into action of its own accord, and may even, if severe enough, take control of him while it operates.
It is sad. It is beautiful. Taste it. Feel it. Learn from Hubbard, learn from Hitler, learn from Faust: when the devil comes, don't sell your soul. View all 7 comments. View all 4 comments. He was kidding, right? View 2 comments. Shelves: ebooks. To better fight the enemy, know the enemy. The funniest blend of hypnosis and psychoanalysis to come along in a good long while. Hey guys, it's a science! And by science we mean a collection of information about a thing.
To explain the workings of the brain we've made up some anthropomorphic devices that remove any blame for misdeeds committed. You can see more concepts being invented in the author's mind as the book goes on, as if the whole work were a stream of consciousness exercise.
It's har To better fight the enemy, know the enemy. It's hard to imagine this crazed pseudo-science being the seed for such a twisted and deranged enterprise like Scientology. View all 18 comments. The worth of an individual is computed in terms of the alignment, on any dynamic, of his potential value with optimum survival along that dynamic. A high PV may, by reversed vector, result in a negative worth as in some severely aberrated persons.
A high PV on any dynamic assures a high worth only in the unaberrated person. View all 15 comments. I didn't actually read the book because, well, why would I want to willingly put that shit in my brain. Giving it 1 star is just my way of spitting on Scientology. View all 5 comments. Shelves: igtrtsootb. I bought this book because I am reading it for a book club. Now, I am afraid eBay and Half. So, on the the review. This book is worthless.
It's poorly written, disorganized, absolutely not science, and a pipe dream of a self-help process. That anyone was enticed to make use of it, not to mention actually got anything out of it is beyond my understanding. There are no new concepts of "self-help" or psychology in this book. It is just r I bought this book because I am reading it for a book club.
It is just repackaged as a new "science of the mind," which, again, is no science at all. There is no place in a science book for terms like "almost," "seems," "perhaps," "wild guess," etc. When things are asserted as scientific fact, the words above have no place in the discourse.
There are many, many examples of this throughout the book. In addition the author makes assertions as "scientific fact" with no proof or even explanation. It is extremely frustrating to read this as a person with a scientific education and background. I find it very hard to believe that anything in this book relating to the "science" of Dianetics is true or to be believed. There is nothing to convince the analytical person of the truth of any of the assertions.
Whether this book has helped anyone I cannot say. I will not speak to that. The first major sections of the book make becoming "A Clear" sound very desirable. The author is overly fixated on attempted abortion, something that may have been a problem in the first half of the 20th century in America but has ceased to be a serious issue in the 21st century.
Keep in mind that this book was published in ! Ron Hubbard was an outcast of society and a failed science fiction writer before he wrote this book. This is the kind of book that would come from the pen of a person like that. I urge anyone who reads this book to take it from an analytical point of view and asses what you read carefully. Do not take what is presented here at face value. View 1 comment. This book changed the way I view people and myself. It explains exactly why people are the way they are and what causes us to some times act irrationally.
It gives an exact technology to help us get rid of the "reactive mind" and all negative aspects of ourselves so we can once again live a rational and happy life. I've seen the miracles of this science and I'm glad to finally have read the book first hand to understand how it all works. View all 8 comments.
Rambling, illogical, fantastical, and a total mess. I'd only recommend this to somebody who wants to know more about how batshit insane Scientology is. Other than that, don't bother. View all 3 comments. While watching the old footage of L. Ron Hubbard on his boat, king in his own self-created reality, I realized that he seemed somehow familiar.
Not his physical body, perhaps, but something about his face, his expressions and mannerisms… At one point in the footage, a reporter asks Hubbard, "has it occurred to you that you may be quite mad? That's when it hit me.
Of course- L. Ron Hubbard is Donald Trump! Hear me out. Trump University, for example, is not a university, in the same way the Church of Scientology is not a church; they're both bait-and-switch money-making schemes.
Trump and Hubbard both tested out their acts in the realm of entertainment Trump on TV, Hubbard in science-fiction pulp magazines, where he included in his short fiction many of the ideas that would resurface as doctrine in Scientology before attempting to present themselves as serious to mass audiences. Trump has applied the sensibility of reality TV to politics; Hubbard applied the sensibility of science-fiction to religion. Both deliberately capitalized on Americans' susceptibility to celebrity Trump on his own, Hubbard by starting the first church of Scientology in Hollywood and cultivating actors as apostles.
Both encourage a nostalgia for a mythical time that never existed Hubbard 75 million years ago, when humans lived, on another planet, much like s Americans, Trump an undefined time when America was "great" , and blame the loss of that past prosperity on enemies Xenu the Galactic Overlord and roaming hordes of illegal immigrants, respectively.
I did a Google search, and unfortunately it does not seem as though the Church of Scientology has endorsed Trump. Disappointing, but there's still time. In a word: Tripe. His science fiction was and always will be terrible, and I include this bunk in that pile, though to use the word "science" at all is overly misleading. At no point are the methods for these "scientific facts" ever mentioned or brought up. This In a word: Tripe.
This Is Fiction. Through and through. Though I am ashamed to admit I even touched this book let alone read it I'm writing this as a heads up to anyone who might be curious: Read it if you're up for a good laugh but be prepaired to lose some braincells. By far, one of the most important books that I have ever read in my life. I would have to say that at first I was a little initimated by it because of its length.
However, after I got started I learned a lot more about myself and why I am the way that I am. Anyone who has read this book and has not been changed in some way shape or form, is simply not a normal person. This is one of those books that will change your life. Any Scientologist will tell you that this book is a stepping-stone to many By far, one of the most important books that I have ever read in my life.
Any Scientologist will tell you that this book is a stepping-stone to many greater things, and they are right. As you continue on the Basics, you will gain more knowledge about yourself and others around you than you will ever get from any other book in existance.
Truly this book and those that follow will be the most important books you will ever read. Reading it made me high. While no one can deny that Tom Cruise's life has really taken off since starting up scientology, I don't like the use of the word "Dianetics". Just because Hubbard's wife, Diane, became an android after her death, doesn't mean that the rest of us want to hear about it. I flipped through it to see what it was about.
Here is a good quote by Robert Carroll regarding the book. The key elements of Hubbard's so-called science don't seem testable, yet he repeatedly claims that he is asserting only scientific facts and data from many experiments.
It isn't even clear what such "data" would look like. Most of his data is in the form of anecdotes and I flipped through it to see what it was about.
Most of his data is in the form of anecdotes and speculations Such speculation is appropriate in fiction, but not in science. View all 13 comments. I started to read it out of sheer curiosity, then became fascinated by the number of "tear-out" sign-up slips that litter every-other chapter.
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