Info-ParaNet Newsletters, Number 53 Tuesday, October 3rd 1989 Today's Topics: Re: Bill Moore As 'savior' Of The Ufological Community LRH ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: paranet!f20.n30163.z1.FIDONET.ORG!Jim.Speiser Subject: Re: Bill Moore As 'savior' Of The Ufological Community Date: 2 Oct 89 07:56:00 GMT My working hypothesis is simple. They're trying to confuse the issue. And succeeding hugely. --Jim -- Jim Speiser - via FidoNet node 1:104/422 UUCP: !scicom!paranet!User_Name INTERNET: Jim.Speiser@f20.n30163.z1.FIDONET.ORG -------------------------------------------------------------------- From: MacLeod Subject: LRH Date: 3 Oct 89 18:06:21 GMT The note which appeared recently seems to be a response to an older posting of mine. I'll try to answer the questions. :I have just recently discovered this echo and read your comments on LRH :and Scn. I am interested in more info on this subject. Some questions. :1. What is OTO? The OTO is the Ordo Templar Orientalis, a group organized in the 19th century Europe to carry out various kinds of what is called "ceremonial magic". This is a kind of left-brain magic-by-the-numbers approach which dates back to Pythagoreas and the presocratics. The OTO and similar groups generally boasted of secret wisdom handed down through the ages; as the name suggests, the OTO originally claimed secrets imported into the West through the Knights Templars. Often these were confused, half-understood Tantric techniques or muddled Sufi mysticism. Because sex was so suppressed in Victorian England sex magic played a great part. In this century the OTO was run by the notorious Aleister Crowley, and he chartered a group in Los Angeles run by Jack Parsons. (A good intro to the OTO and Crowley is Colin Wilson's book _The Occult_.) :2. >LRH is known to have been involved with the OTO in Los Angeles. : Known by who? What is your reference on this. Therer are two recent LRH biographies which deal with his involvement. The better of the two is _Bare-Faced Messiah_, written by an Englishman. In it his mistress and later wife is interviewed and others on the scene at the time contributed their comments. There are also letters from Parsons describing how he and LRH attempted various curious experiments, and stories about how Ron bullshitted his way into and out of trouble (as he does for virtually the entire book). :3. >Interestingly, when you confront the Church of Scientology with such :stories, :Who in the church was confronted or WHICH church of Scn. was :contacted? Was this the "official" church response to such inquiries? August Murphy, the ED (Executive Director) of the Church of Scientology of San Francisco, wrote a long rebuttal to a bunch of questions about LRH's involvement with the OTO published in _Critique_ magazine last year (by the way, I highly recommend _Critique_). Friends of mine have put C of S spokesmen on the spot on radio call-in shows with similar requests for more data. The C of S doesn't deny that LRH was there; they just insist that he was acting as some sort of police spy or government agent, which is bad enough, but apparently something they don't feel called to account for. :4. What is "Nevada Aerial Research"? The name of a person or group issuing a newsletter with some interesting UFO and fringe science stories. I can dig up the address if you're interested. I have no idea where he-she-they get their data from. :5. Why should we give more weight to what NAV says about LRH's theories : than to what the man on the street says about LRH's theories? The NAR made no comment one way or the other about what they printed; it looked like they simply included some kind of typed pages within the camera-ready copy of their own letter. I thought the material exceptional because it was more detailed than anything I had yet seen, and I have been exposed to a variety of Scientology materials within and without the church. :6. (comment) I have read several of LRH's books and the only one I recall :having anything to do with e.t.'s is "Scientology: A History of Man". :Since I read it a new printing has come out with 2 added previously :unreleased chapters. It is not an ordinary book. HOM is very weird and often nearly unreadable unless you completely disconnect your critical faculties. There are other tidbits of what Hubbard calls "space opera" sprinkled here and there in his books and tapes. Scientologists eat these little bits up and yearn for the day they make it to the "upper levels" and can be trusted with the confidential materials which go into the convoluted story LRH weaves in greater detail. The similarities between Hubbard's story and some of the Lear-Cooper-Bennewitz stuff is disturbing, in one sense, which was the point of my earlier posting. :8. >"wake up" humans before a series of destabilizing actions and events :occurred which would throw human civilization into a tailspin. :This alligns with what I have read, however in my experience the :"actions and events" were always clearly indicated to be man's :self distruction through nuclear war and nothing else. (LRH was :a nuclear physicist among other things.) LRH was ten pounds of bs in a five pound sack, among other things. His various claims of attending "one of the first classes taught about nuclear physics" was so much fiction, as was his claims of a Princeton education and degrees from George Washington University. See _Bare Faced Messiah_ for details. He does mention nuclear war in several places, mostly as an imitation of a bunch of unsavory incidents which supposedly happened 76 million years ago in the era central to the "Wall of Fire", or New OT III processing. Briefly, after a interstellar civil war, the bad guy made a kind of last stand on Earth and detonated huge atomic weapons in many volcanoes all over the Earth's surface, precipitating some kind of huge atmospheric catastrophe (presumably a nuclear winter-type scenario. In another, obscure, reference, he claims that Mammoths with frozen vegetables still in their mouths (indicating freezing in several seconds or less) were caused by beings temporarily whisking the atmosphere off the planet and then replacing it.) Now, having raked LRH over the coals, let me reiterate that some of the Dianetic and Scientological techniques and exercises are the most potent ways of healing the spirit that I've ever seen. I credit these techniques with saving my life, in fact. Unfortunately, LRH was a jerk as well as an innovator, and he built an organization which reflected his own paranoia and stubborness. I had the good fortune to encounter the C of S when a mature adult and with a reasonably tough and mature personality. If I had found them at 20 instead of 30 I would have been drawn much more deeply into the cultish (and repellant) aspects of the organization. As you might guess the C of S has lost many, many people from its ranks over the years, including virtually all of the old time members who worked with LRH and who have made careers out of Dianetic and Scientological auditing. There are independent movements which are trying to separate out the useful aspects of the LRH materials from the speculative, the elliptical, and the simple lies. If you have any interest in Scn techniques I strongly suggest seeing an independent rather than getting enmeshed in the Church itself. Michael Sloan MacLeod (amdahl!drivax!macleod) 177 Webster St. no. 382 Monterey, CA 93940 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To have your thoughts in the next issue, please send electronic mail to 'infopara' at the following address: UUCP {ncar,isis,nbires,boulder}!scicom!infopara DOMAIN infopara@scicom.alphacdc.com ADMIN Address infopara-request@scicom.alphacdc.com {ncar,isis,nbires,boulder}!scicom!infopara-request ******************************************************************************** End of Info-ParaNet Newsletter ********************************************************************************