going-clear-scientology-hollywood-and-the-prison-of-belief-by-lawrence-wright-2

writes. “When I walked downstairs … the electric lights dazzled me. The clean modern
lines of the house interior, and the furniture, were elegant and strange to me beyond all
description. I was freshly there from another age. For the rst time in this lifetime, I
knew I was beyond the laws of space and time.
“I was never the same again.”
With his new acceptance of past-life experiences, Hubbard could now describe the
individual as being divisible into three parts. First there was the spirit, or soul, which
Hubbard calls the thetan. The thetan normally lives in or near a body but can also be
entirely separate from it. When a person goes exterior, for instance, it is the thetan part
of him that travels outside the body or views himself from across the room. The mind,
which serves mainly as a storehouse of pictures, functions as a communication and
control system for the thetan, helping him operate in his environment. The body is
merely the physical composition of the person, existing in space and time.
Anyone who stands in the way of a thetan’s spiritual progress is a Suppressive Person
(SP). This is a key concept in Scientology. Hubbard uses the term to describe a
sociopath. The Suppressive instinctively ghts against constructive forces and is driven
berserk by those who try to help others. Hubbard estimates that Suppressives constitute
about twenty percent of the population, but only about two and a half percent are truly
dangerous. “A Suppressive Person will goof up or vilify any eort to help anybody and
particularly knife with violence anything calculated to make human beings more
powerful or more intelligent,” Hubbard writes. “The artist in particular is often found as
a magnet for persons with anti-social personalities who see in his art something which
must be destroyed.”
Naturally, anyone who is close to a Suppressive Person is in great danger of falling
under his inuence. Hubbard called that person a Potential Trouble Source. If, for
instance, a parent opposes a child who wants to join Scientology, that parent is likely to
be declared an SP; and as long as the child remains in contact with the parent, he is in
danger of being dened as a PTS. He will be denied auditing and training. Eventually,
the child will have to make a choice, either to leave the church—which oers him a path
to career success, personal improvement, and salvation—or to disconnect from his
parent, who is the cause of his failure to achieve happiness and realize his dreams.
Hubbard had learned some dicult lessons from his experience with Dianetics. He
was by nature an autocrat, but his work beckoned to amateurs. The movement inspired
by his book had sprung up so quickly there was no real chance to rein it in and exert the
kind of authority that might have made it more durable. Although he tried to impose
order by creating professional training schools for auditors, in truth he had more or less
surrendered control of the movement from the moment of inception by empowering his
readers to become practitioners themselves; all they had to do was to follow the
formulas sketched in his book. Entrepreneurs grabbed hold of the concept and snatched
it out of his hands. They spread the message, but they also diluted it. When the Dianetics
movement subsided, Hubbard was unable to restore the momentum that had given it
such a rocket-powered launch. Imitators and competitors came onto the eld, some even
rivaling Hubbard himself. He was determined not to make the same mistakes with