That lecture's pretty interesting. Hubbard may not have known a billion from a trillion, but he seems pretty comfortable with the subject of hypnosis.
It's a rambling, disjointed lecture, but he starts out by saying that hypnosis is completely horrible, the sort of thing evil psychs love, because it destroys determinism; "the whole process of hypnotism is the exact parallel process to the dwindling spiral." He gradually describes it in bits and pieces.
LRH said:
Now, in the first place, what is hypnotism? You think of it as hocus-pocus. Some people don't believe it is true or, you know, they doubt hypnotism. This is silly.
Hypnotism is that process by which sufficient agreement can be made between an operator and a subject so that the subject will agree that the operator has entire and complete control of his intellectual processes, as well as his sleep, mock-up processes, et cetera, ad infinitum. It is that process by which the operator—the hypnotist—takes control of the machinery of the thetan by agreement.
LRH said:
So if we look across the whole field we can find that we can induce hypnotism on any dynamic merely by suppressing the determinism of an individual on that dynamic and supplanting that determinism with one's own will.
He admits to having hypnotized people in the early days, and that Dianetic reverie is hypnosis.
LRH said:
In Book One it talks about Dianetic reverie. You realize that Dianetic reverie is the thinnest upper level possible of hypnotism. Here the auditor had to take a certain amount of control over the preclear's bank in order to get the preclear's bank operating at all. And then by knocking out enough held-down fives, why, the preclear would become more awake or alive than previously.
The only excuse we had for doing this, for inducing anything like an attentive state of mind on the part of a preclear, was because preclears were not able, in the main, to do these processes without this. Therefore, the processes themselves were a little too complicated, weren't they? Certainly, if an auditor did them with some inexpertness, they were very complicated.
All right. So we moved out of this level of Dianetic reverie. But remember, my first investigations were undertaken at the deepest levels of hypnotism.
Distributed throughout this are vicious and absurd attacks on psychiatry. These are used to illustrate, in a straw man fashion, how anything done by a psych is nothing like scientology. And if a psych hypnotizes someone and they say they're better? It's fake!
LRH said:
So then, man's waking up is much more important than his going to sleep, as far as therapy is concerned. And yet therapy has been on a 180-degree vector. It has insisted that the only way to make a man well was to put him to sleep; the only way you made a man sane was to put a straitjacket on him. To beat in his anchor points with whips: that was the way to make men sane. And nobody, in all the millennia man has been on earth, has ever made one individual sane or better with straitjackets, whips or any other mechanism which suppressed his dynamics. That's a curious thing.
If they would just open up the front door right now and bring in somebody who had gotten well, who observably was better through having been hypnotized, I would take back at least one one-hundredth of what I've said today.
Yes, you can get a fellow so apathetic that he will no longer register a facsimile. Yes, you can get a fellow so convinced on other-determinism that he's well, that he'll go around like a little automaton saying, "I'm well. I'm well."
Therapeutic hypnotists are in the business of enslavement, and are quickly destroyed by their own continuous overts.
LRH said:
[Hypnotists] don't ask for processing, they beg for it! They beg with a desperation which gets them tears in their eyes. They get down on their knees, "Please, please. For God sakes, process me."
It's a fantastic thing. I mean, you've never heard a plea like some old-time, long-duration hypnotist will make. He has enslaved so many intelligences, overtly, that he at last has come to a point where he himself is so enslaved that he can't budge or exhibit free will in his activities and environment. And he gets to a point of where he realizes he's just about down the third time.
He then goes on for a while about how all traditional western education is hypnotic, because it forces an overwhelming amount of data onto the student without giving the student any control over the subject.
LRH said:
We could say the human race consists of a number of individuals who have gone almost entirely to sleep. They are walking around to some degree in a trance. And that trance is absolutely no different from an hypnotic trance. There's no difference. You can induce this same kind of trance.
The way you really knock out somebody's education is to educate him in an hypnotic way: You educate him monotonously. You educate him under duress. You make the punishment just horrible if he were to miss.
He says that hypnosis is accomplished by exercising control. Objectives, anyone? Scientology "justice"? Where's your control when you're on a billion year contract, expected to do exactly as you're told, and rarely even know whether your pay envelope will be empty until you open it? That one could, in 5 minutes, be ordered to divorce, or sent to some hellhole indefinitely?
LRH said:
And hypnotism is accomplished simply by demonstrating to a person that he is not able to control, but that somebody else controls him. That's all there is to the subject, and actually that's all there is to training.
Throughout this lecture, he frames hypnotism as terrible, and destructive of determinism, and says that his own stuff can't be hypnosis, because it's great instead of horrible; it makes them awake and self-determined, rather than creating sleepwalking zombies.
He also says that the hypnotic relationship continues to exist outside of any therapy sessions.
LRH said:
So the problem of hypnotism is simply the problem of control. It is the problem of determinism. When a hypnotist starts in, he's got an individual there who is to some degree subjugated to his will. And he then, by a process—a gradient scale of agreement—builds up the fact to where the hypnotist has actually taken the place of the subject's will. Control and will has transferred in this case.
<---snip--->
This is the condition in psychoanalysis. It is an hypnotic condition by which one takes a practice and puts it into an hypnotic rapport to such a degree that the practice then sort of moves on an automaton basis, totally on the advices of the analyst.
Now, I don't know about all of you, but in school/uni I never experienced anything near the monotony and duress of scientology training. I don't need to ask if you ever had to try to act awake while listening to Hubbard lecture, because I KNOW that you did. Suppressed yawns, "no, I just closed my eyes to focus on the sound," and that sort of thing. And if I cut a uni class? My grade might go down a little, end of story. My professor would not call me up and say that he was driving to my house to get me back on course. My professor would not send me to ethics. My professor would never ask me to stay in class from 9AM until 11PM. Monotony and duress like that are hallmarks of scientology training.
Never in my life did I experience being as other-determined as I was in scientology. Hubbard's only real defenses are things like this:
LRH said:
I'll teach you a process so that you will do it right. That's because a lot of experience says that's the right way to do a process. But, I never for one moment—never for one moment—ask you to take anything completely on its face value. You do this technique, it makes people well for you. Fine. That's right.
But it isn't making them well for you because I say so. It's because you are dealing with the woof and warp of existence which we happen to be dealing with.
In the end, it's just a circular argument. Hypnotism is terrible enslavement (because I say so), scientology is wonderful liberation (because I say so and "it's true for you" *cough*), therefore scientology can't be hypnotism, even though it looks just like it.
