Hello, I'm a scientist. Specifically, a physics professor. I know — so what? So nothing. I’ve never been a Scientologist, never even taken their personality test. It's just that over the past year or so, reading stuff online, I’ve become fascinated by Scientology as a phenomenon. I’ve been lurking here for a few months now, and I notice that the ESMB FAQ says people with no Scientology history are welcome to post.
What I can offer is a sort of reality check. My impression is that a lot of smart people get caught in Scientology when they are young or otherwise vulnerable; and then once they’ve been in a few years, it can be really hard to escape the Scientology worldview. So maybe someone will find it useful to know what it all looks like to an educated adult with an open but scientifically informed mind. I'm not saying the conclusions are any surprise, but it may be handy to know that they're obvious to an outsider.
First, it’s obvious that there are no ‘superpower’ OT abilities, such as ‘stable exteriorization with full perception’. It’s obvious because out-of-body perception, or creating even tiny amounts of physical mass or force by mental ‘mocking up’, would be huge and basic violations of natural law as we now understand it. Now, my point is not that we are sure that what we now understand must be true! My greatest hope is that there are major new discoveries still to be made; if not, I'm wasting my life. My point is that OT superpowers would be a major new discovery.
Anyone who really had OT superpowers would easily be able to demonstrate them rigorously. And then, because this would be so scientifically surprising, they wouldn’t just win the million dollar prize of the James Randi Foundation. They’d win the Nobel prize in physics, get their name up in the lights of world history along with Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein, and immediately gain the stature to draw millions of people onto ‘the Bridge’. Anyone who could do that, surely would do that. Nobody has, so we know that nobody can.
On the other hand, though, at least a few bits of Scientology probably do work, as far as they go. Quasi-hypnotic euphoria from prolonged concentration, subjective sensations of being out of one's body, other stuff like this, these are all known phenomena. There are a lot of funny mental quirks in the human brain that are not yet fully understood, but perfectly real. Scientology may well have managed to include a few of these. That doesn’t mean they are what Scientology says they are. Just because the bait is real cheese doesn’t mean the trap is not a trap.
So it seems likely that a few basic things in Scientology do work, though they will also work at least as well outside Scientology; but the big promises in Scientology certainly do not. What keeps people stuck wasting years of their lives, hoping vainly to advance from their initial cool but modest 'wins' to the nonexistent OT states? This kind of psychology isn't my field, but I think an explanation that fits all the facts I've seen can be found in the folktale of the Emperor's New Clothes.
