Live Performance of L. Ron Hubbard’s Science Fiction Short “Tough Old Man”

Live Performance of L. Ron Hubbard’s Science Fiction Short “Tough Old Man”, originally uploaded by tadnkat.

This weekend, my wife and I attended another excellent performance of L. Ron Hubbard‘s Stories from the Golden Age at the Founding Church of Scientology in Washington, DC.

Like the earlier performances I’ve written about, including LRH’s sci-fi short “Battling Bolto”, and the quite-entertaining performance of “One Was Stubborn”, the performance was a multicast audio reading of one of Mr. Hubbard’s stories from the 1930′s golden age of pulp fiction, and was done replete with lighting and audio effects to make it a rather immersive performance.    Author Services, the literary agent for Mr. Hubbard’s works, does a tour through the area once a year, and these performances are always a treat.

I’ve been listening to more and more of these stories lately, seeing as I have to take an 8-hour each-way road trip once per month for work, and audiobooks like these make an excellent trip companion.

If you want to get hold of this story itself, it’s one of the short stories in the book When Shadows Fall which you can get here.

Celebrating L. Ron Hubbard’s 101st Birthday

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Celebrated L. Ron Hubbard’s 101st birthday at the Founding Church of Scientology in Washington DC this weekend. 

It really is heartening to see so many people around the globe taking his life and legacy to heart.

Live Performance of L. Ron Hubbard’s “Battling Bolto” at the Founding Church of Scientology Washington, D.C.

L. Ron Hubbard Stories from a Golden Age Reading of “Battling Bolto”, originally uploaded by tadnkat.

My wife and I (as well as my daughter) were treated to another good time at our church this weekend – this time care of an amazingly-professional performance of the L. Ron Hubbard sci-fi short-story entitled “Battling Bolto”.

Unfortunately, unlike last year’s live perfomance, I forgot to bring my DSLR, so the only photo I could take of it was from my lowly BlackBerry Curve.   But the performance itself, held in the chapel of the Founding Church of Scientology in Washington, D.C, was just as excellent.

Author Services has been working to release the full array of  L. Ron Hubbard’s short stories – both as illustrated books, but also as high-quality audiobooks.  It’s the audiobooks that I, personally, have been most fond of – as they’re all told by  not a single voice, but by multiple actors and replete with outstanding sound effects.   Before the performance, we were treated to a demonstration of what goes into making the audiobooks – the actors, the sound effects, the attempts to find sounds that can instantly communicate what’s happening without one having any visual to go along with it except what’s in your head.

And the story itself, “Battling Bolto” is one that one can now get as part of the L. Ron Hubbard paperback entitled When Shadows Fall.   The story is about a hulking man from another world, Bolto, who is duped into being whisked away by a traveling con man who travels from planet to planet selling his wares.

I already am a subscriber to these Golden Age Stories (i.e. I get a new one monthly when they come out) but seeing the performance in person is a real treat.

Preserving the Authenticity of my Religion

I personally have quite a bit of respect for all great religions of the world.  I think that by and large, their founders and original proponents were quite enlightened, and had some fairly star-high goals for man – both in terms of morality and enhancing mankind’s ability to interact with one another, as well as high goals for mankind’s inherent spirituality.

Hear-say or Heresy?

There’s been an impediment that (I would say) every religion has had to deal with, however, and that is with respect to the communication and preservation of their exact religious beliefs, scriptures and teachings.  In the earlier days of man, the primary way that beliefs and customs could be passed on generation to generation was in song, in the spoken word, and in some cases – someone was bright enough to write down what it was that they heard into book form.

Unfortunately there is often a wide variance between what the founder of a religion actually said, and what the individual who hears it all verbally takes away from such an experience.

Every religion has this issue to one degree or another.  From the Bhagavad-Gita to the King James edition of the bible, so many enlightened texts have relied in whole or in part on the interpretation of another (or of committees & parliamentary bodies) on what the founder originally taught.

Now please understand, I mean positively no disrespect to any enlightened text which forms the scripture of any religion.  In all cases, having such beliefs written at all has uplifted hundreds of generations, and that can’t be discounted.

Case in Point

My reason for writing this, is I recently finished a study of the Dianetics Professional Course lectures at the Founding Church of Scientology in Washington, DC.

The Dianetics Professional Course lectures were originally known for some decades as a book called “Notes on the Lectures” – a compiled book, taken from the notes of students who were there in the fall of 1950, listening to L. Ron Hubbard give the lecture.  It was assumed for some years that the original taped recordings of the lectures were lost, so this verbal transcription – amounting to what the students understood from the lectures as they were given – were all that remained.

Then, just a few years ago, the original tapes of the lectures were located.  However, due to the fact that the tapes had been sitting in suboptimum storage for over 50 years, it was assumed that they were not going to able to be reproduced for public listening.  However, after a massive effort by Golden Era Productions, the tapes were in fact able to be restored so that all could listen to them.

A fantastic video to watch which gives the details of how much care was put into such, is available to watch on the Scientology website:

Now, I’ve had the opportunity to read the previously-issued Notes on the Lectures book nearly-back-to-back with the actual lectures that Mr. Hubbard gave, and the result is pretty horrifying.  There are some portions of the book where you can fairly well understand which lecture it is that the student note-takers were talking about, as it seemed they were tracking with the lecture.

In other places, though – especially with some of the diagrams they came up with, it seems like they either missed the point entirely, or were making up their own vision of what Mr. Hubbard was talking about.

The actual lectures give the first, best, and most amazing view of the relationship of the properties of affinity, reality (agreement) and communication, and how they relate to a person’s mental health. It’s really quite an amazing study – even if someone studying it wasn’t planning on giving someone a Dianetics session.  I’ll write more of what I got from it on my Scientology parenting site.

But my painful realization, in this case, was not only how wildly off-base the Notes on the Lectures book had been, but it gave me such a respect for entities like Religious Technology Center, and the Chairman of the Board RTC, Mr. David Miscavige, who have as their mission preserving the purity of the Scientology religion.

It made me wonder – how much of what we know of today’s world religions is actually how the founder or spiritual leader taught or said?  How much of it was faithfully passed on with fidelity, and how much was either altered completely or made up whole cloth?  That much, we’ll unfortunately never know.

Live Performance of L. Ron Hubbard’s Short: “One Was Stubborn”

Saturday night, we had the good fortune of having a tour come to town from Author Services – the organization that acts as the literary agent for L. Ron Hubbard’s works.   

In the Chapel of the Founding Church of Scientology, we got not only a briefing about what Author Services has been doing – what with the release of the incredible Stories From a Golden Age books & audiobooks, and the incomparable Writers of the Future Competition, but we also got treated to a live performance of the sci-fi short story entitled “One Was Stubborn” by L. Ron Hubbard.

 

As a first primer, in case you didn’t know, L. Ron Hubbard was one of the most prolific authors during the golden age of the pulps, an era during the 1930’s and 1940’s where instead of television, people turned to reading gripping short stories of all sorts as their common form of entertainment.

L. Ron Hubbard wrote in literally every genre – westerns, adventure, sci-fi, even romance.   This site has an excellent video presentation on such.

Author Services has recently released the full cache of L. Ron Hubbard’s short stories – both as quite excellent illustrated books, but also as high-quality audiobooks.  It’s the audiobooks that I, personally, have been most fond of – as they’re all told by  not a single voice, but by multiple actors and replete with outstanding sound effects.   You can get a sample of some of them, including the one we saw live. 

The story centers around a fellow named Old Shellback (above), who allegedly is the most stubborn old codger in the entire universe.  When a charismatic (yet slimy) religious leader dubbed “the Messiah” comes along to try to convince everyone that the world exists only by mutual agreement and calls for its end, objects start to disappear.

The story goes from there – one that I found quite entertaining, but even more so due to the excellent performance we were treated to.

Evaluating Information – Seeing "Both Sides" of the Story

I got a rather loaded question on my earlier post on the Evil John Sweeney which I thought deserves its own forum for discussion.

His question:

I apologize if I’ve been disrepectful, but I do have a serious question for you. As your child grows up, do you want them to restrict information to themselves and others, or would you prefer for them to evaluate all the information and decide for themselves?

Obviously a loaded question, and one I’ve been asked repeatedly on various subjects – whether I wrote something about Scientology, or about drug use, questions of whether or not marijuana is indeed a "gateway drug", questions about religion in general, etc, etc.   On another post I wrote about the dangers of the drug Ecstasy, I was getting flamed by druggies for not presenting "both sides" of the story — something I thought was absurd – sort of like my writing a post about the relative pros and cons of running a baby over with a truck.  Senseless.

Now, to answer the commentator’s  question above, I positively do not want to "restrict information" being given to my children, and of course would want them to be able to evaluate any  information for themselves.  However, I’ll go further than that – as evaluation of information is itself an important subject.  Nobody can truly operate well when they’re being force-fed information to treat as "fact".  As such, one has not only the necessity of being able to freely assimilate and evaluate information, but also in that computation it is intrinsically important for one to be able to take into account the source of the information in said evaluation.

Example: German politician exclaiming that racial integration in Germany is an "unmitigated failure".   Likely you would get a different story if you talked to a Turk living in peace in Germany.

Example: Get the opinion of a Hezbollah radical as to whether or not the Jew deserves to be in Palestine.   A Jew may have a different opinion.

Now, I’m not saying that a Hezbollah radical is incapable of stating or observing an actual fact with respect to Judaism.  But obviously, his data would be suspect with respect to bias, and one would simply need to take that into account when accepting a statement from him.

My reason for wanting to post on this topic is pretty simple.   I’ve had quite a bit of people try to tell me what to think about my religion, using data they’ve located on the Internet as their "reliable source" in terms of a "controversy" about my religious beliefs, or with respect to leadership within the Church of Scientology.

I’m unfortunately a bit sorry for some of these folks, with respect to their ability to observe the source of information and use such to compute whether or not they should believe something they’re reading.   I.e. when trying to find out about Scientology, read a Scientology book.  Don’t ask someone antagonistic about Scientology, as that will likely not give you the real story.  Fine, you can go talk to someone who hates religion and find out what they think.  I’ve done plenty of that.  Look at my comment streams.

But in the end, it’s up to me to be able to formulate my own opinion, and in the end – with my kids – it will be up to them to formulate their own opinions too.   For me, as you can read about here, I made my own decision about Scientology when I was a kid, and I’ll allow my kids to definitely do the same.

Scientologist to Reddit: I’ll Respect Your Beliefs if You Respect Mine

I’ve found Reddit to be a rough place for commentary, if you’re not either (a) an Atheist or (b) on some manner of antagonistic agenda against some religion or another.  Today, front-page on Reddit was a comic insinuating that it’s okay to bash Christians because Christians keep telling people they’re immoral sinners.   But what else is new – this sort of thing is basically always front page on Reddit, with around 1500 upvotes and hundreds of comments.

Today was another such “interesting” day on Reddit, one that I find tiresome, unfortunately.  Mostly because I keep having to answer the same questions over and over again from the same skeptical types of people who have the same bizarre misconceptions about my religion from similar off-the-wall sources.

I’m putting this on my blog now, so that hopefully I can just either refer to it in the future, or at least use it for copypasta.  Parts are vetted for the reading enjoyment of the user.

The below is from a Reddit Post I made simply to post an article on the ScientologyParent site detailing how Scientology is used to help pregnant mothers.

Commenter: What, do you hook the fetus up to an e reader so you can clear it before it is born?

Me: It’s usual practice to click on an article and read it, as that will many times save one from making ignorant and bigoted comments. Just as a tip. But then again, your recent comment history shows bigoted comments against Christians and Muslims as well as Scientologists, so I can’t hope for too much.

Commenter: I tried to read your article, it was meaningless drivel

Me: How to have a stress-free birth is meaningless drivel? Ever talked to a stressed-out mom?

Commenter: Do you have any clinical trials or evidence that “auditing” in any way helps a pregnant mother?

Me: Read the comments. You can believe them, or not. Doesn’t much matter to me.

Commenter: Comments by fellow scientologists is not valid evidence.

Me: Wow – that makes positively no sense at all. Someone uses Scientology, sees that it works for them, likes it and writes about it, and thereby is now invalid as evidence that it was helpful?

Commenter: Correct, look up the difference between anecdotal evidence and real evidence. Are there any clinical, science based trials that suggest that any e-reader or clearing has any benefit to pregnant mothers? And then look up the placebo effect while you are at it.

Me:

Well aware of the placebo effect. When Dianetics was originally in development, there was a massive set of test cases used, many of which were pregnant mothers. Do I have access to those results from where I am? No. But what is valid for me is (a) if I understand the theory of what’s being done, does it make sense that it would make someone better and relieve stress, and (b) what do people say who have done such a procedure.

Answer is (a) the theory does make sense to me (may not to you — such views are your prerogative), and (b) I’ve known scores of people to get such counseling when pregnant, and 100% say it was immensely helpful, one of which being my own WIFE.

So, again, if you want to downvote it, or voice your skepticism, fine. I’m just not down with the whole Reddit thing of “see how hard you can slam the other guy’s religious beliefs”. If you’re athiest or buddhist or spaghettimonsterist or whatever, I’ll respect that even if I don’t agree with it, I’d just ask for the same.

 

What comes after the Basics?

In reading a chapter in Scientology 0-8, I came upon the Tone Plotting Scale from a June 1955 lecture by L. Ron Hubbard.  Looking this up on the Materials Guide Chart, I saw that this was from the Anatomy of the Spirit of Man Congress which LRH held at that time.   However, I quickly also saw that there are a number of other unreleased items that look like they will much further explain some of the concepts I’m reading on the Basics.  Can’t wait for these to come out!!

Scientology and Gradient Scales

I read something else interesting in my Scientology 0-8 Book today.  This was on the subject of gradient scales and their use.

I’ve always known in Scientology that we do things on a gradient scale, and don’t believe in skipped gradients or giving someone too much of something that they’re not ready for, etc.  It’s a basic part of our study technology and just is a fact — you work with gradient scales.

However, in the Scientology 0-8 book, there are a lot of other gradient scales – and I never understood what their use would be.  This part on page 99 clarifies, though:

” Remember two things:

“These scales are true.

” They do apply to life.  And unless you clothe them with some sensibility, unless you can use them while processing somebody, unless you can intelligently apply them and know where they begin and end — and know enough to use your own good sense too — they are just nice mathematical arrangements that are very pretty.” — LRH

I thought this interesting — as I know how to use the Tone Scale as covered in Science of Survival, but the other scales I was at a bit of a loss on how to use.