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on the theory of evolution |
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“Evolution: there's no such thing. Bodies don't evolve. They deteriorate, but they don't evolve. You can trace all kinds of reasons how they evolve, and why they evolve, and you can figure it all out, but the truth of the matter is when you get horses on a planet, somebody came along and mocked up some horses! Now, they also mocked up these horses with the capability of growing hair or not growing hair. You've got adjustment factors, but not evolution factors. So you confuse the adjustment factors and prove the whole theory of evolution.” |
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L. Ron Hubbard |
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 (from Saint Hill Special Briefing Course lecture #287, renumbered 1991: #316 “Errors in Time”, given on 18 July 1963) |
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“This is a cold-blooded and factual account of your last sixty trillion years.” |
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L. Ron Hubbard |
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(from “Foreword” to ‘What to Audit’ (1952), reissue title: ‘Scientology: A History of Man’) |
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Index:
 Introduction and implants
 It is generally conceived by members of the Scientology community that there had been evolution. They then may refer to the book publication ‘Scientology: A History of Man’. Subtitled: ‘A list and Description of the Principal Incidents to be Found in a Human Being’. Chapter 4 of the book runs of evolution-like incidents. One should keep in mind however that this was a handbook of sorts to be used by auditors. Its original release title was ‘What to Audit’*  . The reissue title is a kind of misleading in that respect. That which is contained in the little book is that which may be originated by the person receiving processing. The book is just a collection of any such things that reside in the mind. These originations were then categorized with a common denominator factor. Anyway the quotations assembled on this page may shed some some light on this and hopefully will clarify some things.
 Mary Sue Hubbard
holding a copy of the book |
It is advised while going through this to have some basic understanding about evolutionary theory. This information is provided here for those Scientologists interested in this matter, but even for evolutionists and creationists.
► Rather interestingly the information found in these writings may actually account for the compulsive nature of evolutionists and a variety of scientists, as in ‘an irresistable impulse to perform some irrational act’. It may in effect demonstrate why so many persons have fallen for this theory of evolution and have accepted it that easily as their paradigm. It may explain why they regard it as science so adamantly and as the only acceptable explanation for the origin of this universe, this planet and man. This when the observed evidence that is found rather contradicts the occurrence of evolution having taking place. In Scientology they have this phenomena that is referred to as implants* . Something that may indeed account for this ‘Darwinian Theory’ and ‘Errors in Time’
* ‘What to Audit’.
Title of a book first published in 1952 in a limited edition. This was meant to be a guide for auditors to prepare them what could be originated by the person subjected to auditing processes. When it was reissued in England 2 years later the title was changed to ‘Scientology: A History of Man’.
* implants. A painful and forceful means of overwhelming a being with artificial of false concepts in a malicious attempt to control and suppress him. An unwilling and unknowing receipt of a thought. An intentional installation of fixed ideas.
Selective quotations relating to evolution
About the ‘Theta-MEST Theory’
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“What I'm going to describe to you tonight is a basic theory that underlies this. The basic theory is called the Theta-MEST Theory. I know there's going to be a lot of you going to have a lot of trouble trying to figure out what a Theta-MEST theory is, but if you have any trouble, it is simply because you're trying to make it too complicated. It is too simple. That's the trouble with the Theta-MEST theory.
Theta stands for thought. Once upon a time. Man talked about his ‘soul’. Philosophers have talked about ‘life energy’. Some fellow, once upon a time, talked about ‘cosmic consciousness’. All of these things could be called theta. In other words, theta is just the Greek word which comes the closest to saying ‘thought’. So let's take thought as a separate energy, as something we don't know a great deal about, but we'll just compartment it out of the physical universe.
Now, we know the physical universe. The physical universe is this desk and that chair and that light and the electricity running through that light. Very simple.
We've all had our tiffs and bumps from the physical universe. We know about the physical universe. We call that MEST. It is called MEST because of Matter, Energy, Space and Time. And we take the first letter of each one of those words and put them all together and we have MEST.
In other words, matter–energy formed into solids. Energy itself–it could be heat, it could be electricity, it could be any type of energy or any manifestation of energy of which we know in the physical universe. And then there's space. We all know what space is, well, it's this empty stuff. And then there's time, what very few of us have enough of.
This is the physical universe and MEST is just another way of saying ‘the physical universe’. We could also call it–and get very, very erudite about the whole thing and call it phi–p-h-i and that would be another Greek syllable, and that would stand for physical universe. But this starts to sound too much like ‘having to have a label because we don't understand what we're talking about’, so let's just call it MEST and let it go at that. And by MEST we mean the physical universe.
Now, evidently, the theory of ‘mud to man’ has not worked out too well. The biologist has said, ‘Spontaneously arising from the ammonia seas of the world was a form of life which became more and more complicated and it evoluted and evoluted and all of a sudden you had a man. And that is all there's to it’.
And you look at him fixedly and say, ‘Yes, but this basic unit of life ...’
‘Oh’, he says, ‘well, that was probably a virus or a monocell or something.’ and so on.
‘But how did it come into being?’
‘Well, it just fortuitously came into being. It just happened at that moment there were enough factors present so that they combined and this happened.’
It's just exactly like that mountain of iron that fell over sideways upon the oil well and somehow or other fortuitously happened to produce a new Cadillac.
The odds against the mud-to-man theory, to anyone who wants to figure this out actuarially, are so great that when you add to them the odds of this organism going on and getting more and more complex, you get into an imponderable.
Men in the past have solved this imponderable by saying, ‘Well, God made Man and that's all there is to it and shut up!’
All right. This, we find, is a far more acceptable theory, if we want to call it a theory. Because we would call ‘cosmic consciousness’, or something a determination to do something to the physical universe and we find out our first axiom is simply in the line of ‘theta has as its mission or one of its missions the changing of MEST’. Now, that's not very complicated. Theta changes MEST.” LRH
(from Science of Survival lecture #1 “Theta-Mest Theory, Part 1”, given on 21 May 51) |
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Sound snippet |
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About the consequence of MEST without Theta
“As one examines these upper levels of mind, when one examines the evidence of the
theta body, and when one himself experiences, incidental to processing, the evidence of his
own continuation into yesterdays and an evident guarantee of his tomorrows past his death in
the current generation, one's orientation with regard to goals and purposes may undergo a
considerable alteration. The biologist, revolting against churches which may or may not have
considerably suppressed scientific research in the past, has sought to dream for man an origin
out of mud and ammonia seas and a source for him independent of God, but springing only
from material things. This reactive overreaching gave us no method of alleviating the unhappiness of man, even in the restricted fields of chronic somatics and mental aberration, and
gave to us instead tremendous weapons of destruction without providing as well any sanity with which to use them.
Under the guidance of the material-blinkered scientist, whose greatest goal was a work-animal
adjustment of man to a physical environment, whose end for the individual was six feet
of ground and a coffin sometimes proof against worms, and whose goal for the group was an
ant society wherein the smallest unit of life worthy of notice was ten thousand individuals, we
have been led down dark and evil byways of destruction not only of the dreams, hopes, and
ethics of men but of the MEST planet as well. Materialistic science, operating on the premise
that man came from mud only, that the mind is a queerly erroneous stimulus-response
mechanism, that the human soul is a delusion, that God was a myth of some aberrated
Mesopotamian, has presented us at last with the immediate and real threat of man's extinction
as a species. In view of the fact that this materialistic science led only, then, in the direction of
death, even the unthinking should see the fact that something must be desperately wrong with the teachings of the Lysenkos, the Darwins, and my learned schoolmates, the atomic scientists who have given man at last for his gravespade the atomic bomb.
However, it was natural for man, as an organism heavily enturbulated with MEST, to
bring to perfection something like the understanding of the laws of MEST before he looked
about to see whether anything else might exist. The materialist scientist has enormously
advanced man's control of MEST, even if he has by his doctrines considerably inhibited man's
understanding of what in Dianetics we call theta. Francis Bacon, Newton, and the rest
developed ways of thinking about thinking and ways of reasoning about reason which have
been of considerable value to Dianetics and without which, indeed, Dianetics could not have
been formulated. But Bacon and Newton did not espouse the materialist cause. Their disciples developed the doctrine that man came from mud and that man's destiny was mud.
If Dianetics
does not come too late upon the scene, its investigation of higher mind levels, even at this low
and undeveloped point, may be of assistance to a resurgence in man of something of his belief
in a Divine Being and in himself as an entity partially divine. The basic principles of Dianetics
demand that a fact, to be proven, must be sensed, measured, or experienced. When science
thrust this onto the scene of thinking, man's willingness to accept a fact merely upon faith was
in itself reduced. Caught unprepared before this new doctrine without which, so its espousers
claim, nothing could be valid, the religions still attempted to hold at high value what was
actually a vitally necessary part of man's social existence. But generation after generation of
young men and women came off the assembly lines marked ‘educational courses,’ filled full of
the doctrine that they must believe only what they could experience, and ground very fine in the
mills of the materialist. These generations, actually, regardless of their ability to quote Hamlet
or play Bach on the piano, to look into microscopes, to serve as executives in steamship
offices, to shift and command and generally alter MEST, were nevertheless socially lost
generations which had no concept of the value of themselves as individuals, which had no
workable social order worth mentioning if the value of a social order is to be measured in terms
of happiness. These generations were wrecked by divorce, inhibitions, purposelessness,
sophistication, insecurity and general hopelessness. Representative of their feeling in the field
of humanity were schools of thought which taught them that a man's highest goal was to
become ‘adjusted to his environment’ without once realizing that man's only advance depended
on man's ability to adjust the environment to him as a species; which taught that genetic
heredity alone was responsible for neurosis and insanity, and that filth and muck alone covered
the entire problem of the human mind from top to bottom. This is a sad and piteous thing. No
empire one has studied in any former day had ever become so depraved and Godless in its senility as the overall average of the societies of man in the world today.
It is no wonder that an ideology which holds that man, generation after generation, can
be moulded into mindless machine parts, that there is no destiny for the individual beyond his
place as an emotionless, rigidly-held cog in a dully, hopelessly grinding social wheel,
commands of its minions the destruction and eradication from any society of the producer, the individuals, the thinker, or any noble man.” LRH
(from book ‘Science of Survival’, Jun 51; Book Two, Chapter Eighteen: “Level of Mind Alert”)
About the ‘Theory of Natural Selection’
“One must see this continual necessity of the organism to be in advance of the environment before one can appreciate the value of reason. The organism cannot discover how the environment is going to evolve test species to see if they survive. This is Darwin's natural selection. But it is only a small part of the process of evolution. There are too many data about the development of various species that just do not fit into natural selection. In order to put forth the theory of natural selection, all the data which points to direction and planning in evolution has to be hidden and disregarded. It has long been known to paleontologists that the horn of the rhinoceros cannot be accounted for by natural selection. There are many things in evolution which evolved slowly and smoothly for no apparent reason unless it is admitted that planning and experimentation was going on as a part of the life process. All of life is a process of thought. There is every reason to think that theta*, at least, is capable of planning. Man is on the highest level of reason known, but every life organism is using reason. The idea that ‘man thinks but all the rest of the universe just happened’ is absurd.”
“The effort to explain life in terms of organisms adjusting to their environment leads to hopeless confusion. But when it is assumed that the organism is adjusting the environment to it, everything falls into place with great ease. In order to survive an organism must be theta, not MEST*. It must be a causative agent. The individual who can change his environment can reason. If he cannot reason, he cannot change his environment. The wide-open case low on the Tone Scale will only be able to change the environment by destroying it, but he is still trying to change the environment. One way or another the organism will go on changing the environment until death.” LRH*
(printed in ‘Dianetic Auditor's Bulletin, Vol 2, No 3’, Sept 51 “Basic Reason - Basic Principles”, taken from a lecture)
About the ‘Darwinian Theory’ and ‘Errors in Time’
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“Now the Darwinian theory—now, I'll give you some idea of the influence of false track upon this society. The Darwinian theory, which probably influenced Pavlov to the greatest degree, is just an implant *. That is an implant from man to mud.” |
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Sound snippet 1 |
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“Now this incident—this incident, now with a wheel dating device which gives you a series of numbers that gives you—gives you the time of these events, shows you being implanted, shows you finished implanting ... , shows you being dumped in the sea, and shows you start from the sea and become seaweed and become this—and to work up stage by stage—giving the millions of years which elapse on each step, see? And you go on and on up the line, each step—each step—each step on an evolutionary channel and you run all the way through on these evolutionary channels. ... and shows you eventually arriving at the state of being a man.
... some of the incidents of ‘What to Audit’ are actually out of that. Some of the incidents of ‘What to Audit’ are actual, some are out of that Darwinian implant, see?” |
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Sound snippet 2 |
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[The sound snippet is longer and fills in the not quoted parts (...) in the above printed text.] |
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“A lot of characters around here got this [implant], most of them become scientists. That actually is the sole foundation of the Darwinian theory. That's the lot. Evolution: there's no such thing. Bodies don't evolve. They deteriorate, but they don't evolve. You can trace all kinds of reasons how they evolve, and why they evolve, and you can figure it all out, but the truth of the matter is when you get horses on a planet, somebody came along and mocked up some horses! Now, they also mocked up these horses with the capability of growing hair or not growing hair. You've got adjustment factors, but not evolution factors. So you confuse the adjustment factors and prove the whole theory of evolution. And now you know man came from mud, and you can write a book like Pavlov and get the whole world poisoned. You see how this one goes?
All of this is based on what? It's based on errors in time. Errors in time. Because an individual has this incident: It's a wrong time, wrong place, going wrong the whole way, and it took up two hours and actually looks like it takes up seven million, see? There are such incidents.” LRH |
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Sound snippet 3 |
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(from Saint Hill Special Briefing Course lecture #287, renumbered 1991: #316 “Errors in Time”, given on 18 July 1963) |
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About ‘Phenomena of perception’
“The basic assumption of modern biology is that there was a bunch and one day a piece of it ‘unmudded’ and we had man. This is a most unreasonable assumption, since older and more searching thought had, many years before Darwin, consistently speculated that space, energy and matter were phenomena of perception. There is energy because we perceive energy. There is matter because we agree that something is solid and sitting there in that space ... .” LRH
(quoted in ‘Advance! 59’, Jul-Aug 79 in article: “Man: The Animal or God?”, source unknown)
‘Scientology: A History of Man’ (formerly: ‘What to Audit’)
What about the mention of Piltdown Man?
| We find in this little book on page 33-34 (1952 edition; page 57, 1980 edition): |
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“The Piltdown Man |
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Man's first real Manhood is found in the PILTDOWN, a creature not an ape, yet not entirely a Man. It is so named not because it is accurately the real Piltdown Man but because it has some similarity. |
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The PILTDOWN contains freakish acts of strange ‘logic,’ of demonstrating dangerous on one’s fellows, of eating one’s wife and other somewhat illogical activities. The PILTDOWN teeth were ENORMOUS and he was quite careless as to whom and what he bit and often very much surprised at the resulting damage. |
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Obsessions about biting, efforts to hide the mouth and early familial troubles can be found in the PILTDOWN. It is a wonderful area in which to locate GE * overt acts.” |
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| * GE. Genetic Entity: The entity that registers the total of incidents which have occurred during the evolution of the physical body itself. The GE is not an actual individual but a composite, of individualities assumed in the single lives along the evolutionary track. |
| And of course, if you just see that piece of text it doesn't seem to make much sense. One has to understand here what the little book was about. Which is just a compilation of things that people had revealed when receiving auditing. These notes have then be sorted by frequency. These don't necessarily present truths, they could, but there is no way of telling. They have been recorded because of usefulness and had back in 1952 been issued as a guide to auditors, originally with the title ‘What to Audit’. |
| These were the very early days and various experimentation was being done. At that time one worked with something that is called Technique 88. |
It is important to understand how these texts came about, and what it was used for. I have noticed it is equally often misunderstood by common Scientologists as it is by non-Scientologists. I printed here this portion about Piltdown Man attempting to clarify a common mistake of the entry.
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“This clearly shows that Hubbard had no idea that Piltdown Man was a hoax. He writes in HoM what has to be audited, including the past lives of the PC, which includes not only the time he was an ape, but also the time he was supposed to be Piltdown Man, and caveman, all part of the Whole Track. |
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As an aside it also shows Hubbard believed in evolution rather than creation: He based the Whole Track on it.” |
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| There are actually 2 obvious misconceptions being forwarded here. Just remember how the writing came about! It is entirely irrelevant if L. Ron Hubbard had some ideas, these are just a summarization of things people have actually said in session. |
| The same goes for the matter of believing in evolution or not. If people have been made to believe there was evolution, then in these auditing sessions he will reveal things from that reality. That's all it is! |
The claim about the mention of Piltdown Man is a bit persistent though. In particular with the anti-Scientologist. They say then that the little book ‘What to Audit’ was issued in 1952 and that Piltdown Man was exposed as a fraud a year later in 1953. It is used as an argument by them to question the validity of the book and at that the whole topic of Scientology. They would say that L. Ron Hubbard made it all up, because if it was correct what he wrote, he would have known that the Piltdown Man never existed, particularly not with that name.
But as said previously, it is irrelevant. See, the news coverage of the Piltdown Man find was rather extensive. The name Piltdown Man was basically used all over the place since its discovery in 1912. (for early news coverage from 1912, see here, pop-up window)
It would then not be so surprising that people in session would have named it Piltdown Man as this would have been on their mind. It doesn't matter either that since decades prior to the official exposure as a forgery, that the validity of the find had been questioned seriously by skeptical scientists of the day. Common people didn't know about that. They would just have remembered the news coverage. After all one had to give it some name. And this was how this not ape anymore/not yet man type of thing was named.
Vocabulary:
audit, auditing, auditor:
The application of Scientology processes and procedures to someone by a trained auditor (listener). The goal of the auditor is to make the receiver of the auditing look at incidents and reduce the mental charge which may lay upon them. The auditor may not evaluate and has to adhere to the Auditor's code.
HCOB:
‘Hubbard Communications Office Bulletin’. Color flash–red ink on white paper. Written by LRH only , but only so starting from January 1974. These are the technical issue line. All data for auditing and courses is contained in HCOBs. For more information go here (separate window).
implant:
1. A painful and forceful means of overwhelming a being with artificial of false concepts in a malicious attempt to control and suppress him. (Aud 71 ASHO) 2. An unwilling and unknowing receipt of a thought. An intentional installation of fixed ideas. (SH Spec 83, 6612C06)
LRH:
An usual abbreviation for ‘L. Ron Hubbard’.
MEST:
A coined word, meaning matter, energy, space and time, the physical universe. All physical phenomena may be considered as energy operating in space and time. The movement of matter or energy in time is the measure of space. All things are mest except theta.
pc(s):
Short for ‘preclear(s)’. See at that entry in vocabulary.
preclear (pc):
1. A person who, through Scientology processing, is finding out more about himself and life. (The Phoenix Lectures, p. 20) 2. A spiritual being who is now on the road to becoming Clear, hence preclear. (HCOB 5 Apr 69) 3. One who is discovering things about himself and who is becoming clearer. (HCO PL 21 Aug 62)
Saint Hill Special Briefing Course (SHSBC):
This was a course delivered by L. Ron Hubbard at Saint Hill, England during 1961-66 and comprises of 447 lectures. Its result is a very adept auditor and thorough know-how of Scientology itself. The materials are studied in chronological sequence so as to fully understand the development of the technology. This will make you a Class VI Auditor.
SHSBC:
‘Saint Hill Special Briefing Course’. See at that entry in vocabulary.
theta:
Thought, life force, the spirit or the soul.
Copyright © 2002, 2007, 2010, 2014, 2015, 2019 Michel
Snoeck. All rights reserved.
This page revised:
14 July, 2024
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