Yesterday after the Botanical Garden, the other car saw a sign outside the local Scientology building: "Open House." I do believe that the proper response to such a sign is entry.
We got a brief tour of the building that covered almost none of the space. The building is good-sized, and we saw the entry and a few small rooms. The man who spoke with us gave us some brief explanations of Scientology, played a snippet of an L. Ron Hubbard lecture, and answered questions that we had.
In a nutshell, I learned: L. Ron Hubbard founded Scientology by learning various disciplines and choosing what worked/made sense in each of them. The human being has three distinct parts or aspects (I'm not sure what their word for it is): the body, mind, and spirit. The body acts as a machine; the mind functions as the "switchboard"; and the spirit houses you. When something goes wrong in a person's life, this means that something has gone wrong with the mind, because the spirit (read: person) is essentially good and the body (it seemed to me) is a perfect machine. To solve anything from behavioral problems to relational issues to physical illness, one must discover what has gone wrong with the mind. Because the mind controls the body, we can fix anything by controlling the mind in the proper way.
The "tour guide" answered my questions about the differences between physical disorders and mental ones by explaining that most illnesses are psychosomatic and if we can deal with the mind part, the body part will go more smoothly. Okay. But it did not make sense to me that any mental illness/disorder (from what I gathered) could be solved completely through the mind, but some of other problems (broken bone, for instance) would need to be addressed physically as well as with the mind.
As we talked longer, we also got into questions of death. Since we are our spirits, we never actually die; we leave our bodies. Sounds like a lot of religions (though Catholicism does believe in the resurrected body, our bodies do actually die; we don't). Our spirits and our minds go on to find another body -- "a maternity ward is a good place for this," according to our guide. Which raised my pro-life hackles. Yet he also talked about how fetuses and "unborn children" (!) experience pain, and this can lead to body/mind problems later on. When I confronted this inconsistency, he hedged a bit, so I never got a straight answer on when or how a spirit takes on a new body.
When our spirit and mind find a new body, our mind retains the experiences from the previous life/lives. In fact, our mind simply records every experience we ever have, whether we consciously remember it or not. The proof? Eastern religions, and people who remember past lives.
I thought I had conceptualized the body/mind/spirit connection until we got into death, and then I became highly confused about how the three are connected. To make matters more confusing, more people exist now than did 200 years ago. Does this mean new spirits are being created? How does this happen?
Our guide answered that yes, new spirits do come into being, and the process is 1) fascinating; 2) easy to explain/understand; and 3) avoids the whole "Creator" question. He couldn't explain it as well as L. Ron Hubbard, and he could tell us exactly where in L. Ron Hubbard's lecture series to find it. In the second lecture of "Golden Dawn." He couldn't remember the name.
He invited us to the lecture series on Wednesday nights for $15 a piece and Dianetics workshops on weekends for $100. Other than costing approximately what I have for food in a month, the price bothers me on principle. If you have the truth that will help other people in so many ways, why don't you want to share it with everyone, not just those with money?
I do want to go back, however. I have more questions, so I can understand why people believe this philosophy/religion. I also feel that, because it is based so much on science and logic, if a Scientologist listens hard enough to himself, he'll start to see the inconsistencies.
Then again, people claim inconsistencies in my religion, and I just enjoy the challenge of figuring out why it seems that way but isn't.
Wow, we never actually ventured inside the Scientology building.(Those open houses are a weekly affair.) I was more interested in its architecture than the people inside. I'm impressed with your philosophical curiosity.
ReplyDeleteThere's a local guy who sometimes protests outside on weekends. He wears a "V for Vendetta" mask and holds a cardboard sign about how scientology kills/is a cult. Apparently he lost a couple family members to its secretive community. I waved at him a couple times.