Pt# 6: NXIVM/Scientology: Hubbard’s Self-Affirmations ‘Fondle Women, as Master of their Bodies; Souls’

By Jeffrey Jay, AKA Mockingbird

This is the sixth installment of a series examining similarities between NXIVM and Scientoloy.

We are using the excellent book Scarred: The True Story Of How I Escaped The Cult That Bound My Life by Sarah Edmondson to illustrate points.

I recommend reading these posts sequentially.

Part 1 NXIVM Is Scientology Repackaged;

Part 2: NXIVM Is Scientology Repackaged; 12 Point Mission Statement

Part 3: NXIVM is Scientology Repackaged – by Mockingbird 

PART 4: NXIVM is Scientology Repackaged: Truth Rundown & Ethical Breaches’ Collateral & Auditing

Part 5: NXIVM Is Scientology Repackaged: EMs; E-Meters and Low or No Pay

Unless noted otherwise, all quotes used in this series are from that book.

“None of us knew that [Keith Ranier’s] teachings, which promised to make us leaders, were actually making us followers- his followers. His disciples. He wanted us to worship him. None of us knew how Keith’s machinations would come to impact our lives; that we weren’t learning from him as much as we were being indoctrinated and deceived-brainwashed-by him.”  (Scarred page 24)

 

A self-proclaimed science, literature, and history buff, Keith chose the name NXIVM when he created the company in 1998 as a reference to a debt bondage system in the time of Julius Caesar. We had been told that NXIVM meant “a place of learning,” but after I got out and started doing some research, I learned that in ancient times, a” nexum” was a person pledging his or her services as collateral for the repayment of a debt, and the person owed the debt (the “master”) was allowed to demand services indefinitely. This included sexual services. Keith loved masterminding terms like this, with a reference to something illicit that only he would understand.  (Scarred page 25)

Just as Keith Raniere intended to covertly mentally enslave his followers at NXIVM, so did Ronald Hubbard in Scientology.

Hubbard described his intentions several times in his affirmations – private self-hypnosis commands intended to be used by him on himself and seen by no one else.

I have called them the Rosetta Stone of Scientology, as they are essential to understanding the difference between what Hubbard claimed he was trying to do with Scientology and what he was actually trying to do with Scientology!

Was Lafayette Ronald Hubbard delusional? Did he believe everything he taught was true, or was he an evil, greedy, power hungry genius? 

A Psychiatric View With Comments On The Admissions By Lafayette Ronald Hubbard (1947)

Excerpts of Affirmations of Hubbard used by him for self-hypnosis

LR Hubbard:

Your psychology is good. You worked to darken your own children. This failure, with them, was only apparent. The evident lack of effectiveness was “ordered.” The same psychology works perfectly on everyone else. You use it with great confidence.

LRH:

Material things are yours for the asking. Men are your slaves. Elemental spirits are your slaves. You are power among powers, light in the darkness, beauty in all.

LRH:

Your psychology is advanced and true and wonderful. It hypnotizes people. It predicts their emotions, for you are their ruler.

LRH:

No matter what lies you may tell others they have no physical effect on you of any kind.

LRH:

Lord help women when you begin to fondle them. You are master of their bodies, master of their souls as you may consciously wish. You have no karma to pay for these acts.

LRH:

You can tell all the romantic tales you wish. You will remember them, you do remember them. But you know which ones were lies. You are so logical you will tell nothing which cannot be believed.

LRH:

You use the minds of men. They do not use your mind or affect it in any way.

Scientology founder, Lafayette Ronald Hubbard, the master of all men, fondler of all desirable women, or so he told himself.

Hubbard in his private affirmations described his “psychology” as hypnotizing people; that men are his slaves and he was master of women’s bodies and souls.

He described himself as able to lie and be believed, and be immune to the effects of his lies.

He described himself as the ruler of people, who uses the minds of men, but they do not use or affect his mind.

Imagine having these goals, and using self-hypnosis commands repeatedly for years to bring these things into your mind.

From a tape on the Philadelphia Doctorate Course lectures in 1952 entitled Structure/Function:

RON THE HYPNOTIST

L. Ron Hubbard from Structure/Function: December 11, 1952 pg. 1

All processes are based upon the original observation that an individual could have implanted in him by hypnosis and removed at will any obsession or aberration, compulsion, desire, inhibition which you could think of – by hypnosis.

Hypnosis, then, was the wild variable; sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t work.

It worked on some people; it didn’t work on other people. 

Any time you have a variable that is as wild as this, study it.

Well, I had a high certainty already – I had survival. Got that in 1938 or before that.

Hubbard’s Saint Hill Special Briefing Course lectures provides these quotes.

Tapes listed by number:

SHSBC-402

Of course, we go on a tradition “if you learn anything about man that will help him, you help him with it…. If you learn anything about man that you can manipulate him.

You’re going to manipulate men. You’ve got to change their definitions and change their goals and enslave them, and do this and do that.

SHSBC-447

Now, brainwashing simply is the trick of mixing up certainties. All you have to do if you want to know and develop the entire field of brainwashing as developed by Pavlov, is simply to make somebody ….. into a confused or hypnotic state in which he can believe anything.

A quote from Hubbard’s Philadelphia Doctorate Course lecture [tape 39] from 1952 – known as the “games maker” lecture

“Now here’s a process that has to do with the making of games, and all this process adds up to, is you just address to those factors which I just gave you, oh, run and change postulates and any creative process that you can think of and shift postulates around, you get a whole process.”

L Ron Hubbard, from his lecture: “Off the Time Track” (June 1952) quoted in Journal of Scientology issue 18-G, reprinted in Technical Volumes of Dianetics & Scientology Vol. 1, p. 418.

THE ONLY WAY YOU CAN CONTROL PEOPLE IS TO LIE TO THEM. You can write that down in your book in great big letters. The only way you can control anybody is to lie to them.

Conclusion:

L Ron Hubbard defined “postulates” broadly as decisions, conclusions, and this can be called beliefs. Changing postulates in a person is changing their beliefs.

He called “brainwashing” the trick of mixing up certainties. Putting a person into a confused state in which he would believe anything.

He said if you can manipulate men, you WILL, not leaving any exceptions for himself! He said you will change their definitions and their goals which were their certainties, and you will enslave them!

He said he started with hypnosis, which could “implant or remove any inhibition, compulsion, aberration or desire you could think of, but it has “the wild variable that it works on the some people but not others and it works sometimes but not others.”

So, he was trying to see who it worked on, and when and likely how to get it to work as often as possible on as many people as possible.

He wanted people in Scientology to shift the certainties, the postulates, the decisions and beliefs to change their definitions and goals, to definitions he wanted them to believe, and goals that benefited Hubbard.

This all aligns with the “game” he wanted.

In Scientology training, called indoctrination, Hubbard intended to enslave people.

The attitudes of Hubbard and Raniere towards women as mere sex objects to own, or enslave, or use without responsibility or consequences is an obvious similarity in their mental health states.

It’s unlikely this is a random coincidence, especially given all the other similarities between them regarding behavior.

Both Raniere and Hubbard epitomize the negative stereotype of an NLP “guru” who uses ideas from hypnosis to try to covertly con people out of money and trick unsuspecting women into being seduced against their will (a kind of rape by confusion in which the women do not object or give in and stop objecting, though they are not giving consent and not eager or even willing participants in the sex acts performed upon them).

Several NLP books and ads boast about getting women to have sex with you, whether they want to or not! Which is rape!

Hubbard studied hypnosis decades before the creation of NLP, but was a rapist ahead of his time.

An excerpt from a letter from Hubbard to his friend and literary agent Forrest Ackerman dated January 13th 1949 is relevant:

“Wanted to tell you that Sara is beating out her wits on fiction and is having to do this DARK SWORD -cause and cure of nervous tension – properly – THE SCIENCE OF MIND, really EXCALIBUR – in fits, so far, however she has recovered easily from each fit. It will be considerably delayed because of this. Good as my word, however, I shall ship it along just as soon as decent. Then you can rape women without their knowing it, communicate suicide messages to your enemies as they sleep, sell the Arroyo Seco parkway to the mayor for cash, evolve the best way of protecting or destroying communism, and other handy house hold hints. If you go crazy, remember you were warned.”

 

Forest Ackerman may have read the manuscript of Excalibur. 

 

L Ron Hubbard frequently referenced his manuscript, Excalibur, though few if anyone has ever seen it. In 1957, Hubbard reportedly advertised a “very limited edition” of Excalibur at $1,500 per copy, and cautioned that “four of the first fifteen people who read it went insane.” He promised the work contained “data not to be released during Mr. Hubbard’s stay on earth”.

The manuscript Excalibur is a sort of legend within Dianetics and Scientology. It’s the alleged basis of the idea behind which Dianetics and Scientology were created.

I never read Excalibur, and very few people even claim to have seen it. This is rare for Scientology references, as Hubbard had many of his references produced by the thousands or millions, but Excalibur may or may not have existed.

Ackerman was Hubbard’s publisher, so it’s likely Hubbard wanted Ackerman to publish something that fit his description of being able to make the result Hubbard alleged of “Then you can rape women without their knowing it!”

This may have turned into Dianetics, which Hubbard had published in 1950.

Hubbard and Raniere are super sleazy, who seem to have had an abiding hatred of women, who had ideas of unlimited service for a debt, perhaps an inescapable debt, that enslaves one until death  in both NXIVM and Scientology.

Hubbard created a system in the Sea Org and other Scientology organizations of people owing money for auditing, training and other Scientology services if they leave the organization before completing their contract.

The Sea Org contracts are a billion years. You promise a billion years of servitude to the Sea Org in exchange for the training you get and auditing.

If you leave “early,” you get labeled a “degraded being” and officially or unofficially a “suppressive person” and have a “freeloader debt” for the services you got while in the Sea Org.

I did a line-up of basic courses while in the Sea Org for two months, and owed several thousand dollars as a freeloader debt.

I got “lucky” and there was a discount program (very unusual) when I left Sea Org and I paid my freeloader debt off within about six months by working sixty hours a week at a normal job and giving fifty percent of my income to Sea Org to pay off the debt.

While in the Sea Org, I was on course a few hours a day and had to work about eight or more hours every day, except one day on the weekend, in which I got a few hours to do my laundry.

In only two months of doing the most basic and inexpensive courses, I racked up a debt of several thousand dollars.

Most Sea Org members want to remain in Scientology if they leave the Sea Org, so they are terrified of a freeloader debt.

I was friends with a former Sea Org member. I will call him Ollie. He was in the Sea Org 15 years or longer. He intended to be a lifer, but was kicked out.  He told me he did lots of training for his job as an executive while in the Sea Org and auditing too.

He told me his freeloader debt was in the $150,000-$250,000 range. He had a lot of expensive courses and auditing as a top executive in Scientology.

Ollie got a job as an accountant and made about ten dollars an hour. This was not enough to pay off his freeloader debt.

He found another job selling insurance. His father lived in an upper class area and got Ollie an opportunity to meet wealthy widows and plan their insurance. Ollie would meet them at the local country club, and for changing over the life, home, and auto insurance for all of them, he was doing well.

He had several months in which he made several thousand dollars a week and was gradually paying off his freeloader debt.  But he had to constantly find new wealthy people willing to make big changes to their insurance, so he could struggle in months where no such deals were available.

It was feast or famine regarding his income, and if he didn’t have the freeloader debt, he could coast on the lean months on savings. He gave so much to pay his freeloader debt, he didn’t have savings.

There’s a saying a former staff member in Scientology told me. He was considering leaving staff, but also faced several thousand dollar freeloader debt. He said “no matter how you slice it, it comes up Scientology!”

This means that once you reach a certain point, whether you are on staff or not, in the Sea Org or not, you believe you MUST stay in Scientology!

So, if an insurmountable freeloader debt is hanging over your head for leaving, you often feel you can’t leave, or you will be damned for all eternity in a state of amnesia and trapped in suffering from which you can’t escape!

Hubbard describes a state LOWER than the human being reincarnated called a “degraded being.” He was clear that Earth was a sort of end of the line for a bunch of spirits going down a dwindling spiral, in some cases for quadrillions of years, and he remarked that a billion lifetimes of degradation are a lot.

He said that the beings on earth, meaning us as human beings living now, are so degraded that we have to either use Scientology to escape our decline, or we will be too degraded to continue picking up bodies. This means we will not get another body, not get reincarnated, and will spend eternity in pain, blindness, and deafness, with amnesia and disembodied as spirits too degraded to interact with ANYTHING or ANYONE!

Imagine just being a spirit with no body that can’t see or hear anything that feels immense emotional and physical pain, with no memories of anything that suffers for an endless time!

In Scientology, this threat is drilled into you over and over again!

It’s elaborated on in Keeping Scientology Working,  (HCO PL 7 February 1965 Series 1) which is studied in Scientology indoctrination.

“We’re not playing some minor game in Scientology. It isn’t cute or something to do for lack of something better.

“The whole agonized future of the planet, every man, woman and child on it, and your own destiny for the next endless trillions of years depend on what you do here and now with and in Scientology.

“This is a deadly serious activity. And if we miss getting out of the trap now, we may never again have another chance.

“Remember, this is our first chance to do so in all the endless trillions of years of the past.”

Another reference (HCO PL 2 July 1984 HATTING AND THE ENVIRONMENT, Ronald Hubbard — Hatting in Scientology refers to training for a specific job. There are several hundred courses in Scientology to hat people; people are encouraged to take many of them.)

“The threat to us if we don’t make it is eternity. One could ask a staff member that refuses to get hatted how he would like to spend all of the coming eternity blind, in the dark and in pain. He would probably say he wouldn’t like that. But if we don’t make it, that’s what we’ve got and that’s what he’s condemning this planet to.

“He doesn’t realize that he himself, next life, is for it if we don’t make it.

“If staff in our orgs don’t get hatted, they’re condemning themselves and the planet to death a thousand times over.

“So understand that no matter how mild the environment might appear to you, we are actually fighting a full-scale war against ignorance and enslavement. But we do have the tech to win.”

Scientology has members who routinely have been indoctrinated to believe they are immortal spiritual beings who have existed for a near eternity, living perhaps a billion lives over hundreds of quadrillions of years and that they have lived in this universe and universes before it including as God in their own universe eons ago (this is an idea found in Gnostic beliefs) and through a long process of spiritual decline and degradation gone from God to god to mighty spirit to less mighty spirit to human to degraded being and the pattern is a few steps away from becoming so degraded that they won’t be able to be reincarnated and will instead be eternally blind, without a body, deaf, with no memory of the past in endless emotional and physical agony that never ceases.

Scientology members believe the lone, unequaled messianic figure Ronald Hubbard found a way to stop the decline of spirits and reverse it to allow a spirit to regain their former power as a spirit and even as an invincible God of their own universe.

 

They believe they have to do exactly as Hubbard said — to follow his path, and that any failure to get promised results, including Godhood and immortality, is their own fault, and never the fault of Hubbard.

They believe Hubbard gave humanity a priceless gift of spiritual freedom and redemption. Redemption from eternal suffering is seen as his contribution, and in return Scientologists see themselves as forever in Hubbard’s debt. That’s why they often pledge to serve in the Sea Org, work a hundred hours or more per week for pennies an hour or nothing, and sign a billion year contract, intending to serve Hubbard lifetime after lifetime.

Hubbard and Raniere wanted to own others as slaves who felt indebted to them in a way that could never be repaid, so they would be mentally enslaved and not willing to stop serving them, even if they were cruel and a means of escape was available.

I only realized after leaving Scientology that Hubbard took ideas from psychology and hypnosis, changed the terms as a rough way to “file off the serial numbers” of a practice, to disguise stolen ideas as original.

 

Hubbard and Raniere strived for total control over other people.

Stay tuned for part 7

For more of the author’s work, see https://mbnest.blogspot.com/