Was it through auditing and self-hypnosis?
Typically there is some sort of 'vision' for 'prophets'.
Any and all information would be great!

Allegedly, he applied Dianetics to himself and cured himself of injuries sustained during fierce battles he engaged in during WWII.

He claimed to have been "crippled and blinded" and "machine-gunned in the back."

The problem there is he never actually fought in any battles except for the battle to keep from making multiple trips to the buffet line.

If Tubby did actually sustain war injuries the cult would proudly display his DD214 (his official war record) where it would show Purple Heart Medals for being injured in combat.

Alas, the injuries never were, and thus, the entirety of Dianetics and $cientology is based on a bold faced lie.

The revelation about Xenu and OT III appears to have come from comic books and newspaper headlines. See Xemnu of the Magic Planet at viewtopic.php?f=9&t=5576

People think "there must be some super revelation if all these people join and give so much." No, CoS took hard-selling techniques from a book and added whatever worked to control and exploit their followers.

CoS uses:
- free stress test - to get you in the door (often hiding their name “Scientology” and calling it “Dianetics or “Life Improvement”)
- trying to sell you a book or DVD, to soften up your tight grip on your wallet.
- appeal to idealism (fight psychiatrists),
- flattery (frequently saying your IQ test was high)
- greed (for vaguely promised supernormal abilities),
- fear (saying your personality test shows dangers).
- family ties (pressuring new recruits to bring in friends and families)
- love-bombing - being your new best friend, as long as you pay and obey. This includes invitations to supposedly exciting events, that you are asked to bring a friend to. These events create more pressure on the student to buy, donate and volunteer.
- cheap intro classes, like a communication course (which you could get, better, at a community college), that seem useful.
- celebrity name-dropping - my relative was sucked in, in the 1970's, because they dropped the name of Chick Corea and John Travolta.
- verbal (never written) promises that "Scientology can help you with that" (stopping smoking, improving family trouble, etc.) Of course it's YOUR fault later if you're still smoking or still have family trouble, because you have "overts," "withholds," misunderstood words" and a "third party" like your non-Scientologist relative who is secretly sabotaging you.
- your suggestibility after an auditing session, due to mild euphoria from the hypnotic aspects of auditing; so you literally are led to a registrar to buy another course, before you regain your natural resistance to overpriced courses.
- the tax-deductibility of donations AND courses, pretending that means a seal of approval from the government
- the possibility of a supposedly glamorous job, like a minister (without any college!), to make you pay for minister courses. Then they put you to work cold-calling old members or sending out useless letters. Your minister course is useless outside CoS.
- to lure you, front groups like Volunteer Ministers, Narconon, Applied Scholastics, CoS-run schools, Criminon, Youth for Human Rights International, The Way to Happiness leaflets, and others
- your own Scientologist relative or friend is a very effective recruiter, since you still trust them. Celebrity Centre and other groups hold C-level-celebrity talent shows and Christmas events for your relative/friend to invite you to.
They use young, attractive recruiters that you rarely see again after you join. They falsely claim "scientifically proven" if you're not religious, and "spiritual tech" if you are. They hide the Xenu story, other mythology, and their rapacious demands for courses costing tens of thousands of dollars, until you're in deep.
Wieber described the "fear" aspect of recruitment:
from viewtopic.php?f=3&t=27000

Caroline in this forum said:
From
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=36111

The home page of http://www.xenu.net has several recruitment links:
Personality Test at http://www.xenu.net/archive/oca/
How to Believe in Scientology http://www.xenu.net/archive/personal_story/funkydonny.html

Other new religions and aggressive marketers like Amway use some of these techniques. After all, CoS's REAL Bible is Big League Sales. Court case probing Big League Sales in Scientology is at http://www.ca11.uscourts.gov/opinions/ops/200515129.pdf

Yet, with all this intense selling, many people drop out after the first session; CoS is well aware of this. Probably these are people who don't hypnotize easily. This trait is linked to high personal barriers - like a person who won't lend things, needs privacy, and doesn't like to share secrets. The not-easily-hypnotizable person finds auditing pointless, intrusive, and boring, and will drop out. On the other hand, the more hypnotizable person likes auditing and after a few times falls gratefully into a reverie (Hubbard's word) when the auditor speaks the hypnotic trigger-phrase "This is the session." At the very high end of the hypnotizability scale is the "hypnotic virtuoso" who is thrilled by auditing, loves the praise for how well he or she performs in audits, and becomes a huge Scientology supporter. Sadly, the more enthusiastic the person and the more suited they are for auditing, the more Scientology controls and defrauds them. Hubbard himself was a hypnotist and knew well that it doesn't make you a zombie or a puppet; it just makes you more suggestible. CoS dogma that there's no hypnosis in Scientology is a lie.

A good summary is at Why do people believe in scientology? http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index ... 544AAu8foI

For personal stories, look at some entries from "My Story from Within Scientology" at
viewforum.php?f=3

To get real-book footnotes about recruitment, you can read online for free:
L. Ron Hubbard, Messiah or Madman http://www.xenu.net/archive/books/mom/M ... Madman.txt
Bare-Faced Messiah: The True Story of L. Ron Hubbard http://www.xenu.net/archive/books/bfm/bfmconte.htm
A Piece of Blue Sky http://www.xenu.net/archive/books/apobs/order.htm
The Scandal of Scientology http://www.xenu.net/archive/books/tsos/sos.html
My Nine Lives in Scientology http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Library/Shelf/pignotti/
The Total Freedom Trap http://www.xenu.net/archive/books/ttft/
Road to Xenu http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Library/Shelf/xenu/

More recent books worth buying are:
Inside Scientology by Janet Reitman (big media hit in 2011) http://www.janetreitman.com/
Blown for Good http://blownforgood.com/
Counterfeit Dreams http://counterfeitdreams.com/
My Billion Year Contract http://mybillionyearcontract.com/
The Church of Scientology: A History of a New Religion http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninsca ... gys_an.php

Long story short, Hubbard was a sociopathic con man.

Everything he ever said was either an outright lie, or a small truth used to support a much larger lie.

The only realizations he ever came to were better ways to victimize other people.

Just imagine the devil and you'll have a pretty good handle on what Hubbard was all about.

Welcome to the board, TrixieTrix!

I do not know if you are an ex-Scientologist but you, probably, have heard about the engrams. Hubbard borrowed the engram idea from a Polish scientist, Korzybski.

Dianetics auditing is a psychoanalytic technique that was invented in pre-Freud era; Freud used it, too.

Freud was an idiot, none of his techniques worked. Korzybski never said that the engrams could be erased, he introduced them in order to explain certain linguistic irregularities. His definition of the engram is self-contradictory, and currently no one, except for the Scientologists, uses it.

I think the OT data is a series of hallucinations that Hubbard had, but not everyone agrees with me. I do not know what triggered those hallucinations.

I'm going to repeat myself here. I've said this elsewhere, but I think it relates to your question, TrixieTrix, and welcome to the Bake.

On Arnie Lerman's recommendation I read Battle for the Mind by William Sargant.
http://www.amazon.com/Battle-Mind-Physi ... 1883536065
As a recently ex-scientologist at the time I found this book difficult to read. For one thing Sargant starts out saying he will only be dealing with physiological matters of the mind. He does depart from that slightly later in the book.

This book was first published in 1957 but it is thought that the manuscript had been completed earlier. Whether that's true or not I think it doesn't matter.

Sargant starts off describing Pavlov's experiments with dogs and how Pavlov kept meticulous records of everything he did and observed. From that research psychiatrists developed a therapy for post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD (not to be confused with PTS type D)) called abreaction therapy. This was used effectively on soldiers during World War One to treat their PTSD, which at the time was called shell shock.

The way abreaction therapy works is the patient is made to relive the traumatic incident by going through it over and over until it erases. Sound familiar?

In Judith Herman's book Trauma and Recovery she goes over the history of PTSD treatment and shows that it has come up, been used, been popular and then disappeared from practice and public awareness four or five times since the late nineteenth century.

Now can you connect the dots?

I think Hubbard, looking for a way to make a fast big buck, discovered abreaction therapy, saw that it was hardly known to most people and repackaged it as dianetics.

One of the side effects of abreaction therapy, known to the psychiatrists and therapists using it during World War One was that patients of the therapy became highly suggestible from the therapy and that suggestibility lasted for days afterward. Hubbard never mentions this in his writings about dianetics. From that I deduce that it was his intent to take advantage of those people made suggestible from receiving the abreaction therapy he had named dianetics.

In Barefaced Messiah the story goes that L. Ron Hubbard got funding from another for his dianetic operations. Because he was a spendthrift who had no control over money he bankrupted his operation and the person who funded him ended up getting all the rights to dianetics.

Hubbard then founded his so called religion, scientology.

There you have references:
Battle for the Mind:A Physiology of Conversion and Brainwashing by William Sargant
Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence--from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror by Judith Herman
Barefaced Messiah: The True Story of L. Ron Hubbard by Russell Miller

Read those and see if you agree with my speculation.

While I'm on about this:

In my opinion $cientology's only purpose for existence is to provide extreme material wealth to one individual.

Welcome to Clambake TrixieTrix

Re: How Does LRH Claim to Have Come to this Realization?

LRon never actually "claimed" anything in this regard. He wrote in one of his letters (KSW 1):

"We will not speculate here on why this was so or how I came to rise above the bank."

Translation: no explanation for how he "figured it all out", at least not from him.

Later he writes in a book (in a cryptic fashion) that he is the "Metteya" or "Future Buddha".

The mythology created by his followers is that he is simply an enlightened, benevolent genius-man, same as The Buddha was.

But no matter what he really is, the important fact is that he has yet to produce any enlightened followers. Like Jason Beghe says "show me an F-ing Clear!" We are all still waiting for that enlightened scientologist to show up.

I personally feel "enlightened" only now that I have left scientology- enlightened about Cults, at least.

Ron was definitely not the Buddha.
Everyone please read Psuedo-Buddhism and Scientology at http://searchlight.iwarp.com/articles/P ... tology.htm

The Hymn of Asia (see thread A Question for those who have read the OT levels , at viewtopic.php?t=21414) , attributes the "flames about the noble head" to the artist Nicholas Roerich.

Buddhist Art News shows a Nicholas Roerich painting of a saintly horse rider with flames about his chest and head, bringing some sacred stone, at http://www.buddhistartnews.com/ban07/?tag=mongolia
It's possible the "flames about the noble head" came from this religious-fantasy painting, and were written somewhere, and Hubbard interpreted that, in his me-me-me thinking, as a flames=redhead=Hubbard=reincarnated Buddha.

One needs to go to the Pali Canon, a major Buddhist source document, not a gullible fantasist like Roerich, and not even the Encylopedia Brittanica, for important claims like being a reincarnation of Buddha. I skimmed a translated Canon and found nothing about red or golden hair or "the West."

IS Hymn of Asia a rip off of Light of Asia, 1879, by Edwin Arnold? Both were written by Westerners about Buddha. See http://www.theosophy-nw.org/theosnw/boo ... asia-1.htm . Light of Asia would have been kicking around theosophy and occult bookstores in mid-twentieth century America, along with Roerich's books and art. Hubbard's flat, simplistic, carnival-barker style in Hymn of Asia compares poorly to the lush, intelligent poem of Edwin Arnold. In fact, Hubbard's "poem" is merely a long commercial for Scientology.

Philosophically and morally, Ron could never be a reincarnation of Buddha. See Buddha was a skeptic who never tooted his own horn. L. Ron is no reincarnation of Buddha! at viewtopic.php?t=3799

How Does LRH Claim to Have Come to this Realization?

Drugs and booze. lotsa lotsa lotsa drugs and booze....and he himself being obviously a mental case from waaayyyyy back contributes as well.