power?

Question answered by honorarykid in Scientology

nightavenger asked this question on 10/5/2000:

In an earlier question, someone stated the following,

"Now, if an OT Scientologist would ever take the James Randi Challenge, and demonstrate real OT powers, such as you often claim to have to each other, when you know no outsiders are watching, then I'd change my tune in a heartbeat. I'd join right up with Scientology if I saw even one shred of credible evidence that you can really learn to manipulate MEST by doing Scientology drills."

Here are my questions...

what is an OT scientologist

what is the James Randi Challenge?

what powers are he speaking of?

What is and how do you manipulate MEST?

what are scientology drills?

Thanks for any light you can shed on my darkness.

honorarykid gave this response on 10/5/2000:

Oops! Sorry. That was me who said those things.

Scientology has it's own subculture and lexicon, and as a person who follows the subject, one can begin to use those terms himself, forgetting that others are not aware of their meanings. I'll try not to do that in the future.

OT is an ancronym. An OT is a Scientologist who is an "Operating Thetan." It takes years of courses and lots of money to become an Operating Thetan. BTW, a Thetan is you, as Scientology defines you. You are a spirit being. You are a Thetan. Your body isn't you, your body is just a car for you to get around in. This is not terribly different from the Christian view of the soul, really, although this belief is more strident in Scientology than it is in today's mainstream Christian churches. Maybe that's because Scientologists routinely claim that they (as spirits) leave their bodies and travel around.

Anyway, the Church of Scientology alleges that as their members become Operating Thetans, by doing repetitive drills and auditing, they gain supernatural, God-like powers.

BTW, auditing is a one on one (usually) practice that is the cornerstone of Scientology. Their is usually a student and a supervisor or coach, the student is put into a light trance, and then suggestion, repetition and sometimes coercion are used to convince the student that he or she is gaining new and wondrous personal powers and abilities.

Later on, Scientologists also have solo auditing processes, wherein they self-hypnotize.

Anyway, these drills are alleged to automatically gain the Scientologists the abilities to manipulate Matter, Energy, Space and Time (or MEST). They can allegedly move matter with their thoughts, astrally travel, postulate to force the occurance of future events, etc.

These skills are not new skills, we just regain knowledge of our true, natural state! That's because Scientology teaches that we are all God-like, immortal spirit beings. We're really like 'Q' in the Star Trek TNG series, except that 75 million years ago, we were all captured and brainwashed to think we are really just meat bodies. So as our bodies die, we simply retreat into another meat body. Many Thetans can exist in one body, and in fact, some Thetans have the terrible misfortune of thinking they are a hand, or a foot. Physical aches and pains in our bodies are often caused by the brainwashing delusions of these "Body Thetans" (BTs).

But then L. Ron Hubbard came alone in the 50s and 60s and luckily for us all, he "discovered" these truths, and he selflessly developed his "technology" to set us free, and help us regain our God-like OT abilities. Sheerly by coincidence, he got very rich and very powerful in the process.

James Randi is a skeptic who debunks the magical claims of scam artists and charlatans. He has learned all manner of sleight of hand trickery, and exposed people like Uri Geller as the bullshit artists that they are.

Randi has issued a public challenge, and offered with it a prize that is now well in excess of a million dollars, to anyone who can show him a true supernatural power, in a test or experiment which both he and the testee must agreed to.

To my knowledge, no one, no levitating Transcendental Meditationist, no OT Scientologist, no magical spoon bender, no entrail soothsayer, has ever even tried to claim the prize, let alone passed the test of having supernatural abilities.

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