Incident (Scientology)

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An incident in Scientology beliefs is something that happened to a person that continues to have a grip on their mind or spirit, and is negatively affecting them. It could be an accident or traumatic event that includes pain and subconscious commands, whether from this life or in past lives. Scientology auditing procedures are used to locate incidents in the mind, and relieve them.^{[1]: 3-4 [a][3]: INCIDENT}

A special type of incident is called an "implant" which is basically an enforced memory that can contain commands and fictitious events. The person will believe the implanted event actually existed, and the commands in the implant allegedly make the person act strange. In a contemporary sense you could compare an implant to a hypnotic command, however the implants L. Ron Hubbard mentioned in his Dianetics and Scientology writings follow space opera themes. Typically, these implants involve electronic fields entrapping and zapping a thetan (the being), installing commands, and showing cinema-like moving pictures to install false memories.^{[b][5]: 30 [3]: IMPLANT [6]: 91}

Instances of implantation are termed incidents; the subjects of the implants are termed goals. Such incidents are alleged to have occurred millions or trillions of years ago,^[c] and follow the pattern of a hostile alien civilization capturing and brainwashing free thetans. Some incidents are simply unusual and traumatic events in which the memory is said to linger for trillions of years.

Hubbard wrote extensively about specific incidents and implants that he alleged are common to all beings on earth, and which should be "audited out" (removed) in order to help a person become more sane or spiritually free. The incidents that have most been covered in media, scholarly works, and books include the between-lives implants,^[8]: 206 Christ and crucifixion implants, and the OT III implants known as the Xenu story. Hubbard believed that implantation is being performed in contemporary times by psychiatrists and priests.^{[9]: 104,106 [5]: 344} Hubbard's incidents and implants are unique to Scientology beliefs and have not been proven to exist or to have happened.

In his book Scientology: A History of Man, which was previously named What to Audit, Hubbard describes numerous incidents which are common to most beings on earth and which must be audited out (removed). They include incidents with names such as "Before Earth" where beings were taught to be good colonists,^{[10]: 75–76} the "Body Builder" around fifty million years ago,^[10]: 82, the "Fly Trap" or "Bubble Gum" incident in which a being develops an obsession about motion,^{[10]: 83–84 [11]} the "Coffee Grinder" involving a hand-held machine which emitted a push-pull electronic wave sounding like stuttering 'baps',^{[10]: 73–74} and the "Jack-in-the-Box" where alien invaders tricked beings into collecting pictures and getting confused.^{[10]: 68–69} The "Ice Cube" incident is a story in which alien invaders transport beings to a new area by packing them in ice and dumping them into an ocean on the new planet—Hubbard alleges that someone with this incident would manifest with chronically cold hands and feet.^{[10]: 77–78}

One of the more gruesome incidents is "Bodies in pawn":^{[10]: 80–81}

A fellow is grabbed, hypnotized, shoved into an electronic field, and then told he is somewhere else. And so he departs—most of him—and goes to the new location while still being under control of the implanters. He picks up a [physical] body in the new location and starts living a life there, while still having a living body somewhere else. The implanters can keep his original body alive indefinitely, and control the [being] through it. If the [being] tries to flee, the hypnotizers simply cause pain to the original body, still alive in a vat of fluid, and he is immediately recalled. That's a BODY IN PAWN. It's a second body you may have, living somewhere else, right in present time. But the second body is not under YOUR direct control.

— L. Ron Hubbard ^[12][13]

These incidents are described in the material for Operating Thetan level III and are audited on that level.

Incident I

Incident I is set four quadrillion years ago,^[c] wherein an unsuspecting thetan was subjected to a loud snapping noise, followed by a flood of luminescence, then saw a chariot followed by a trumpeting cherub. After a loud set of snaps, the thetan was overwhelmed by darkness. This is described as the implant opening the gateway to the present universe, separating thetans from their static (natural/godlike) state. The incident is described in Operating Thetan level III (OT III), written in 1967.^[14]: 104

R6 Implants (Incident II)

The R6 Implants were the work of the Galactic Confederacy's tyrannical leader, Xenu, 75 million years ago. According to Hubbard, Xenu destroyed billions of captured subjects during Incident II by dropping them into volcanoes and attacking them with nuclear weapons.^[15] The subjects, once disembodied, were forced to watch a "three-D, super colossal motion picture" for thirty-six days. This implanted pictures "contain[ing] God, the Devil, Angels, space opera, theaters, helicopters, a constant spinning, a spinning dancer, trains and various scenes very like modern England."^[16]

Implants were intended to embed a false "goal" into the being which acted as a command or caused bizarre behavior in the being. In Scientology auditing, goals are sought so as to remove them or reduce their command effect on the being. Implanted goals might be worded as: to end, to be dead, to be asleep, to be solid, to create, to find, to be invisible—or the favorite "to forget". Methods of trapping a thetan and implanting goals might include blasts of raw electricity, explosions, fantastic motion, or white energy. Hubbard gave names to implants—like aircraft door, gorilla, hoipolloi, bear, black thetan, and invisible picture—based on supposed elements that appeared during these incidents. These incidents are alleged to have occurred trillions of years ago, with the oldest mentioned in Malko (1970) as "70 trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion years".^{[c][17]: 111–3 [18]}

[Emphasis on auditing goals] reflects Hubbard's recurring fixation on science fiction type scenarios consisting mostly of "hypnotically implanted goals." Such goals were said to have been deliberately and maliciously installed into a person's subconscious mind throughout his travails in many lifetimes. Many of these lives were said to have been lived on other planets besides Earth. Some societies, both on Earth and on other planets, were said to have been very scientifically advanced.

— Bent Corydon in chapter Clay in the Master's Hands ^[4]

Train Goals

Devised by the Marcabians and implemented between "hundreds of years ago to hundreds of thousands of years ago", the Train Goals were a series of implants given in a huge train station. The thetan was put into "a railway carriage quite like a British railway coach with compartments" and subjected to a barrage of "white energy". During the implant sequence:

a face may come up and say "You still here? Get out. Get off this train. We hate you." And from the speakers "This happened to you yesterday, tomorrow, now. This is your departure point, keep coming back. You'll be meeting all your friends here. When you're killed and dead keep coming back. You haven't a chance to get away. You've got to report in. This happened to you days ago, weeks ago, years ago. You don't know when this happened to you. We hate you. Get out. Don't ever come back."^[19]

Heaven Implants

The Heaven Implants were given "43,891,832,611,177 years, 344 days, 10 hours, 20 minutes and 40 seconds from 10:02+1⁄2 P.M. Daylight Greenwich Time May 9, 1963." They comprised two series of views of Heaven, the first of which was quite positive: Hubbard compares Heaven to "Busch Gardens in Pasadena". In the second series, Heaven had become a lot shabbier:

The place is shabby. The vegetation is gone. The pillars are scruffy. The saints have vanished. So have the Angels. A sign on one (the left as you "enter") says "This is Heaven". The right has a sign "Hell" with an arrow and inside the grounds one can see the excavations like archaeological diggings with raw terraces, that lead to "Hell".

Hubbard reported that he had encountered no "devils or satans". Heaven was, however, not quite as conventionally depicted, and took the form of a town which "consisted of a trolley bus, some building fronts, sidewalks, train tracks, a boarding house, a bistro in a basement where there is a 'bulletin board' well lighted, and a BANK BUILDING." Hubbard described how the second series of Heaven implants depicts:

a passenger getting on the trolley bus, a "workman" halfway down the first stairs of To Forget "eating lunch" and in To Be in Heaven a gardener or electrician adjusting an implant box behind a hedge and periodically leaping up and screaming.^[20]

After being ridiculed in the Anderson Report (an Australian public inquiry into Scientology), this bulletin was withdrawn from circulation.

Helatrobus Implants

These were implanted by the inhabitants of the planet Helatrobus, some "382 trillion years ago to 52 trillion years ago".^[c] The Helatrobans were motivated by a fear of free thetans and sought to restrain them by capturing and brainwashing thetans in order to weaken them. In a series of lectures, Hubbard goes into some detail about how this was done:

Planets were surrounded suddenly by radioactive cloud masses. And very often a long time before the planet came under attack from these implant people, waves of radioactive clouds, Magellanic clouds, black and gray, would sweep over and engulf the planet, and it would be living in an atmosphere of radioactivity, which was highly antipathetic to the living beings, bodies, plants, anything else that was on this planet.

And so planetary systems would become engulfed in radioactive masses, gray and black. And the earmarks of such a planetary action was gray and black – gray towering masses of clouds. These Magellanic clouds would not otherwise have come anywhere near a planetary system.
("State of OT")

When a planet had been engulfed, the Helatrobans would attack it with "little orange-colored bombs that would talk" and the clouds themselves would talk: "And here you'd have a gray cloud going by and it'd be saying, 'Hark! Hark! Hark!' you see? 'Watch out! Look out! Who's there? Who's that?'"

Hapless people on the planet's surface would be kidnapped using a small capsule "placed at will in space. It shot out a large bubble, the being would grab at the bubble or strike at it and be sucked at once into the capsule. Then the capsule would be retracted into an aircraft." A victim would then be implanted for up to six months and the Helatrobans would "fix him on a post in a big bunch of stuff ... put him on a post and wobbled him around and ran him through this implant of goals on a little monowheel. Little monowheel pole trap. And it had the effigy of a body on it." ("State of OT")

Obscene Dog Incident

In the "Assists" lecture of October 3, 1968, Hubbard described a surreal cosmological event said to take place shortly after Incident I (the creation of the universe): "There's the incident called "The Obscene Dog" which is just a little bit later than Incident One. And sometimes actually by running it, why you can get the PC into Incident One. The Obscene Dog was a sort of a brass dog in a sitting position and anybody who got around to the front of the dog got caught in some electronic current and passed through the dog to the dog's rear end and spat out. Thetans didn't like this."^[21]

• Space opera in Scientology scripture
• Marcab Confederacy
• Helatrobus

• "Electropsychometric Scouting: Battle of the Universes", April 1952
• "Technique 88 and the Whole Track Part I", 26 June 1952
• "The Role of Earth", November 1952
• Philadelphia Doctorate Course (PDC), 1 December 1952
• "History and development of processes: question and answer period", 17 December 1954
• "Create and Confront", 3 January 1960
• "E-Meter Actions, Errors in Auditing", 12 June 1961
• "The Helatrobus Implants", 21 May 1963
• "State of OT", 23 May 1963
• "The Free Being", 9 July 1963
• "Auditing Comm Cycles", 6 August 1963
• "The ITSA Line", 21 August 1963
• "Org Board and Livingness", 6 April 1965
• "Assists" lecture. 3 October 1968, #10 in the Class VIII series. (Audio extracts)

• L. Ron Hubbard, Scientology 8-8008 (current edition, Bridge Publications, 1989; ISBN 0-88404-429-7)
• Christopher Partridge, UFO Religions (Routledge, 2003; ISBN 0-415-26324-7)

• Church of Scientology, International Scientology News #3 (1997)
• Lure of the celebrity sect (Jamie Doward, The Observer, Sun 16 May 2004)
• Marco Frenschkowski: L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology, Marburg Journal of Religion, Volume 4, No. 1 (July 1999)
• Hubbard, "The Story of a Static", Professional Auditor's Bulletin 1 February 1957