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Chapter 4:
Have You Lived Before This Life?
It isn't a matter of believing or
not believing you have lived before. It's a matter of remembering or not
remembering you have lived before.
-- from "Have You Lived Before This Life," L. Ron Hubbard {1}
If the prenatal
theories of Dianetics appeared startling to some, Scientology had
something even more radical to offer -- past lives -- presented not as a
matter of conjecture but as a matter of certainty. In addition to
"remembering" their life in the womb, Scientologists can "remember" the
past lives of their immortal thetan or spirit, which is said to have
lived in many bodies before ours. Hubbard used to believe that this
thetan had existed for 74 trillion years, but he now believes it's
longer.{2}
One Scientologist claims he fell out of a spaceship
55,000,000,000,000,000,000 years ago and became a manta ray fish after
having been killed by one.{3} This thetan, which is said to be
one-quarter to two inches in diameter{4} and blind or dimsighted at
first,{5} would look for a new body after each death, sometimes
following a woman who looked like she might become pregnant.{6} Some
thetans, however, had to go to "implant stations" to get a new body, and
since there were more thetans than bodies, some of them had to queue up
for as long as 22 million years just waiting.
Scientologists believe that the past lives and deaths of their thetans
are the cause of some of their problems today. For example, Hubbard
thought it possible that someone suffering from psoriasis (a skin
disease) may have contracted it from the remains of the digestive fluid
when the person (or his thetan) was being eaten by an animal in one of
his past lives.{7}
If a person frequently clenches his jaws, or suffers from a pain there
or in his tooth, it could be a vestige from the days that his thetan was
in the body of a primeval clam which was having trouble opening and
closing its shell.{8} Hubbard said that if the pain in the jaw was
associated with a fear of falling, then the clam might have been picked
up by a bird.{9}
Hubbard believes that millions of years ago many of us were this same
primeval clam, which he calls a "Boo-Hoo" or "Grim Weeper," and if a
Scientologist walks into an auditing session and finds that he can't
cry, Hubbard said it may be "because he is about to be hit by a wave,
has his eyes full of sand, or is frightened about opening his shell
because he is afraid of being hit."{10}
The auditor may try to cure him by making him "run the Boo-Hoo,"{11}
that is, by getting him either to "imagine that his eyes are in his
mouth looking out" or to go through the physical motions of crying so he
"connects" with the Grim Weeper or Boo-Hoo.{12}
Hubbard himself doesn't claim to have been a clam, but he does claim to
have lived in ancient Rome a couple of thousand years ago, where he
picked up a formula for feeding non-breast-fed babies.{13} He has since
passed this formula on to his followers in one of his many chatty
newsletters.
Scientologists spend a great deal of time during their auditing sessions
reliving and resolving their past lives. One Scientologist was said to
have gone into a state of grief when she realized she had been her
father's lover -- before she was born.
Another Scientologist was concerned because his wife was now living with
another man who had once been her husband -- in one of her previous
lifetimes.{14}
A Boston cab driver and part-time Harvard student discovered during an
auditing session that his current headaches started when he was a Roman
Centurion in 216 B.C., during the Battle of Cannae.{15} He believes that
someone from the Roman Burial party, mistakenly believing him dead,
tried to kick his helmet back onto his head.
Despite this insight he still has his headaches, but this hasn't shaken
his belief in Scientology. His faith didn't falter even when one of his
Scientology friends, after spending hundreds of hours in the group
getting rid of all of his engrams and becoming a "clear," moved to
Albuquerque and committed suicide. He attributed the suicide not to
Scientology, but to living in Albuquerque.
Hubbard has devoted a special book called Have You Lived Before This
Life: A Scientific Survey just to past-life case histories of
Scientologists. The preface of this book also contains the names and
addresses of the people who took part in the experiment so that the
cynical could check its facts.
The names listed, however, were not those of the preclear who had
relived the experience, but those of the auditor who elicited the
stories from them -- and all auditors are advanced, dedicated and
believing Scientologists.
Strangely enough, few subjects in this experiment thought they had ever
been famous in their past lives, except for one British man who was
uncertain whether or not he had once been Lord Nelson. (The details of
his death, without even a passing reference to his good friend Hardy,
suggest that he was not.)
A few people, however, believed that they had been animals before being
humans in this life, and elsewhere, Hubbard told the story of a
"psychotic" girl who recovered after she worked through an earlier life
as a lion who ate its keeper.{16} Hubbard also said that some
intelligent dogs or horses might have once been generals or ministers of
state who were taking it easy for a life or two to cure them of their
ulcers.
Most of the Scientologists who relived their past lives believed that
they had once been plain people, or very often space people, and for
plots, their histories read like a type of science-fiction
sadomasochism. Many of the preclears believed that they had lived on
other planets, and that the most unimaginably terrible things happened
to them during "wars between worlds and celestial travel between
universes whose existence was not even suspected before Hubbard's time,"
said the Australian Inquiry.{17}
One preclear remembered that when he was in another life and was five
years old he was "already on the lookout for brothels," by fourteen or
fifteen had learned all about "sex and homosexuals," and by sixteen had
killed his father, baby, and captain, breaking up the body of the last,
before finally being taken away to the "Zap machine" where he was
decapitated and his arms and body placed in a space coffin.{18}
One man remembered that when he was in another life he was a Roman
soldier who strangled his wife with a cord, killed a slave, was beaten
across the face with the handle of a chariot whip and then was himself
killed by a lion in an arena.
Accounts of other past lives included: one man who accidentally stabbed
his pregnant wife in the stomach with clippers, thereby killing his
baby; one who intentionally raped and killed his wife; and one who
somehow accidentally killed his twelve-year-old daughter with a
pitchfork when he caught her having intercourse.
A sexually neurotic woman who refused to open her legs during
childbirth, so that her baby had to be born while she was lying on her
side, traced her problem back to another life in which she claimed to
have been tortured and killed by being cut with a knife "down the center
of her genitalia."
Throughout Hubbard's book on other lives there is a strange repetitive
theme of torture or excision of the eyes, a theme that can also be found
in some of Hubbard's other writings. One person said his eyes had been
burned out with a hot iron brand before he had been stretched on the
rack; another said his head had been clamped into a metal frame and his
left eye blinded with a hot instrument (and also his ear drums pierced);
another said he pushed a needle through each of his eyeballs into the
frontal lobe; and a fourth said that red hot irons had been thrust into
his eyes while he was chained to a cross.{19}
Just as a preclear's life in the womb was painful, so was his life
before. A preclear may spend as many as fifty-five hours on just one
past life, and often undergoes a great deal of mental anguish in
reliving it.{20} Throughout the book there are statements that people
had "convulsive body movements," cried a great deal "at the loss of her
body" (in other words, her death), or protested that "I can't go
on."{21}
But go on they must. The preclear must obey his auditor when the auditor
tells him to "be in that incident," and then asks him, "what part of
that incident can you confront?" The preclear must then repeat the story
over and over again, lifting a new detail each time, discarding portions
of the story that don't fit, and establishing with the E-meter the exact
date that the past-life incident allegedly occurred.{22}
Although the preclear sometimes views this whole task with something
less than enthusiasm, Hubbard was so elated with it that he wrote of his
plans to write a sequel to this book, which was to be called Where Were
You Buried?{23} He asked his auditors for help on this project by
checking their preclears for recent deaths and then going to the place
of burial and locating the grave and or getting the copy of the death
roll from an official source.
That this book never appeared may be attributed to a number of things.
Perhaps Hubbard was too busy with his other books and projects. Maybe
the auditors thought that such experimentation on a preclear was cruel.
Possibly the preclear refused to "confront" the incident or give his
permission for the data to be disclosed. And finally, maybe when the
past lives were actually checked out by going to the grave or official
source, they were found to be fantasies instead of memories.
_______________
Notes:
{1} initial quote
[39]
{2} how long thetan around [93]
{3} man who was fish [8]
{4} size of thetan [17]
{5} vision of thetan [171]
{6} following pregnant woman around [261]
{7} psoriasis [25]
{8} toothache and jaw ache [25]
{9} pain in jaw and fear of falling [155]
{10} why preclear can't cry [9]
{11} running the Boo-Hoo [142]
{12} how to run it [9]
{13} Hubbard formula for babies [261]
{14} 2 cases of love in past lives [261]
{15} Boston cab driver [277]
{16} Lord Nelson, girl eaten by lion [8]
{17} quote on celestial travel [261]
{18} next 6 cases [8]
{19} all eye cases [8]
{20} spending 55 hours on past life [8]
{21} pain of reliving past life [8]
{22} how they work on past lives [8]
{23} book on burial [42a]
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