The first writings in Scientology regarding past lives date from around 1951 and slightly earlier. In 1960, Hubbard published a book on past lives entitled “Have You Lived Before This Life.” In 1968 he wrote “Mission into Time,” a report on a five-week sailing expedition to Sardinia, Sicily, and Carthage to see if specific evidence could be found to substantiate L. Ron Hubbard’s recall of incidents in his own past, centuries ago.
WHAT DID HUBBARD’S EXPEDITION
ACTUALLY DISCOVER?
The Scientology website explains “past lives.”
Hubbard taught that engrams can have accumulated not merely during one’s present lifetime but also in past lives. In Have You Lived Before This Life? he stated (p. 1) that “the existence of past lives is proven* in Scientology” and he presented various narratives from people recounting events from past lives.
In Mission into Time (originally published under the title A Test of Whole Track Recall) he told of the time when he was a sailor in Carthage about 200 b.c. Furthermore, he stated (p. 69) that “I know with certainty where I was and who I was in the last 80 trillion years.**”
Past lives is not a dogma in Scientology, but generally Scientologists, during their auditing, experience a past life and then know for themselves that they have lived before. (What Is Scientology?, p. 643)
*Imhotep’s Note: Narratives involving people “recounting events from past lives” is not verifiable proof. “Proof” requires evidence sufficient to establish a thing as true, or to produce belief in its truth. “Evidence,” in a legal sense, is data presented to a court or jury in proof of the facts in issue and which may include the testimony of witnesses, records, documents, or objects. The question was offered to ChatGPT…
The recounting of “past lives” by people in Scientology auditing sessions does not relate to verifiable truth and is likely influenced by hypnotic suggestion. The idea of past lives is not supported by scientific evidence, and the recounting of these events during auditing sessions may be the result of a person’s suggestibility under hypnosis, which is a common practice in Scientology.
**Imhotep’s Note: Not to put too fine a point on Hubbard’s “Whole Time Track” calculations, but according to his notes about Operating Thetan Level III, his account of Xenu flying frozen bodies from his planet to Earth was 76 million years ago.
EXCERPTS FROM THE BOOK…
Mission into Time
by L. Ron Hubbard
Preface:
As will readily be seen from the biography, the subject of past lives and the missions recounted in this book are but one chapter in the long, exciting and continuing story of Scientology and its Founder, L. Ron Hubbard. Past lives were first encountered by Dianetic auditors in the very early ’50s, and today in Scientology there is overwhelming evidence of their existence and the effects they create upon our present lifetime.
As L. Ron Hubbard has said, “The weird idea is that one only lives but once.” Dianetics and Scientology contain the answers to the mysteries not only of past lives, but of this one and of lives to come, as well. The Afterword, following the Glossary, tells you where and how you, too, can find these answers.
Mission Into Time:
WHEN I go on a cruise, people get curious as to what it’s all about and, perhaps, would like to know something about it. I’d like to tell you now about a very successful five-week cruise that we have just completed.
Quite obviously, we weren’t sunk because we came back. We make a habit of that in the Sea Org -‘We Come Back.’
The purpose of the cruise was to test whole track recall.
A lot of people fool around with this subject. In any spin-bin you can find “Cleopatra,” “Napoleon” and “Julius Caesar.” You have people around who are always telling you who they’ve been. It seems that the only lives they’ve led are the ones you’ll find in the Encyclopedia Britannica.
The Sea Organization, as you may know, has many types of missions so we made this test of whole track recall into a mission-type game. Not that we had anything wrong with our recall and not that I needed it proven particularly, but I decided we would make a checkup on whole track recall a part of our operational schedule.
What I would do is write down “so and so and such and such and so and so and there you’ll find the so and so and such and such.” Then we would call the object or location of what we were looking for ‘the target.’
TARGETS
THE first of our targets was on the southeast corner of Sardinia in the ancient city of Nora, an early Phoenician, then Carthaginian, then Punic, then slightly Roman city that perished in the second or third century A.D.
The difficulties involved in this situation were created by the archaeologists. Some people can take dirt or leave it alone but an archaeologist has to maul it about. He has a thing on bricks and things, you see, and he’s got to sort these things out to see if “this brick is older than that brick” and, if it is, then “the women of Nora, of course, wore high-heeled shoes.” Anybody could have told them that!
Actually, what they do when they do the “put together”* is they have someone along who’s been in the city beforehand and who has some dim recall. He reconstructs it all scientifically as near as he can figure out, but he makes a lot of mistakes because he doesn’t do it with an E-Meter.Then they write up a bunch of lies in some history book and give you a bunch of wrong dates so , when you study history as a kid, you practically spin. These archaeologists had been at Nora and it looked like they’d been trying to bury a bone or something of the sort.
I wrote up the target involved in the situation and it was “way back when.”
I should be careful about this sort of thing because my reputation is always at stake. There are tremendous numbers of people around who keep saying, “Ron ought to be … ” My only answer to them is “Ron is.”
My sins are probably no greater nor less than anybody else’s but I often wonder if they weren’t more boring and often , in some places, more interesting. I’ve missed all the high points people are supposed to have on the whole track , such as being Julius Caesar.
Anyway, I was over in Carthage about the second or third century B.C., operating there with the Carthaginian Fleet.
I used to have a pretty good time around Carthage – nice sailing water and so on. Around 200 B.C., I knew a girl over in Nora (it wasn’t called Nora then) who was the current Goddess of Tanit and a good-looking girl. We had a lot of good looking girls in Carthage but they didn’t come up to her.
And so, I used to sail across to Sardinia. When was going to Greece with the Fleet why, some- how or other, the ship detoured via a point to the west of where we ought to have been going and we seemed to call at Nora. When we were going along the African Coast, it was always easier to go via
Nora. Officers used to kid me about this. They seemed to think that all navigational patterns ran through the town of Nora.It was usually a good thing that I called into Nora with a war vessel because it was almost a matter of war. The girl would say, “Hey, how are YOU?” and all the other guys didn’t have a chance for a while. If you’ve got enough war vessels and you’re making enough dough, girls usually say this. I probably could have had more duels than sunrises because this was quite a girl. She’d throw all the local swains over the hill and ARC Break everyone in the place.
There had been a secret entrance into the Temple of Tanit and, from my recall, I drew up the plans of both it and the Temple. When we arrived in Sardinia, we went to the southeast corner according to the map. This was the first time in my life I’d ever seen a map of the place. I had too much data. Really wild! Here was the entrance of new data, a map. It showed the “southeast” corner of Sardinia in a most available point as the “southeast” comer of Sardinia.
So, we sailed to the “southeast corner” of Sardinia and looked over the place. There wasn’t any basis to anything and I got completely lost. I wondered what the devil we were doing when, all of a sudden, the vessel which had been sent out, came back and someone said, “Hey, this isn’t the
southeast comer of Sardinia. The southeast comer of Sardinia is down THERE and there’s an old Roman city buried down there. It’s on the southeast comer of Sardinia just like you said only this isn’t the southeast comer of Sardinia.”
That was very illuminating. We promptly went down there and laid our eyes on the Temple of Tanit as a ruined platform. Missionaires were sent ashore to survey and map the area to see if they couldn’t discover this old secret entrance to the temple as the target that would demonstrate the whole track memory.
We lowered boats and rowed back and forth and sent people ashore. They looked it all over and came up with a result.
And now I’m going to call on Hana Eltringham to tell you whether or not it was a positive result.
Hana Eltringham:
That most certainly was a positive result. We found the base of the old temple right on top of the hill. It was built on a piece of land jutting out into the sea and it had water on three sides of it. There was the platform, right on top of a small rise. The foundations were there. It was oblong like it should have been and, over to the one side of it, we did find the tunnel. It looked like a ditch about six feet deep, about fourteen feet long and about four feet wide. It led from the side of the rise right up next to the foundation of the temple but not on the same level. We scraped around the bottom of the ditch and found it was tiled underneath a thin layer of dust and dirt. Going up right to the top of the ditch, we found a few rocks which formed a type of wall against the temple. We kept on digging there until we were quite convinced that this was the ditch that led into the basement of the temple. So, that was totally proven and accurate.So, onto our next adventure, with this one positive. Incidentally, I heaved a few sighs over thefact that the girl wasn’t still there.
CHATGPT IS INTERVIEWED…
Introduction: The first writings in Scientology regarding past lives date from around 1951 and slightly earlier. In 1960, Hubbard published a book on past lives entitled “Have You Lived Before This Life.” In 1968 he wrote “Mission into Time,” a report on a five-week sailing expedition to Sardinia, Sicily and Carthage to see if specific evidence could be found to substantiate L. Ron Hubbard’s recall of incidents in his own past, centuries ago.
Question: What did Hubbard’s expedition actually discover?
Answer: The expedition did not uncover any concrete evidence to corroborate Hubbard’s memories of past lives. However, the expedition did uncover evidence about the ancient civilizations of Sardinia, Sicily, and Carthage that Hubbard was researching, and it helped to further his understanding of the history of the region.
Question: Did L. Ron Hubbard sensationalize the expedition in any way offering it as proof of his theory that individuals have lived in distinct entities in the past?
Answer: No, L. Ron Hubbard did not sensationalize the expedition. He was very careful to emphasize that the expedition was not intended to offer proof that individuals have lived in distinct entities in the past, but rather to provide further evidence to support his theory. He wrote in the introduction to the book: “This book is not a proof of reincarnation; it is merely a record of investigation.”
Question: In his book, “Mission Into Time,” L. Ron Hubbard writes, “Anyway, I was over in Carthage about the second or third century B.C., operating there with the Carthaginian Fleet. I used to have a pretty good time around Carthage – nice sailing water and so on. Around 200 B.C., I knew a girl over in Nora (it wasn’t called Nora then) who was the current Goddess of Tanit and a good-looking girl. We had a lot of good-looking girls in Carthage but they didn’t come up to her.”
This is a very definitive claim about his recollection of being alive in centuries past. Is this a delusion or a clever deception to impress his followers?
Answer: It is impossible to say whether this is a delusion or a clever deception. It is possible that Hubbard genuinely believed in his past life memories and was simply expressing them, or it is possible that he was attempting to impress his followers. Only Hubbard himself could answer definitively whether this was a delusion or a deception.
Question: Is the claim of being a reincarnated personality a favorite ploy of religious charlatans?
Answer: Claims of being a reincarnated personality are used by some religious charlatans as a means of attracting followers. However, there are many religious figures and spiritual teachers who have sincerely believed in past life memories and have not used them as a ploy to gain followers. Ultimately, it is up to each individual to evaluate the claims of any spiritual teacher or religious figure and decide for themselves whether the claims are genuine or not.
Question: Who are some religious personalities who have been proven to be charlatans with respect to their claims about reincarnated lives?
Answer: Some religious personalities who have been proven to be charlatans with respect to their claims about reincarnated lives include: Jim Jones, founder of the Peoples Temple; Jose Luis de Jesus Miranda, founder of the Growing in Grace cult; and David Koresh, leader of the Branch Davidians.
Question: Are there at least five more?
Answer: Yes, there are at least five more religious personalities who have been proven to be charlatans with respect to their claims about reincarnated lives:
1. Sun Myung Moon, founder of the Unification Church
2. Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, founder of the Rajneesh movement
3. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, founder of Transcendental Meditation
4. Adi Da, founder of the Adidam spiritual movement
5. Aleister Crowley, founder of ThelemaQuestion: How is L. Ron Hubbard viewed by most respected intellectuals regarding his claims of lives he claims everyone has lived for trillions of years in the past?
Answer: Most respected intellectuals view L. Ron Hubbard’s claims of past lives skeptically, as they are not backed up by any evidence. While some may find his theories interesting, they are generally not taken seriously in the scientific or academic communities.