Past Life Regression using Dianetics

[Michi]

Chris Shelton addresses in his today's Critical Q&A #224 (http://youtu.be/ITTKIghbFjg?t=1492) YouTube video at 24:52 a question about LRH's claims made in the book Dianetics.
Chris designates the Dianetics procedure as a simple covered-up hypnosis technique where the patient is made to believe in any gains he might experience.
Isn't the Dianetics technique supposedly in essence nothing else than a regression therapy that tries to lessen past trauma and get the person more familiar with his past?
Certainly one would expect gains from any regression therapy.
How would the Dianetics technique compare in effectiveness to other types of regression therapy?

[Bill Ryan]

Chris designates the Dianetics procedure as a simple covered-up hypnosis technique where the patient is made to believe in any gains he might experience.That's incorrect. No hypnosis is ever involved. The gains are palpably real.


Isn't the Dianetics technique supposedly in essence nothing else than a regression therapy that tries to lessen past trauma and get the person more familiar with his past?Yes, that's right.


Certainly one would expect gains from any regression therapy.
How would the Dianetics technique compare in effectiveness to other types of regression therapy?My own experience, such as it is, suggests it's superior, inasmuch as a battery of Dianetic techniques exists to handle absolutely any barrier or issue that might arise during the recall, without exception.

[justpeter]

An interesting report on Dianetics by an American doctor who was involved with Hubbard from the beginning:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Doctor%27s_Report_on_Dianetics

[Bill Ryan]

There's a subtlety here (regarding Dianetics) — and which actually should apply to all past life regressions using any methods — that isn't intuitively obvious. And it's one VERY good reason why 'readings' (someone telling you what they perceive happened) are usually of little real value. Let me try to explain.

People only have attention on past life issues because they affect the present in some maybe unknown or not fully known way.

For instance, one might be afraid of heights, or of water (that's quite common), and sense that something happened back then that caused the wariness, maybe some kind of traumatic accident.

Therefore the task here is to discharge the emotion. So that


One's not affected any more in the present, and
One's 'hooked' attention on the past is released, and one can truly Be Here Now. (Or at least, a little bit more!)

There's an exact analogy with this-life PTSD. Someone might be deeply affected by something that happened last month or last year. A car crash, a bad accident, the sudden death of a loved one, or an incident in the military.

The task is to release that stuck emotion, that drags one out of the present and can make life really difficult. Not to remember what happened in full detail, or write a book about it!

So the goal of Dianetics isn't specially to recall the past life incidents. It's to discharge the emotion attached to them. The detailed past life recall is just a by-product of the process.

You see, it doesn't actually matter what happened back then... it just FEELS that it does. That's utterly important to understand.

But that might be hard to really grasp, unless one's experienced the liberation of no longer picking away at a partly-remembered incident almost obsessively, which can sometimes happen. It's just great to get that splinter out of one's finger, the stone out of one's shoe.

Then one's present life is healed, improved and enhanced. That's the ONLY thing that matters.

:flower:

[Michi]

An interesting report on Dianetics by an American doctor who was involved with Hubbard from the beginning:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Doctor%27s_Report_on_Dianetics

Interesting - I read a write-up from J.A. Winter, M.D. at http://www.xenu.net/archive/fifties/e510000.htm and this looks quite different than the wikipedia content.
Quite many positive cases are reported in the above.

Anyhow, while Hubbard found workable remedies, the major upset was that he labelled all his work as scientific and 100% correct without providing case studies.

And later-on he wrote stacks of directives that no-one ever may question his "science" - a fire-sure way to have non-critical followers, what he even himself called "robots".

Hubbard was so obsessed of "no-one else ever could conceive of the real way out" that he in turn left behind a money-making business that went awry.
He almost had paved the way out - and then he lost it.