Scientology and Internet - The Religious Heritage of Scientology

The dream of making the world a better place has been embraced by every religious movement in history. Indeed, throughout the ages religion has served as the primary civilizing influence on the planet.

The knowledge that man is a spirit is as old as man himself. Only recently, with the advent of Western psychology, have notions cropped up that man is nothing more than an animal, a stimulus-response mechanism. These pronouncements are at odds with every religious tradition, which speak of the “soul,” the “spirit” or the “life force” – to encompass a belief held by all civilized men.

The Scientology religion follows just this tradition of man’s search for his spiritual identity. In Scientology, the individual himself is considered to be the spiritual being – a thetan (pronounced “thay´-tn”). The term is taken from the Greek symbol or letter theta which has long served as a symbol for thought or spirit. Thus, although it is a new religious movement, Scientology is heir to the understanding of thinking men since the beginning of human history that man is a spiritual being who aspires to understand and improve life. The search has been long, but answers now exist in Scientology for anyone who wishes to reach for them.

In Lascaux, France, 15,000 years before Christ, early man painted bulls and other images deep inside the walls of caves. His underlying belief held that such representations would bring the living animal within their grasp, and so guarantee a successful hunt.

Like this ancient man with his primitive spear, in his attempt to conquer the raging bull, human beings have been trying to understand themselves and their relationship to other living things and the physical universe for countless eons. That which has been recorded in cave paintings, on stone tablets and in ancient myths stands as a testament to this search.

For all the mystery surrounding himself, one of the first things man has innately known was that he was more than merely another beast of the forest, more than mere muscle and bone, but that he was somehow endowed with a spark of the divine, a spiritual being.

Such wisdom formed the basis of the first great civilization – the Egyptian, whose culture endured for twenty-seven centuries. As the earliest people to conquer man’s deep-rooted fear of ancestral spirits, they were also among the first to propose that each man must provide for his own happy afterlife.

Despite considerable advances in the physical sciences, their gift of organization and their monumental art and architecture, the Egyptians still lacked the means to reverse the internal decay of their society. Beset with immorality and decadence, they were soon too enfeebled to resist the onslaught of Rome.

About 10,000 years ago, the early Hindu philosophers were also wrestling with life’s most basic questions. Their revelations were first recorded in poems and hymns in the Veda.

The doctrine of transmigration (the ancient concept of reincarnation) – that life is a continuous stream which flows ceaselessly, without beginning and without end – initially seemed to explain much of what plagued India. With the prospect of many lives, it was reasoned, a man had just as many opportunities to achieve self-knowledge.

But such a belief offered little succor to the multitudes of impoverished. And so, as that misery continued to spread, concerned religious leaders began to challenge traditional doctrine.

Siddhartha Gautama, son of a wealthy Hindu rajah, declared that man is a spiritual being who can achieve an entirely new state of awareness which he termed bodhi. For this reason, he is remembered today as the Buddha, revered for civilizing most of Asia. Unfortunately, however, he left no real means for others to actually attain those states of which he spoke.

In Persia and much of the ancient world, philosophers and religious men continued their quest to divine the true nature of man, even studying the movements of the sun and stars in hopes of unlocking the mysteries of life.

In the seventh century B.C., Zoroaster, born into a priestly family, came to believe himself a prophet. Forced to flee his native land for what he taught, he found asylum with King Vishtaspa in eastern Iran. There, the Persian religion of Zoroastrianism was born around the belief that only by defining “good” and “evil” could one hope to free himself of ignorance and achieve true happiness in the afterlife.

A century later, the Chinese philosopher Lao-tse believed the world moved according to a divine pattern, one reflected in the rhythmic and orderly movements of nature. Saddened by the corruption of politicians and general social decay, he saw man striving to be good, rather than let his inherent goodness come naturally from within. Eventually, so great was his disillusionment, he called for a return to a simpler golden age, and set out for the secluded countryside. Yet upon reaching the city’s edge, Lao-tse was beseeched by the gatekeeper not to leave before recording his ideas for posterity.

His manuscript, the Tao Te Ching, became the basis of Taoism and held out yet another hope of higher states to which man could aspire.

Tao means simply “way” or “way to go.” It is the way the universe moves – a universe to which man is inextricably linked. When men are most natural, they move according to the laws of interdependence and interaction of all universal laws, and so maintain a perfect harmony and balance. According to the Tao, it is the way – there is no other.

Unfortunately, Taoism too did not provide a workable means to reach that perfect harmony. Nor was any attempt made to provide such a means. For intrinsic in the Way, was the conviction that its basic truths were beyond words and could only be experienced. Hence the principles remained in the realm of esoteric knowledge.