Friday, June 09, 2006

Dianetics Sponsors NASCAR Driver

It's gratifying to see the LA Times (a most unlikely source if you are aware of their history of anti-religious bias) has put up a mostly favorable article about the sponsorship of NASCAR driver Kenton Gray. Of course they go for the bloated controversy and innuendo -- "NASCAR monitors sponsorship and advertising closely, but has no objection to the 'Dianetics' entry, said NASCAR spokesman Jim Hunter." More "Dianetics" is a book, published by L. Ron Hubbard in 1950. It became a bestseller, people paired up and ran Dianetics on each other in droves. They still do, 56 years later.
Dianetics involves a person looking at his own mental image pictures with the help of an "auditor", someone who asks questions, directs the session, and listens and acknowledges the person doing the looking. There's an exact procedure for doing this outlined in the book "Dianetics, the Modern Science of Mental Health." It's not difficult to learn and it is (from my personal experience) fun, educational, and spiritually rewarding to do Dianetics.
Over the early 1950's, Hubbard evolved and expanded the technology greatly. When they realized that what they were dealing with was the human spirit (after all, who was making and looking at all those mental image pictures?) several practitioners incorporated a church in California, and the religion was called "Scientology". It's not Christianity, Islam, nor Buddhism, but it IS a religion in its own right.

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