← Mayim Bialik's Breakdown
Mayim Bialik's Breakdown
I Spent 9 Years Inside Scientology: The Shared Occult Origins of the Nazi Party and Scientology — and What It Means Today | Jon Atack
01:02:15
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- [00:00]
John Atack
Hubbard realized how he could merge hypnotic techniques, repetition, fixation, and mimicry. The ways of getting somebody into an altered state with the promise of supernatural powers, resistance to any illness, brilliant iq, wonderful emotional equanimity. And he continued to sell these things from 1950, and they're still being sold.
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Mayim Bialik
It's the stuff of science fiction.
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John Atack
Only two aspects really, in Scientology. One is to have the intention so you can command and control other people. And the other is to be able to leave your body and travel the universe. It's a hu scam which has enslaved people psychologically and physically. There are about 4,000 members of his sea organization, and they're slaves. They're not allowed to have children. They don't eat well. They're not paid properly.
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Mayim Bialik
You were a Scientologist for nine years.
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John Atack
I was. I am officially an operating thetan, level five.
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Mayim Bialik
What would you say is one of the most outlandish things that you believe?
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John Atack
75 million years ago, the evil galactic overlord Xenu rounded up the populations of 176 planets, blew them up in volcanoes, collected their spirits on electronic ribbons, and then we were exposed to 36 days of hypnotic implanting in the place that Christians call heaven.
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Mayim Bialik
I don't know what's more disturbing, the occult origins of Nazism or the Nazi occult origins of Scientology. How did the occult make its way into the Nazi party?
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John Atack
It's fundamentally about. Hey, Sal. Hank.
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John Atack
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Mayim Bialik
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Mayim Bialik
hi, I'm Mayim Bialik.
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Jonathan Cohen
And I'm Jonathan Cohen.
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Mayim Bialik
And welcome to our Breakdown. Today we're going to be taking a look into the world of the occult. But not just the occult, as you might think about it. Supernatural phenomenon, psychic phenomenon. Is it true? Is it real? What we're going to be talking about is how a set of beliefs that were absolutely in the category of the occult made their way into the hands and the minds of some of the most powerful men in the Third Reich, and how the occult played a significant role in not only Nazi policy, but Nazi perspective on how those ideas can be used to transform the world. In addition, we're going to examine how the occult origins of the Nazi party made their way into one of the most powerful organizations in the world today. Scientology. Our guest is a former Scientologist who has spent the past four decades examining the origins of Scientology. And what he found has more impact on the history of the world than even he suspected. The book we'll be discussing is if Scientology Ruled the World. Nazi Occultist, Sex, Magic, Space Aliens in the Second Coming. It's a pleasure to welcome to the Breakdown. John Atak. Break it down.
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John Atack
Thank you. It's great to be here.
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Mayim Bialik
Our podcast tends to revolve around the intersection of science and spirituality, but Jonathan and I have a very strong interest in the beliefs that shape people, and in many cases, the information disinformation and misinformation that is often communicated to people. The title and cover of your book alone are eye catching indeed. If Scientology Ruled the World. Nazi Occultists, Sex, Magic, Space Aliens, and the Second Coming. And the COVID of my book has the Scientology symbol alongside the SS symbol that guards wore during World War II. The book behind your left shoulder on your book case has the Scientology symbol and a swastika. So before we even get started, one of these things is not like the other. Why does my book not have a swastika? A question I've never asked anyone in my life.
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John Atack
Because there are three countries in Europe where the image of the swastika is forbidden. And so the book couldn't be sold there. And after a little negotiation with Amazon, we put the SS symbol on instead. I wanted to show that fundamentally, the symbol we're seeing for Scientology here is in fact a Scientology symbol. It has the sig runes coming off at the corners, and it is the Nazi flag with the Scientology symbol at the center. It was first published in, I think, 1981. So it's the symbol of Scientology's international management organization.
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Mayim Bialik
What are the other countries that don't allow the swastika on the COVID of a book?
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John Atack
Germany, Netherlands, and Belgium, for obvious reasons.
- [05:52]
Mayim Bialik
Well, you know, I could go on and on about that. So this is definitely going to be, you know, a different kind of conversation than the kinds that we usually have with guests, because you bring a Different expertise to this subject. I want you to start by explaining to us what is a conversation about Scientology really about?
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John Atack
Well, it's fundamentally about a man who found a way of scamming a lot of people by packing together ideas that he'd taken, particularly from the Ordo Templi Orientis, which was Aleister Crowley's group, and he kind of reframed those ideas, ideas which are being called Western occultism these days, and he repackaged those ideas absolutely cynically. I have no doubt about that. I wrote a history of Scientology called Let's Sell these People a Piece of Blue Sky. And when I've gone into great depth, I've been researching this subject since I first met Scientology 50 years ago, and there is absolutely no doubt in my mind he'd realized how he could merge hypnotic techniques, repetition, fixation, and mimicry, the ways of getting somebody into an altered state with the promise of supernatural powers, resistance to any illness, brilliant iq, wonderful emotional equanimity. And he continued to sell these things from 1950, and they're still being sold, and they've not been achieved. You know, you'll occasionally, of course, get spontaneous remission of a condition, but nobody's shown any supernatural powers yet. And he packaged this in a fairly simplistic cosmology that says we've been around for one and a quarter quadrillion years. That's beyond trillions and billions. We've reincarnated repeatedly through this time, and we've lived in many, many different civilizations. However, for that one and a quarter quadrillion years, I'm only aware of four civilizations that he mentioned in that time. In the last few thousand years on Earth, we've had quite a few. So it's basically. It's a huge scam which has enslaved people psychologically and physically. There are about 4,000 members of his sea organization, and they're slaves. They do whatever they're told. They're not allowed to have children. They don't eat well, they're not paid properly, they don't get proper sleep. I've talked with people who is getting two hours sleep a night, and that's going to break you, whatever happens. So, yeah, that's the Scientology element of it.
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Mayim Bialik
And reading your book is a fascinating history of not only the movement of Scientology, but its origins and, you know, sort of where it's led us. Now, you know, you have. You have quotes throughout the book. I mean, Hubbard confessed that his intention from the very beginning was to assist Lucifer in bringing the Antichrist to Earth to thwart the second coming of Christ, which, according to Hubbard, will actually be a mass landing of aliens from the Markabian planetary system. I mean, it's the stuff of science fiction, and I mean, it goes on and on. And the sort of history that he talked about, it does. It sounds like content that otherwise we would say is the ravings of a not well person. And much of this was. And this is sort of known. Much of this was not disclosed as part of the history of, you know, the. The structure of Scientology. But what I. What I'd like you to talk about as a starting point is Hubbard began by using psychological language and techniques of a field of psychology that was rapidly evolving to. To. To try and assist people. And what's interesting to me is the places that. That I do understand meaning Hubbard used techniques like what we would call exposure therapy.
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John Atack
Right.
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Mayim Bialik
This notion of having you revisit trauma, revisit, you know, significant moments. That's not untrue. That psychology has methodology by which we expose people to something in order to sort of extinguish a response. And it's very well documented in. In rodents, in particular, in. It does not always work with humans. But Hubbard was. Was not a psychologist. He was not able to practice. So talk a little bit about how Hubbard's sort of initial notions that we can form a psychology that can help people. Where did that shift, and where did it coincide with some of his more unreal and kind of bizarre ideas about the human experience?
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John Atack
The first time that he mentioned the techniques he was going to use was in January 1949, in a letter that he wrote to his literary agent, Forry Ackerman, who provided me with the correspondence in that letter where he first reveals the technique that will be called dianetics. He says that he's devised a method that will make a great deal of money. A method whereby you can rape women and they'll have no knowledge that you did this. And a method whereby he thinks he could take over the Catholic church. And he hasn't quite decided what to do. There is no mention of any therapeutic benefit.
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Mayim Bialik
And also. Sorry, I just want to clarify. The goal was not to rape women. He was trying to demonstrate how powerful this technology was, that he believed that was the level to which you could have someone disengage from their conscious experience.
- [12:02]
John Atack
The testimony of his first two wives, the second of whom was bigamous, was that he did use these techniques to harm them. His second wife, Sarah, said that he'd fractured her eustachian tube, so she was deaf. In one ear. So he was using hypnotic practices. Now, as you say, the abreactive therapy, the reliving past experiences have been with us for a long time. It goes back at least to Josef Breuer in 1890. And it's the technique that Freud started with. And if you read, there's a lecture in 1909 given in Worcester, Massachusetts by Freud where he describes this technique in some detail, very much what Hubbard would talk about. You count somebody into a state of reverie or light trance, and you then go back in time through incidents along a chain to release the emotional charge. These are all terms in the Freud lecture which Hubbard will pick up on. Freud then says, why the technique is no good. The technique doesn't work because in Freudian terms, it does not resolve the transference. It makes the person more and more dependent rather than less and less dependent. So as early as 1909, Hubbard claimed to have read Freud. He claimed that the technique came from Freud. So you can only imagine that he was aware of this. He then mixed it in. When he to avoid combat duty, he claimed war wounds. He had no war wounds. He never saw combat. But the last year of the second war, he was in hospital claiming to have ulcers which were. They X rayed him and never found them. But he was given barbiturates, phenobarbital. And he admits to this as a lecture where he says he was addicted to phenobarbital. An obscure lecture, but a lecture nonetheless. And while he was in hospital, he says he put a white coat on him so he could go into the hospital library and read the medical literature. And I'm pretty sure that what he read was a paper by two American psychiatrists called Grinka and Spiegel who were using phenobarbital and abreactive therapy on crew from aircraft who had suffered awful trauma. It's very interesting. They wrote a book called Men Under Stress about the technique, which they thought was fantastically successful at first. In 1960, when they republished the book, they explained that in the long term it didn't work, that the trauma came back. So fundamentally what they were treating was what we now call ptsd and they were not treating it successfully.
- [14:37]
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Mayim Bialik
So talk a little bit more for us about what happened when Hubbard essentially posed as a mental health practitioner. And I, I have nothing against people who are struggling with their own mental health, helping other people. Meaning he definitely, I don't think in many ways should have been in that position, even had he been a psychologist. But talk a little bit about how some of these techniques kind of continued to evolve and how he was originally called out for practicing without a license.
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John Atack
Yeah, the New Jersey Medical association sued him for practicing medicine without a license in 1951. It's worth saying that in 1947, I have this little booklet that I wrote, and it has in it a letter reprinted where Hubbard in 1947 asks for psychiatric treatment because he has lost the balance of his mind. So that was his perception of himself. And he, of course, claimed a veteran's pension till his death. You know, so he claimed to have cured all of these things, but he kept claiming his $38 a month or whatever it was for minor disability. So the techniques, initially, that was Dianetics. He released a book in May 1950 called Dianetics the Modern Science of Mental Health. And those are interesting words, modern science of mental health. To the amazement of all Concerned, it sold 150,000 copies by the October of that year when the medical publisher, Hermitage House, who'd published it, withdrew it from publication because they believed it to be fraudulent. They made no public statement about that. But they did sponsor a book by Dr. Joseph Winter, who'd been working with Hubbard. And Winter wrote a book called A doctor's report on Dianetics, where he said, I think the technique's good. But Hubbard is a con artist and the New Jersey Medical association sue. His second ambigamous wife, Sarah sues for divorce. He kidnaps their one year old child Alexis Valerie, and takes her to Cuba and threatens that he'll chop her up and throw her in a river if the divorce petition is not withdrawn because there are allegations of torture on his part. A Texas oil man called Don Purcell. Sorry, a Wichita oilman called Don Purcell bails him out, brings him back, settles the suits, buys everything out of bankruptcy. And Hubbard, at That point, for $1, sells all of his interest in Dianetics to Purcell, believing that everything's going to go south and badly. But Purcell manages to rescue it. By this time, Hubbard has fallen out with Purcell. He started attacking him publicly because he now wants to introduce the idea of reincarnation. Because the idea of going back to birth and prenatal trauma is not working. It's not producing the results that he claims in Dianetics. Modern science and mental health have worked on 273 people. Not one of those 273 people has ever come forward. So he's found it doesn't work. So the answer is to go earlier. And the only way to go earlier is to get into past lives. Reincarnation. And he's picked this up from. It's called the Magical Memory by Aleister Crowley. He's picked it up directly from Crowley, and he talks about Crowley in 1952. There are three lectures where he talks about his very good friend Aleister Crowley and how we all ought to read Aleister Crowley. So he falls out with Purcell because Purcell's saying, no, reincarnation. No, I'm not going to believe that. He steals the mailing lists of the Wichita foundation and there's a prosecution over that. A man called James Elliot, who works well but is prosecuted, and he sends 31 letters to the whole mailing list about what a charlatan non Purcell is and how he's been mistreated. And he calls him a moneyed Montebank in this thing, flees to Phoenix, Arizona and realizes he doesn't have Dianetics anymore. He's got to do something new. So in February 1952, he invents Scientology, very much based upon Crowley's work on a reframing of the idea that you can elevate the will Thelema. According to Crowley So that you can command other people subliminally to do things. Hubbard just calls it intention. We will raise intention. And the goal is there are only two aspects really in Scientology. One is to have the intention so you can command and control other people. And the other is to be able to leave your body and travel the universe at will. Again, coming from Crowley, and of course, as this new book shows, coming ultimately from Madame Blavatsky.
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Mayim Bialik
Right. Which we will get to.
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John Atack
Which we will get to.
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Mayim Bialik
I know that you are no stranger to accusations from the Church of Scientology about what you do and what you've dedicated, you know, a good portion of your life to. Hubbard wrote a book, Scientology A History of man. And it says, this is a. This is a quote. This is a cold blooded and factual account of your last 60 trillion years. Most of the hundred pages of History of Man are. This is from. From your book. Are devoted to. To a freakish version of human evolution.
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John Atack
Were descended from clams, the boohoo or the grim weeper. He calls the clam.
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Mayim Bialik
Yeah, they're called grim weepers or boohoos. And humans cry because these ancestors had to constantly expel seawater from their shells. You know, like, it catches in my heart when I read something like this because this is something that was, you know, people have access to this and, you know, it's this combination of kind of psychology and it's mythology. I don't. You know, this is sort of what's fascinating to me. Before we get into a little bit more about aliens, planets and Aleister Crowley, I'd like to give you an opportunity to, in a nutshell, tell us about your relationship with Scientology.
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John Atack
Surely. Yeah. When I was 19, I came home from a. I'm a drummer and I was on a tour in the south of France, and I came home to find that the girl I'd been living with for 15 months had disappeared into thin air. And I'd had a pretty grim time in Toulouse. I'd had a week living on one franc a day, which bought me a loaf of bread, and I'm gluten intolerant. And so I got home and I was, you know, quite ecstatic about managing to get home. I'd had to leave my drums behind and my girlfriend wasn't there. She'd just gone and nobody seemed to know where she'd gone. And it turned out that she was shacking up with one of our friends and she went off to live in New Zealand with him, which was probably just as well for her and for me. Frankly, but that's not how I felt at the time. And so I was broken hearted and I couldn't seem to get any help. You know, the people I was talking to couldn't help me. One day I was at a friend's house and there was a copy of a Hubbard book called Science of Survival. Now, I later found this book was actually Ghost, written by Richard DeMille, the son of Cecil Bedemill, who I was in touch with along the way as well. He wrote three of Hubbard's books. But this book seemed to make sense. It said, you have trapped attention units. Your attention's been stuck on things. You have to go back and dig these things out. He'd lost. He actually, in that book, cancelled the original Dianetic technique because it was hypnotic. It came back into use in 1977 and is still used despite Hubbard's admission that it's a hypnotic practice. But his book seemed to make sense. So I called up, I knew a psychiatrist, so I thought, well, she'll know about this. So I called her up and said, don't know anything about her. Okay. So I called up an Anglican priest and said, do you know anything about this? And he said, I don't have an idea. Which was kind of strange because three years before, there'd been massive front page news about a government inquiry in Scientology and how damaging it was. And looking back, it was a bit irresponsible of those two adults. I was 19, not to say, hang on a minute, we'll go and check. But there were no dissenting voices. I went to the Scientology center. The people there were so friendly. They were a couple of years older than I were. They were all university graduates in art subjects, and they seemed to be very genuine. I, at that time was involved with Zen Buddhism. I. I'd learned meditation in a Zen monastery, and that wasn't helping me. And the abbot of the Zen monastery had said, don't join any group unless the least member of it has something that you want. Everybody I saw there was happy. I was not. And within a couple of weeks, I'd moved in with them. And I then had a nine year career in which because I'm a writer, artist, musician, there's a policy in Scientology that you have to be treated as a celebrity if you know. So even though I had no money, I was always, always kid gloves, always nicely treated, wasn't humiliated or abused. And I did six of their significant counselor, they would call it, training courses. I don't think it is a form of counseling. And one of their Course in logic, the data series evaluation course, which is very few people do and is very elaborate. And I also did 25 steps of the then 27 levels of Scientology's bridge. So I am officially operating thetan level 5. So I think you should call me your eminence or something. Oh, my goodness.
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Mayim Bialik
So you were there. You were a Scientologist for nine years.
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John Atack
I was, but never, always as a customer, never working for them. And the difference there is amazing. You know, the John Travolta's Tom Cruisers, Trish Duggans, these people, they are treated so carefully and kindly, whereas the staff are humiliated and abused on a daily basis. And they don't let you know that, of course, they smile at you and sell you the next course. So I was in love with the subject. And at the end of. Towards the end of that nine years, I started to think, as many of us did, that Ron Hubbard was gone because things were becoming nasty. People were behaving in a, you know, militaristic way. David Miscavige, who became the leader in 1987, talked about being tough and ruthless. Now, I don't have a problem with tough. Sometimes you have to do that. Ruthless, no. Not having any mercy. Never having any mercy. No, that. We have to have compassion for people.
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Mayim Bialik
Can you give us some examples so we can understand, you know, what was going on?
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John Atack
First of all, the guy who Hubbard has named as his heir, David Mayo, was thrown out. And there was this bizarre piece called the story of a Squirrel. A squirrel is somebody who practices Scientology without a license. It's that simple. And Mayo, who had been bigged up for a couple of years by Hubbard as the guy who would take over, is suddenly on the outside. And this is a really vitriolic attack on him. It says in it, David Mayo was the bird dog in the control room. And this. It just seemed like a bizarre thing. Many of us started to ask questions. We heard that there'd been this thing called the Mission holders Conference in October 1982 in San Francisco, where. And they published photographs of David Miscavige assaulting somebody at this thing. I later talked to that person about how he was slammed against a filing cabinet by Miscavige. There was a. There were Scientologists who ran so called missions, the fundamental recruiting level of Scientology, who'd made millions of dollars. And several of them were taken aside. One of them had his Rolex watch ripped from his wrist. There were physical beatings. We heard about this and went, well, Hubbard must be gone. I later absolutely was able to prove that Hubbard had ordered this. You know, he was fading into dementia the last years of his life, and he'd become paranoid about there being an attempt to take over Scientology. And so he was getting rid of the golden goose. He was getting rid of the people who were doing the recruiting and about half the membership. There were probably about 40,000 people in Scientology then. It's never exceeded 100,000 people, and probably about 20,000 of us left. But I left because I believed in Scientology. I left because I wanted to, you know, help people using these wonderful techniques. And so I was at the center of the independent Scientology movement in the UK and during the course of that, met Captain Bill Robertson, who features largely in this book, who's a complete lunatic, though I always got on with him very well. And somebody delivered this sort of stack of 18 inches of documents that they'd picked up in the US from a lawyer there. And this guy said, look, I don't have the time to read these, John. You read them, and it was material that had been gathered by a journalist called Michael Lynn Shannon. And he showed that all of the claims Hubbard made about himself, you know, he'd studied with gurus in the East. No, not one. He was a wounded war hero. No. He was a civil engineer with a degree. No. He had a PhD. No. He was a nuclear physicist. No. All made up and reading this stack of documents. And I didn't sleep that night. I kind of went, I've been lied to. And there's a fundamental principle which Hubbard talks about. He says, honesty is sanity. The road to truth must be trod with true steps. And at that moment I went, he's a liar. Therefore I have to question it all.
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Mayim Bialik
So when we hear about people leaving Scientology, there's usually something significant and there's an excommunication and there's threats and all these things. But you left to form kind of an independent universe of Scientology separate from the main organization, because you wanted to sort of preserve the things that you at that time believed were pure about it, correct?
- [30:51]
John Atack
Yes, I was a true believer, and I believed that the so called technology of Scientology, the auditing or counseling procedures, would liberate people. Even though my own experience of the upper levels had been, you know, I was very confused by the idea that I was packed with thousands of little spirits who were determining how I behaved. You know, that had confused me.
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Mayim Bialik
What would you say is one of the most outlandish things that you believed that you now know was insane?
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John Atack
Well, it's exactly that. That on the third operating thetan level. You are told that 75 million years ago, the evil galactic overlord Xenu rounded up the populations of 176 planets, brought them to Earth, blew them up in volcanoes, collected them, their spirits on electronic ribbons, and then they were exposed. We were exposed to 36 days of hypnotic implanting in the place that Christians call heaven, which Hubbard makes clear elsewhere. And I came away from that and I went through it in a very short time, a few days. And I went back in and said, you know, I don't have any supernatural powers as a consequence of this. This is really weird. And to my amazement, rather than being told, well, you need to go back and redo it, retread, as they say, the guy looked at me and said, a lot of people find that you need to do OT4. So I borrowed the money and I did OT4. And after OT4, which is about body thetans, these little spirits that have been drugged, you're dealing with their drug problems from millions of years ago. And at the end of that I went in and said, I'm sorry, but I don't seem to have any benefit from this. And again, the guy said, you need the next level OT5. So I borrowed the money. And at the end of, you know, I stayed for about a year beyond doing OT5, though I didn't do anymore. And I sort of felt, well, maybe the lower level stuff was useful. But I don't understand this idea of me being of any of us being a collection of potentially millions of little beings.
- [33:09]
Jonathan Cohen
How much money were you borrowing each time that you were in order to take the next level?
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John Atack
I think I borrowed about £4,000, maybe £4,500.
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Jonathan Cohen
This is many years ago.
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John Atack
So if I, many, many years ago,
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Jonathan Cohen
if I asked the Internet, what year
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John Atack
was, would have been 1982.
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Jonathan Cohen
So if I ask the Internet, it'll
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John Atack
tell us how much I could have put in the bank at that point.
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Jonathan Cohen
And so in today's money, we're talking about the about $13,500.
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John Atack
Well, that would be in pounds. Yeah, pounds sterling. So probably about 17,000 or $18,000 somewhere around that. So yeah, it was not chump change. And it was for a total of 37 and a half hours. That's all I got for that.
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Jonathan Cohen
I'm interested in this because in all narratives that end up circulating and impacting people significantly, there's often some foundational element that is either helpful or feels true. And so it sounds like at the earlier stages you were getting benefit of some kind and it was in the upper levels that things just felt either overly mythical, way too out there and didn't have any tactical, tangible benefit. Can you talk a little bit about some of the benefits that you did receive in the early phases? Because if you go off and are hoping to take this work and are such a staunch believer in it, I. I think it's important in order to just, you know, reflect on and share some of the positive aspects that allowed you to suspend disbelief, to continue to borrow money and go through some of these upper levels that proved to really fall apart.
- [35:02]
John Atack
Yeah. And it's very important. I mean, on my YouTube channel, there's a piece that I did with my friend Christian Schorko where we are saying, if you've been in any kind of abusive, authoritarian cult, you should also consider the benefits. You should also think, because it isn't all negative, now there is a problem, which is that feeling good and getting benefit are not the same thing. So a simple example would be, I would say that any good counseling system will improve your relationships with other people. Scientology leads to a breakdown of relationships, no doubt about that. Families are split apart, you have parents who won't speak to their children, which is to me, the most appalling thing. The other thing is that a technique can make you feel high. So many ex Scientologists will say that the original course, the communication course, where you do the so called training routines, that that's tremendously good. I think Aaron Smith Levin, he's said as much and he's a major opponent of Scientology, but he told me that he thinks that some of the ideas are good. So people will come away and they'll say, well, yeah, I did that and I felt great. And you're going, yes. You enter the hypnotic trance, and in a hypnotic trance you feel euphoric. And that manipulation of euphoria is a very important thing to understand so that we don't get caught. Now, when Steve Hassan, our mutual friend, first saw the training routines demonstrated. Now, Steve's an experienced hypnotherapist, a highly qualified hypnotherapist. And the first time he saw this, he said, this is the most overt use of hypnosis in any cult that I've seen of the hundreds of cults he looked at. So you have that thing of it makes you feel good, but it doesn't necessarily do you good. It may make you a worse person, you know, more narcissistic. I think that's the main element within Scientology and many of its hundreds of derivative cults from what we know about
- [37:10]
Mayim Bialik
techniques like emdr, which people use for trauma processing, which, you know, with all due respect, like, is not dissimilar from some of these concepts. You know, the notion of emdr, that if you go back and you find that original first or worst trauma, right. That you can then in somehow, and we don't really know how, right. There's some processing that goes on by which you then resolve something. But there is always this component of then trying to emphasize to the system, to the nervous system, that this is healthy, this feels good, this is the place where you can find peace, right? I mean, even in, you know, sort of trauma processing, that. That is done with, like, the use of psychedelics and therapeutic situations. Even in a bad trip, right. Even in a complicated journey, there's always this potential for resolution, right? What's the elevated place of you? What's the source? Where's your higher self? What can we draw on? Right. In holotropic bre work as well? So that notion can be used for good, and it can be used for evil. And what you're talking about is a situation when that is used as a manipulation of the psychological nervous system.
- [38:29]
John Atack
EMDR is a form of hypnotherapy and was devised by an Ericksonian hypnotist and Shapiro. Hypnotherapy can be positive. Hypnotherapy can be negative. It depends partly on the intention of the therapist or anti therapist, if you think about it the other way, and partly upon the recipient. Last year, Steve Hassan and I wrote a chapter for a book called Psychiatry and Eastern Religions and Spirituality. And I gave a list of the techniques that are used to induce altered states, to use euphoria. When I got to the end of the list, having written this thing, I went, I don't know of any religion that doesn't use at least one of these techniques. And people believe they're having a supernatural effect when what they're actually experiencing is physiological. So, for example, meditation, mindfulness, staring at something, we know that that is gives you the Ganzfeld effect. Where. And it's your field of expertise, not mine. But when there is no information coming into the brain, the brain starts to turn up the sensitivity and creates a feedback loop where you will hallucinate, you will see things. You'll also feel euphoric. And, you know, as I say, I was a Zen meditator. I carried on meditating long after Scientology and still have it as part of my practice, though I think it's more about the Deep breathing than the staring. And I tend to listen to music and have a painting to look at. But so, you know, the Rajneeshis use hyperventilation. They go, hoo hoo, hoo hoo hoo. And that oxygenates the blood and makes you feel dizzy and high. We very often fasting will do it. Sleep deprivation will do it. There are all sorts of chanting, dancing, drumming. There are ways of getting into the nervous system and creating a response where you feel great and it can be that you'll come away from that. I have friends who tell me that ayahuasca has done them tremendous benefit. It's not for me, it's not something I want to experience. The first person who told me about it who'd been in the Amazon and it was 25 years ago, and he said angels came and spoke to me. And I went, I don't want that conversation. Thank you so much.
- [40:57]
Mayim Bialik
And also, I mean, the reports of DMT and you know, Terence McKenna saying that, you know, what's revealed is the actual matrix of the universe which is also operated by tiny elves. I think this is a fascinating point that really, you know, kind of hits exactly where Jonathan and I have interest. You know, if you're having an experience, if you are hearing voices, if you are experiencing act access to other realms, if you're in an altered state of consciousness, is that supernatural or is it physiological? What do we know about what happens to the brain in. In psychedelic experiences? What do we know about the brain in near death experiences? Right. What can we know about oxygenation about also what happens when you shut down the input that the brain is constantly receiving? Right. When people say, like, I took mushrooms and everything was so clear, it's like, yeah, because your sensory systems are all being blunte and you're in this like beautiful cavern of, you know, the molecules of your brain. But I think this is a really, really interesting point. I want us to go back now that we've gotten a little bit of sort of your, you know, your personal connection, you know, to write a book about Scientology that includes a discussion of the occult and of the origins of the Nazi party and the destruction, you know, of World War II and really a change in the world, you know, this intersection is disturbing. Meaning I don't know what's more disturbing, the occult origins of Nazism or the Nazi occult origins of Scientology. And the fact that I have to choose between which is more disturbing is literally why you wrote this book. So the connection point, just so people are clear and you know, I really I really did enjoy, you know, going through this book and following, you know, the history. Right. Just so people can understand the framework that we're working in. When you think of Nazis, right, many of us think of, you know, a global attempt to eliminate the. The Jewish people, the Jewish population, you know, successful. I don't even know what word to use. But, you know, 6 million Jews, approximately. Right. And 5 million other people were killed. So something like 11 million people, I think, is the going statistic. But the beginnings of the death campaign of the Nazis did not begin with Jews. It began with mentally ill individuals, with disabled individuals. And this was the umbrella perspective that we are going to perfect the human race and we're going to create an elevated people, which also involved elaborate notions of eugenics and, you know, disgusting race theory and things that we know are A, not true and B, were manipulated. Right. But that notion shares similarities with what Hubbard was doing in saying, we have a way to perfect the human experience. And if extrapolated, that perfection of the human experience can reveal a pure race, a race that is free of any adulteration. And while that may not have been the perspective of Jews and the disabled and the mentally ill, which then extended to homosexuals, to Communists, you know, to Roma, like, name it. The origins are the same, and that's where I want you to take us next. So explain who Helen Petrovna Blavatsky was.
- [44:49]
John Atack
She was a woman born in what is now Ukraine, within the Russian Empire, of German aristocratic descent. I think I quote in the book, a biographer who says that she was perhaps the most learned woman of the 19th century, if not the wisest. And she had an incredible retentive memory. Her grandfather was said to have studied with Count Cagliostro, one of the most significant figures in the Rosicrucian movement. He had a massive occult library. By the time she was 17 and married, she'd already read much of this library. She had what we might think of as an autistic savant memory. She was able to quote reams of books, and she basically had the inner teachings of the Rosicrucians, the Freemasons. She studied with Sufis. She traveled the world. She claimed to have studied with Tibetan masters. That claim has to be questioned because getting into Tibet at that time was not really possible, especially for a woman. We later have Alexandra David Neal in the 20th century who does manage to get in there, but shows how difficult it was. And, of course, the Nazis were fascinated by Tibetans sent to expeditions there. She pulls all of this material together, everything she can get her hands on. She then travels to the US and becomes part of the spiritualist movement. And she admits that she's gone there really to spread her ideas. She doesn't believe that the Fox Sisters are genuine. She doesn't believe that spiritualism is genuine, but it gives her a way in. And she believes that she is projecting material into other people's minds. She believes that she is, you know, including hallucinations and visions of material. She can make things materialize out of thin air, and she becomes a massive sensation. It's worth saying that she was the first person to be investigated by the British Society Parapsychic Phenomena, which was started by the brilliant psychologist William James, who said, you know, we have to understand psychic phenomena. Let's investigate them scientifically. And the first investigation was of her in India. And the guy doing the investigation said, she's a complete fraud. So one of the things that was said was that she was. She had this cabinet where she would pull a drawer out and it would be empty. Then she'd put it back in, and when she drew it out again, there'd be something in it. And her servants said, well, we were on the other, in the room next door, putting the thing in the drawer. There's a lot of argument. People in the Blavatsky theosophy circles are, you know, they're outraged at the thought that she was performing these tricks. I think she was a very impressive woman. She wrote. She first of all focused on bringing back Egyptian ideas, which, of course, would massively influence Aleister Crowley. This is the Emerald Tablet, the Book of Thoth, these supposed things. And she then switched and wrote the secret doctrine which puts forward this idea that there have been five different races of beings, that the first intelligent life on earth was between 200 and 300 million years ago. So we can see where Hubbard's getting his dating from. But they were gaseous beings. They did not have tangible form. They're still with us, apparently. Then there were these other races, and there's miscegenation. She grabs hold of the idea of the Aryan race and says, in Atlantis, there was this Aryan race.
- [48:43]
Mayim Bialik
I'm sorry, Atlantis underwater.
- [48:45]
John Atack
Well, Atlantis, yes, The fabled continent, which historically we first find in two of Plato's dialogues. So around about 300 BC, who's saying he'd been told by an Egyptian priest that 7,000 years ago there was a war between Atlantis and Athens. There wasn't anything of Athens 7,000 years before that, and that they need to be cognizant of this, they need to be aware of this. And Plato seems to be, you know, telling a story to make a moral point. It doesn't seem to be serious. This idea is abandoned until the 19th century when I think three American writers pick up the idea and start to flesh it out. One of them is Ignatius Loyola Donnelly. He's a fascinating character. He's a state congressman and serves four terms. And he writes a book, Atlantis, the Lost Continent, which is published six years before Blavatsky's secret doctrine. And here we have the idea of the Aryans. Now he thought the Aryans were the Scots and Irish, you know, so they were red haired people. But Madame Blavatsky seems to have had a thing about red hair. And she complains about people miscegenating and interbreeding and getting red hair and being covered in red hair. So she shifts the place of Atlantis and she has this idea that there is an evolution of races. There will be two further races. And the Nazis didn't seem to keep reading the book because she says that the final root race will be an interbred race in America. So maybe we're headed towards that. And they will be the super beings. But the Aryans lost their superpowers by interbreeding with inferior beings, that they had godlike powers.
- [50:39]
Mayim Bialik
And this should be ringing every bell. This should be ringing every bell of Mein Kampf. This should be ringing every bell of. This is the foundation of a notion that changed the world and caused a world war.
- [50:56]
John Atack
Yes. And the deaths of 50 million people. So. And I mean, I. I thought I knew something about this because for 40 years I've been fascinated. I knew, I had some inclination that there was a connection between Nazi occultism and Scientology. But the books that are out there, Powells and Bergier, they wrote three books and the Morning of the Magicians and things. And they're fantasies.
- [51:23]
Mayim Bialik
How did the occult make its way into the Nazi party? How did that literally happen?
- [51:30]
John Atack
There's a devotee of Blavatsky's called Dr. Franz Hartman. And whether he was actually a medical doctor or not, we don't know. There's no record of qualification. But he performed eye surgeries for some years in Colorado for a dozen years. And he had gone to spiritualist seances and felt they were fraudulent. He felt there was something underneath it, but he felt they were making things up, which of course, one of the two Fox sisters later admitted they were and explained how they were doing it. And then he read something that Blavatsky had written and he traveled to India. And if you can imagine how arduous the journey would be back in the 1880s to go from the US to India to sit at the feet of Madame Blavatsky, he would become head of one of the two German theosophical societies. The other one was led by Rudolf Steiner, founder of Anthroposophy. And while he was head of a theosophical society, he also joined the Liszt Society, which followed a man called Guido von List. They are Aryan racists. They are anti Semitic racists. And shortly before joining that society, he was one of the three founders of the Ordo Templi Orientis, which Aleister Crowley will take over and from where Scientology's ideas will come. So one line goes through Crowley to Scientology. The other line goes through the Liszt Society to the Thule Gesellschaft, the Thule Group. And there we find the founders of the Nazi Party, Hans Frank, Rudolf Hess, Dieter Eckart. And they are literally, you know, communicants of the dual group, which is an occult German society. And the founders of the Nazi Party. All of the founders of the Nazi Party belong. You know, we're at the periphery of this group. Hitler is recruited in very shortly afterwards.
- [53:38]
Mayim Bialik
I literally. I have a minor in Hebrew and Jewish studies, which is basically a minor in the Holocaust and the Third Reich. And, you know, I know many, many things about World War II, about the Nazi Party, about the structure of Western Europe. This is a thing that I never knew or knew to think about. And of all the things we talk about, when we talk about the insanity and the nonsensical brutality of the Nazi Party, it never occurs to us to look into some of these foundations of the belief systems that formed, again, a party that transformed the world and started a world war. That's astounding to me.
- [54:26]
John Atack
It's surprising. I mean, historians, and I've talked with historians along the way, they'll kind of go, well, magic is nonsense, so therefore it doesn't matter. And I kind of go, no, what people believe does matter, whether it's nonsense or not. So that Heinrich Himmler had a round table at Wewelsberg Schloss, his castle, where he trained SS officers, and he's the head of the ss. He trained SS officers in yoga and meditation and took them through occult ceremonies. But he has a round table because he's waiting for King Arthur and the Knights of the Holy Grail to come back. And you're going, they're made up stories. They're stories made up by Chretien de Troy from Geoffrey Of Monmouth.
- [55:06]
Mayim Bialik
I don't know why I feel like, you know, in defense of Himmler, which is not what I'm saying, but people are. People are obviously allowed to have side beliefs. I don't really care. Like, I don't really care in that sense. The point when we do have to care is when have those outside beliefs actually become part of the mainstream policies of the Nazi party? Right, because you can say, like, oh, he could believe in fairies and angel dust. Like, how does that affect me? But what we're talking about and what you have studied and spent decades working on is that it does matter. And a lot of these things that we'd like to push to the side as fringe, and it's a conspiracy and, oh, the Church of Scientology is mad at you for saying this. The fact is, there is an origin that made its way into not only the Nazi ideology and the implementation of the murder of tens of millions of people, but in addition, this separate branch of the similar root of the occult found its way into an enormous part of 20th century American history and has shaped not only the Church of Scientology, but the way we view belief, the way we view, you know, who's worthy of helping someone and what determines sanity. That seems incredibly significant. And that's where the occult is not just something for the fringes of the Internet. It's still valid. It's still working in our society. It's not so hidden.
- [56:47]
John Atack
The great majority of people believe in the supernatural. There was a survey of atheists done in the 1990s, and it was found that although they didn't believe in God, 80% of them believed in magic and the supernatural. So it is our inclination to believe in such things. And my fundamental proposition for this book, it's attributed to Voltaire, but he didn't actually say it. But absurd beliefs can lead to atrocious behaviors. If Himmler, the head of one and a quarter million troops, the ss, If Himmler had not believed what he believed, then he wouldn't have ordered the SS to kill 30 million Slavs during Barbarossa. And there was no differentiation made. Himmler said, they are Jew Bolsheviks. That's the same thing. So 27 million Slavs were actually killed.
- [57:42]
Mayim Bialik
And when you mention that yoga and meditation were part of some sort of training and indoctrination of SS soldiers as we know them, you know, what comes to mind is a lot of people don't want to talk about, but do talk about the things that soldiers had to do in order to do the things they did. And the administration of Drugs is one of the things that people talk about.
- [58:12]
John Atack
Amphetamines, yes.
- [58:13]
Mayim Bialik
The use of amphetamines and, you know, it's kind of like one of these things. And whenever I would hear about it, I was always like, that's gross. I don't wanna think about it. It's not part of the historical academic conversation. However, it is part of the academic conversation and it's part of understanding what. What does it mean to brainwash people? What does it mean to create an environment where someone is being given hypnotic techniques in addition to amphetamines to see what you can make them do? And I'm not absolving any Nazi soldier, SS soldier of responsibility. That's not what I'm talking about. But this is the way that you structure a killing machine, Right? And when you think about the similarities of the use of amphetamines by Hubbard early on in the techniques of mental control, even on his own child. Right. When you think about what happens in those situations, you see, it's. People are very easy to control when you are using techniques of hypnosis, when you are using drugs to alter the physiology, that's how you control a people. Which is ironic because one of Scientology's main platforms is we don't believe in psychiatry. We don't believe in medication. We're going to hit pause here on our conversation with John Atack. But guess what? There's a lot more. In part two of our conversation, we're going to discuss how the occult went wrong. How do we keep the good parts of the occult and get rid of the parts that can be destructive. We're also going to talk about places in our current government and our current world where the occult may still be present.
- [60:05]
Jonathan Cohen
John's going to talk about the recourse he's received from the church and ways that he has been stalked and even threatened.
- [60:12]
Mayim Bialik
He's also going to answer the question, is all politics occult? Please make sure to stay tuned for part two of our conversation with our John Atak. And from our breakdown to the one we hope you never have. We'll see you next time.
- [60:25]
John Atack
It's Maya Bialik's breakdown. She's gonna break it down for you. She's got a neuroscience PhD or two, non fiction. And now she's gonna break down. It's a breakdown. She's gonna break it down.
- [60:41]
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