Super Powers

I used to live right across the street from the Scientology Celebrity building in Hollywood. They have a cheap brunch on Sundays that I was warned to never, ever, ever go into lest ye be overcome with entreaties to join the cause.

This story shows me what I was missing. (I double-checked the date, and this didn't come out on April 1).

Matt Feshbach believes he has super powers. He senses danger faster than most people. He appreciates beauty more deeply than he used to. He says he outperforms his peers in the money management industry.

He heightened his powers of perception in 1995 when he went to Los Angeles and became the first and so far only "public" Scientologist to take a highly classified Scientology program called Super Power.

Where in L.A. did he do this?

"Just in Los Angeles," is all Feshbach will say. Super Power is that secret.

That's right. Scientology is giving away super powers. These far-right warbloggers with their focus on Islamo-murder-gangsters are missing the point. You want to demonize a religion for being dangerous to world stability? SCIENTOLOGY IS GIVING AWAY SUPER POWERS! What part of that don't you get?

A key aim of Super Power is to enhance one's perceptions - and not just the five senses we all know - hearing, sight, touch, taste and smell.

Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard taught that people have 57 "perceptics." They include an ability to discern relative sizes, blood circulation, balance, compass direction, temperature, gravity and an "awareness of importance, unimportance."

There are even better ones than that, which the author lists at the back end of the article. My favorites: Timen Sight (huh?), the fact that they break sound down into "pitch, tone, volume, and rhythm" as if those are separate powers, Awareness of awareness (!), awareness of not knowing (!!), Cellular and bacterial position (dude, I could totally know where my CELLS are, man!), Moisture (self), and best of all, Perception of having perceived.

These guys really know an easy mark when they see one, huh? They get rich people to pay to get "super powers" (as part of a training course that can cost in the tens of thousands of dollars) by tricking them into thinking their normal senses and intuition are actually the super powers themselves. Read this, it's rich:

Super Power uses machines, apparatus and specially designed rooms to exercise and enhance a person's so-called perceptics. Those machines include an antigravity simulator and a gyroscope-like apparatus that spins a person around while blindfolded to improve perception of compass direction, said the former Scientologists.

A video screen that moves forward and backward while flashing images is used to hone a viewer's ability to identify subliminal messages, they said [...]

Former Scientologists Bruce Hines and Chuck Beatty, once staffers at the church's international base in Hemet, Calif., said that while on punishment detail, they made chairs of various sizes - ones big enough for a giant, others too small even for a child - that were set up in a room designed to hone one's sense of relative sizes.

Please if there is some higher power in heaven send me a videotape of Tom Cruise making a tiny chair. I won't ask for anything else again. Ever.

As if you need proof of these super-heroes that now walk among us mortal men:

(Feshbach) offered this anecdote:

He had just finished his perceptics training and was at the Los Angeles airport, preparing to fly home to the Tampa Bay area. He stood at a crosswalk with perhaps 20 others, including a woman and her son, an antsy boy 6 or 7 years old.

As the light turned green, the boy bolted into the street, ahead of his mother. Feshbach perceived a pickup bearing down on the boy, driven by a young woman.

He yelled and saved the boy's life by a quarter of an inch, he said.

Coincidence? Feshbach doesn't think so. No one else saw the pickup, he says. He believes that, through the Super Power program, he elevated his perceptive abilities beyond those of the others at that crosswalk. His enhanced perceptions have played out numerous times since, he said.

He "perceived" the "pickup truck" by mystically "turning" his "head" and using his newly powerful "eyes" to see the "two tons of steel thunder" moving "quickly" in their "direction." Just try noticing giant pickup trucks, Catholics!

Having dissed Scientology, I will now find a secure location and hide for seven years.

(hat tip Champagne)