Talk:Affirmations (L. Ron Hubbard)

A fact from Affirmations (L. Ron Hubbard) appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 8 February 2013 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard is said to have told himself in his "Affirmations" that "Men are your slaves"?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2013/February. The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Affirmations (L. Ron Hubbard).

Wikipedia

Three points

The intro states that Affirmations is "said to have been written by L. Ron Hubbard". To me, there is little doubt that Hubbard wrote it, because it is utterly clear that the statements in the document are about him. Maybe someone helped him write it, which would make him a co-author, but I find that unlikely.
The intro states that the Affirmations "appear to have been intended" as a form of self-hypnosis, suggesting that this is uncertain. It isn't, the document itself states that it was intended for use in hypnosis (Eg: "By hypnosis I must be convinced as follows:", and "Your Guardian alone can talk to you as you sleep but she may not hypnotize you. Only you can hypnotize yourself.").
The article alleges: "The Affirmations are voluminous, with the introduction alone running to thirty pages". However, see this PDF version of the Affirmations from the website of Gerry Armstrong. The file also includes a preface by Armstrong and an index tagged at the end. Excluding these sections, the document is 16 pages long (normal-sized A4 pages). Not exactly voluminous. Maybe I'm seeing an abridged version, but a google search does not give me anything else, so I assume that this is in fact the whole thing.

I've altered the article in accordance to these points. Cheers, Manifestation (talk) 20:45, 15 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

As to #3 above, I remark: The Affirmations were in L. Ron Hubbard's own handwriting. The document you have seen is a compact computer transcription. If you look at any of the other samples of L. Ron Hubbard's writings, you'll see that there's not much written on any one page. For example, this file has many pages in Hubbard's handwriting. The PDF page numbers 24, 25, 32, 38, 59, and 66 are a small sampling of single pages with LRH's signature initials on them. It is very conceivable that the preamble of the Affirmations might have taken up 30 pages.

From Reitman's book, she wrote:

This chapter, which covers the first forty years of L. Ron Hubbard's life, relies heavily on Jon Atack's A Piece of Blue Sky and Russell Miller's Barefaced Messiah, both of which drew extensively on the Armstrong materials. Unless otherwise noted, quotes from Hubbard's childhood journals come largely from Barefaced Messiah. To supplement this biographical research, I did my own interviews with Armstrong about these materials, and interviewed him at length about the authenticity of the affirmations, which Scientology viewed as confidential. I also used documents presented in the 1984 Armstrong case. In addition, and where at all possible, I quote from Hubbard's own writing, some of which the Church of Scientology has made available on its websites www.aboutlronhubbard.org and www.ronhubbard.org prior to the spring of 2010; it is also published in Scientology's series of Ron magazines (Bridge Publications, 1991).

As such, I am restoring the concept. Grorp (talk) 04:58, 10 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]