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Scientology nearly ready to unveil Super Power
Posted on Friday, September 01, 2006 (CDT) by Thoth
 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. Under wraps for decades, Super Power now is being prepped for its eventual rollout in Scientology's massive building in downtown Clearwater. That will be the only place worldwide where the program, much anticipated by Scientologists, will be offered.
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."
Church officials won't
discuss specifics of Super Power. But Feshbach and another prominent
Clearwater Scientologist who, like Feshbach, is a major donor to Super
Power's building fund, provided some details in interviews with the St.
Petersburg Times. A group of former Scientologists who worked for the
church on a campus in California where the program was in development
also described elements of it.
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.
Hubbard promised Super
Power would improve perceptions and "put the person into a new realm of
ability." He believed it would unlock abilities needed to spread
Scientology across the planet.
For Feshbach it's like nothing he has ever done in Scientology.
"I got it. I loved it," he gushed.
Feshbach, 52, and his two
brothers became famous in investment circles during the 1980s as the
kings of short selling stocks - essentially betting which stocks will
tank. At one point, the California-based Feshbach Bros. managed
$1-billion for clients.
Feshbach now lives in
Belleair, where his wife, Kathy, runs a Scientology mission. Because he
donated millions to the Super Power building fund, he was invited to
undergo the program.
It's geared toward creating
a "more competent spiritual being," he said. "I'm not dependant on my
physical body to perceive things."
He 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.
Super Power takes "weeks,
not months" to complete, said Feshbach. He would not discuss the
specific machines and drills that former Scientologists said are used
to enhance perceptions.
The perceptics portion of
Super Power is one of 12 "rundowns" in the full program, Feshbach said.
But it clearly is a key aspect.
Details of Super Power
training have been kept secret even from church members. Like much of
Scientology training, details aren't revealed until one pays to take
the course.
Asked about Super Power,
church spokesman Ben Shaw provided a written statement: "Super Power is
a series of spiritual counseling processes designed to give a person
back his own viewpoint, increase his perception, exercise his power of
choice, and greatly enhance other spiritual abilities."
Shaw would not say how much the program will cost. Upper levels of Scientology training can run tens of thousands of dollars.
He declined to provide
further insight into Super Power. "It's not something I'm willing to
provide to you in any manner," Shaw said.
Scientologist Ron Pollack,
who donated $5-million to the Super Power fund after making millions in
hedge funds in the 1990s, said he got a sneak peek. The head of
fundraising for the project showed him a photo of "some high-tech
thing" developed by engineers in Southern California that offers
different aromas on demand. It's for a drill to enhance one's sense of
smell, he said.
Pollack said he has no idea
how Super Power will be set up, but is excited about the parts on
ethics and perceptics, which he likened to a "trip to Disney."
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.
Hines also said the Super
Power program, which Hubbard wanted rolled out in 1978, met with delays
during the 20-plus years that it was being piloted on church staffers.
One setback occurred when
the church checked back on the staffers who had been through Super
Power. It turned out, Hines said, many had left the church - hardly the
expected outcome.
"The fact that it was around in 1978 and it's still not worked out 28 years later, that's pretty significant," Hines said.
Hines, who said he once
performed Scientology's core practice of auditing on celebrity
Scientologists Kirstie Allie, Anne Archer and Nicole Kidman (she no
longer is a Scientologist), worked at the California facility until
1993 and left the church staff in 2003. He and other ex-Scientology
staffers are convinced that church brass delayed completion of the big
building in Clearwater because the Super Power program was not
finished. The exterior was completed three years ago, then construction
stopped.
"The building was getting
done faster than the tech program itself," said Karen Pressley, a
former church staffer at the same California campus, who left the
church in 1998.
"This is a flap of magnitude in Scientology management," Pressley said.
Shaw said those ex-members are just wrong.
"These people know absolutely nothing" about the Super Power pilot, he said.
Scientology processes are
technical and cannot be understood out of context, Shaw said. "If
someone is interested in Scientology, they should read a book and find
out for themselves what Scientology is and thus begin their own
spiritual journey," Shaw said.
Super Power is ready, he said, and 300 staff members are being trained to deliver it.
Construction delays in
Clearwater, Shaw said, are due to a recent explosion of church
expansion worldwide. The church has spent hundreds of millions to
purchase and renovate properties. Last year, it purchased nearly
1-million square feet of buildings in 18 cities around the world.
That expansion, by far the
largest in church history, diverted the church's attention, he said.
Plus, he said, Scientology leaders have been compelled to redesign the
building's interior repeatedly to make it a crown jewel.
The Super Power program
will be ready to go the moment the new building is completed, he said.
Scientology officials promise that will be 2007.
Scientology's 57 senses
Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard's list of 57 perceptics. Words in parentheses are his:
- Timen Sight
-
Tasten Colorn Depth
-
Solidity (barriers)
-
Relative sizes (external)
-
Sound
-
Pitch
-
Tone
-
Volume
-
Rhythm
-
Smell
-
Touch (pressure, friction, heat or cold and oiliness)
-
Personal emotion
-
Endocrine states
-
Awareness of awareness
-
Personal size
-
Organic sensation (including hunger)
-
Heartbeat
-
Blood circulation
-
Cellular and bacterial position
-
Gravitic (self and other weights)
-
Motion of self
-
Motion (exterior)
-
Body position
-
Joint position
-
Internal temperature
-
External temperature
-
Balance
-
Muscular tension
-
Saline content of self (body)
-
Fields/magnetic
-
Time track motion
-
Physical energy (personal weariness, etc.)
-
Self-determinism
-
Moisture (self)
-
Sound direction
-
Emotional state of other organs
-
Personal position on the tone scale*
-
Affinity (self and others)
-
Communication (self and others)
-
Reality (self and others)
-
Emotional state of groups
-
Compass direction
-
Level of consciousness
-
Pain
-
Perception of conclusions (past and present)
-
Perception of computation (past and present)
-
Perception of imagination (past and present)
-
Perception of having perceived (past and present)
-
Awareness of not knowing
-
Awareness of importance, unimportance
-
Awareness of others
-
Awareness of location and placement (masses, spaces and location itself)
-
Perception of appetite
-
Kinesthesia
*Scientology's tone scale,
as defined in The Scientology Handbook: A scale which shows the
successive emotional tones a person can experience.Source: Scientology
0-8, The Book of Basics, by L. Ron Hubbard.
Copyright: tampabay.com
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