What Scientology teaches
The eight dynamics
Scientology describes life as eight widening urges toward survival, from the self to infinity, which it identifies with the Supreme Being.
The teaching
Hubbard described eight dynamics: self, family and sex, groups, mankind, life forms, the physical universe, spirit, and infinity. Ethical decisions are meant to give the greatest good across the most dynamics. The Church does not define the eighth dynamic, God, for its members.
Scientology's own words
“the urge toward existence as infinity”
The eighth dynamic, as described by the Church of Scientology (L. Ron Hubbard, Scientology: The Fundamentals of Thought, 1956)
Beside the Bible
Jesus summed up the law in two commands: love God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, and love your neighbour as yourself. God is not the last ring of a circle that starts with me. He is first.
29Jesus answered, “The greatest is: ‘Hear, Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. 30You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ This is the first commandment. 31The second is like this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”
Mark 12:29-31 (WEB) · context
24The God who made the world and all things in it, he, being Lord of heaven and earth, doesn’t dwell in temples made with hands. 25He isn’t served by men’s hands, as though he needed anything, seeing he himself gives to all life and breath and all things. 26He made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the surface of the earth, having determined appointed seasons and the boundaries of their dwellings, 27that they should seek the Lord, if perhaps they might reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. 28‘For in him we live, move, and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘For we are also his offspring.’
Acts 17:24-28 (WEB) · context
Sources
- Scientology source L. Ron Hubbard, Scientology: The Fundamentals of Thought (1956).