Lecture: Uses and Future of Scientology
Author: Hubbard, L. R.
Document date: 1953, 3 October
Document title: The Uses And Future Of Scientology
Document type: lecture transcript
Event: First International Congress of Dianeticists and Scientologists
Location: Philadelphia, Pennysylvania
Document ID: ICDS-10
Description: Hubbard defines love and admiration and discusses his preference for admiration over the Christian idea of love.
Now, where we talk about, then, broad “love,” this mawkish horrible concept of: “You’ve got to love your neighbor, you son of a gun, or we’ll beat your ears in and fry you for an eternity.” No, let’s not worry about love that close to hate.
Admiration betokens in itself a kind of respect. It borders on liking, admiring – it’s a much, much better word than love. Love all too often is a compulsive passion which devours the very young, and they go and starve to death and blow their brains out and pine and sigh and learn ridiculous dances. And this is love.They don’t even see the person to whom they have attached their sentiment. They don’t even know that person is there. They’re “in love!”
Admiration, a heavy level of admiration, betokens a sort of respect If you really admired somebody – if you really admired somebody, you’d have to have some understanding of existence and some understanding of him or her. And believe me, it would have a lot more pleasantness and a lot more duration than this thing called “love.”
And I used the word love just as it’s used in the society today and also as it’s used by the Christian church, whatever might have happened to that in the last few centuries.
Admiration: to admire existence, to find interest, pleasant interest or pleasant excitement in life itself, its motion and action; to be able to respect and admire livingness in a thing
rather than to trap and cage that livingness for possession. And that would be the difference between love and admiration.A thing which is loved has to be trapped and caged, and a thing which is admired is a thing which you would like to see free. There’s all the difference in the world, then, between a top-scale emotion like admiration and a bottom-scale emotion like love. Love is down there with hate, so dose to it that they flip like a gambler’s card. Passionate devotion – very, very passionate devotion – where it does not include observation, is love; devotion, where it does include observation, would be admiration.
Hubbard, L. R. (1953, 3 October). The Uses And Future Of Scientology. First International Congress of Dianeticists and Scientologists, (ICDS-10). Lecture conducted from Philadelphia, Pennysylvania.