------------------------------------------------------------------- F.A.C.T.Net, Inc. (Fight Against Coercive Tactics Network, Incorporated) a non-profit computer bulletin board and electronic library 601 16th St. #C-217 Golden, Colorado 80401 USA BBS 303 530-1942 FAX 303 530-2950 Office 303 473-0111 This document is part of an electronic lending library and preservational electronic archive. F.A.C.T.Net does not sell documents, it only lends them according to the terms of your library cardholder agreement with F.A.C.T.Net, Inc. ------------------------------------------------------------------- SCIENTOLOGY THE NOW RELIGION by George AIalko DELACORTE PRESS / NEW YORK ]NI~ODUC~ON Xi OBIB L Tt~; Now II~'ligion x II. "l{on" 27 III. Enter Dianetics 43 IV. Scie,,l~,lo~ 6o V. The Real Truth ~o~ VI. Technir]ues, Drills, and Processes 1~3 VII. "Efl~ies" ~53 Hl I~l~[IB8 VIII. Conclusions ~75 I would like to thank Michaela Williams, articles editor of the now defunct eye Magazine, who invited me to write an article about Scientology. Research into the subject led to this book, which contains most of the material from that original article, but in much different form. C.M. Grateful acknowledgn~ent is made for permission to quote from the following copyrighted material: Nine Chains to the 5loon by Buckminster Fuller: Used by permission of Southern Illinois University Press. Extracts from Scienfologie 34 by A. Nordenholz, translated by W. R. McPheeters: Used by permission of W. R. McPheeters, P.O. Box 64~, Lucerne Valley, California 9~356. "The Polygraph" by Burke M. Smith: C<~pyright c ~967 by Scientific American, Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission. Copyright c ~97o by George Malko All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the Publisher, excepting brie[ quotes used in connection with reviews written specitlcally for inclusion in a magazine or newspaper. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 73-~o866o Manufactured in the United States of America First printing To the memory o my [athc INTRODUCTION On Sunday, December ~2, ~968, J~hn McMastcr, tim world's first clcar-a b{'ing enlightened and totally free-spoke at the xveekly services of New York's Clmrch of Scientology. The church is headquartered at 49 West 32nd Street in the main ballroom of the tlotel Martinique, a moderately priced establishment of well-worn respectability which is just off Herald Square, on the fringes of the bustling crowds that daily attack Maey's, GimbeI's, and E.J. Korvette. I bad been in the ballroom once before, at a Scientology congress. Then, the large high-ceilinged n,,~m had been a dun-yellow, with something used and shabby about it. Now, presumably in bon~r of McMaster's singular appearance, the whole room hact been painted white and tim ceiling hacl been cleaned. Bccanse it was approaching Christmas, timre were decurations anct a tinseled tree. The proceedings began xvith some singing of blues songs by a girl named Doreen Davis. She introduced each song with a few simple appropriate words, linking them to Seientology if possible, to what she had learned from being part of it. She was well received and then introduced her accompanist, Amanda Ambrose, herself an accomplished blues singer, who followed Miss Davis and sang a few more songs, finishing with what was obviously the gathering's favorite, "On A Clear Day You Can See Forever." The room was packed. There must have been four hundred xi xii INTnODUCTION peonSic there, filling all the seats and crowding the nfrrow aisles. In the hack, in areas usually partitioncd off into small offices, tlle partitions had been pusheel back and people stood on desks, a few having scrambled np to sit on filing eat~inets. A little boy, not at all lost, pushed his way with young determination among the people crowding everywhere, the sweat shirt he wore bearing tile announcement "Scientology Worksl" At the front of the room, dominating everything, was an enormous black and white photograph of L. Ron ttubbard, the man who had devised and developed all of the basic theories and teaching techniques of Scientology, from its melodramatie beginnings as Dianetics to tile present day and its promise of the realization of oue's theta, one's tn~e spirit. It was an imposing photograph, a head shot, three-quarters face, his chin resting on the thumbs of his joined hands, his receding white hair smootl~ly combed hack from a high forehead, his eyes slightly narrowed giving him something of a vulpine look. It was a study in self-confidence. Then McMaster nvas ann~m~ced and appeared. He was wearing clerical garb ancl a clerical collar, white cuffs of a thin wool turtleneck showing at the wrists of his black jacket. lie had a purple sash aro~md Iris neck, xvith some kind of pendant hanging just at tile juncture of tim jacket, under the button. McMaster, a one-time medical student who was born in South Africa, is of indeterminate age, anywhere from fortytwo to fifty. Itis features are very fine and Iris face is soft, almost beautiful, almost ascetic, with very clear light blue eyes that always gaze out peacefully, with only one or two moments when, while making a point, they widen the way William F. Buckle)i',s do when he is on to something pertinent and rich on the tongue to say. McMaster's hair is corn-silk blond and looks whitened by the sun. His hands, as he speaks, move slightly, airily, meeting in front to let fingers touch in the barest kind of clasp. He began almost immediately by telling of his experiences INTI~()I)I!(5'I'I()N Xiii with a lelevisi~n pn~gran~, tl~e Alan B~rk{' Show, which l~ad invited bhn to :tt~pear to talk ab~t Sci,'nt{d,~gy. Ilc hacl arrived at the studio, he sai{1, and forrod tl~at people he ktlex~ to be hostile to Scient~logy I~ad been placed in tim stndio a~dience t~ q~wstion llim wllen open q~esti~ming xvas invited. Challenging the program's pn~ducer ou this, McNlaster said tile m~m l~a~l cxplained the pn>gram xvas nlerel), trying t~ present h,~tll sidcs of the subject. NIcNlastcr, looking ont at us with the same calm lie l~ad sh<~xvn tl~e proch~cer, told tl~c man, "flow can there he two sides to tl~c thrill?" a~d walked o~t. The a~dient'~ h~ved it~ They appla~de{l xvarmly. ve~ yet) warmly, anwin~ it wonldn't he so, knowing they conld do it if tlley xvanted to but it {li."s cnrolhncnt had groxvn 500 percent. She didn't say she had bceu tol›t that, or had heard it or read it; she told me. I asked if that was in terms of worldwide membership and she said she wasn't quite snre. I asked if it meant this country, or New York, and she said, twice, "I'm not really sure about that, I'm not really sure about that." So I said, "But it's grown five hundred percent .... "And she looked at me, struggling to maintain some kind of eye-lock which I suddenly understood was essential to people in Scientology, and said, "Yes, isn't that something?" I thanked her-Scientologists thank each other incessantly to indicate communication has been achieved successfullyand turned to find myself looking up at tile enormous, everpresent photograph of L. Ron Itubbard. For some reason, that first time, he made me think of a cross between H. L. Hunt and Len Deighton's General Midwinter, whose million-dollar brain was going to save the freedomdoving people of the world. "I got nothing against clich~s, son. It's the quickest method of communication yet invented .... "Behind me a young man tapped on the microphone for our attention, and as people found seats and sat down, he explained that instead of the scheduled lectnre we would hear a brand new tape from "Ben." Everyone grew quiet with that uncomfortable rustle of not being quite ready to give fnll attention. The young man switched on a tape recorder and left the platform. There was some continued shuffling in and out of the balkoom and I began to wonder if everybody might not make a slow, unobtrusive exodus during the speech, seeing as how the tape recol:der could not possibly feel offended. I was wrong. Though there was a steady in and out at the door, more people came in than left, and by the time somebody on the tape finished introducing Hubbard to what. was obviously an audience somewhere else, the applause which met him where he was was joined by warm applause where I was. That was spooky. It was certainly a sign of respect for Hubbard, but let's face TIlE NOW I1ELIGION 13 it, there was nobody there, just this tape recorder with its slowly turning reels, and Hubbard's even, somewhat mellow disembodied voice coming out of it. Itis topic was "Scientology: The Future of Western Civilization." Ite admitreel it sounded presumptuons of him to bite off something like that, the notion that Scicntology was the future of Western civilization. It was not at all presumptuous, he said, and lanncl~ed into a long discourse on wily man got to be the way he is. His talk toncl~ed on chaos-to-form or form-to-chaos, the latter being what history is rce, ll!t all about, the former what we are made to believe our path has been. The truth, he said, was that order-or form-preceded chaos, and it was man who was responsible for the chaos. IIe mentioned the obliteration of the individual, and how groups can bc ›tangerous to tile individual. Hc sai›l war xvas govcrnmcnt's attempt to do xvl~lt taxes ]lad failed to do; sustain cunfusion, I s,ppose. At one point, after a particular comment, hc said, "You get the idea?" A voice behind me unhcsitatingly ansxvcrcd, "YeaIll" tlubbar›l xvcnt on to say that there is no such thing as tile masses, that tl~c Communist powers-the' commissars, as he called tbcm with obvious relish-arc fooling themselves when tbcy talk abont the greatest geeel for tile greatest mmd~cr of people. Itc pointed out that all troubles stem from individnal aberrations; thtis it is tile solution of in›lividual aberrations which xvill pro›luce the salvation of Western civilization. It was a neat rctnrn to his major topic, from which hc had ranged far and wide, rambling, cajoling, tossing off a few jokes which sent chuckles rippling through our audience while his, wherever he was, laughed heartily. Then be paused, and said, almost as a directire, "So introduce a little order, okay?" Two seats away from me, Mary-Lou an›l several other people said softly, almost in unison, "Okay." Bob Thomas was in the reception room as I came out of the ballroom. He was smiling, tall, imposing; several people clustered around talking to him. He asked what I thought of the 14 SCIENTOI, OGy "Uongress and I said l'd j~st heard tlte Ilubbard tape. lie looked aretract as several yonng girls walk~'d by, all of them meal and very miniskirted, little bottoms sweet and round, and seemed about to say something. tie caught himself, either because what he wanted to say might seem tile kind of levity he wasn't used to revealing, or because he remembered I was writing about Seientology. I said goodbye to him and left. I was tired. In my mind, I tried to put some order into all I'd seen and heard. I remembered MarV-Lou telling me that Seientology's goal was to clear the planet within ten years. I suddenly understood that the ten years was from tile now of her joining. There was no fixed date. It was a constant, a continuum, so that everybody who joins can tell themselves that, can give themselves the ultimate raison d'dtre: Ten years from today we will have saved the planet. I was beginning to respect Scientology's ability to persuade. This was brought home to me even more tellingly when a very close friend told me why she involved herself with it. Her boyfriend had been in Seientolngy quite seriously, and when they began having problems, she agreed to go to several sessions to see if it might help them. "I never saw it as being a danger or anything like that," she told me. "It was a system. I wasn't sure it was a system I wanted to spend time on-I wasn't sure I wanted to spend time on any system investigating human functions. I was very passively involved, in that I wanted to work out my relationship with , and this was where he was working it out and it made sense to me to go to the same place. I remember at one poiut we had a really bad break and we thought we'd separate for good, and he was involved in Seie, tology at the time and through it it occurred to him we should try to work it out together. We stayed together another year. It had that much effect on our relationship." Investigating Scientology, I was constantly confronted by my own feelings and convictions, my own doubts and fears. T~,~:, NOW nE~.~;,ON 35 Much of xvhat 1 b{'lieved abo~,l people, abo~t their wiselore and discretion, was challenged, as if I was reluctant to admit to myself tl~at all of us-not only young people, whose lemminglike embrace of fads and fancies is so casually put down as just kids try. ing to be hip-are susceptible to movements such as Scientology which profess to have all the answers. My own skepticism was something I wanted to fin{l in everyone, particularly in people alreadv in Scientolugy. Some welbexpressed doubts, I felt, wonld only enhance Scientology's validity. I only fonnd nnq~aliflecl entlmsiasm, a determination to convince me of its enortuo~s worth, and great etforts to get me to join. Everyone I talked to. particularly the kids trying to grab yo~ with their eyes so tl~at the electricity of their ex~d~erance woold crackle through to yon, was only too eager to tell me about Scientology's various levels of "Belease," and bow they now feel "Marvelousl" and "FreeV' And they were all advising me on the best way to get into Seientology: Take the Communications Course, you just have to take the Communications Course. Why the Communications Course to start with? I asked a young girl at a Seientology branall office, 8o Fifth Avenue, where I had alrea~ly been several times. This time I was there to buy some books, as well as a copy of Seientology's "Classification Gradation and Awareness Chart of I~evels and Certificates." The girl was short, dark, plumpish, with thick legs that looked bad in the black English schoolgirl stockings and abbreviated wool miniskirt she was wearing. She said the reason everyone is encouraged to take the Communications Course is that it "helps establish the reality of Seientology." I must have looked puzzled, because she said it helps you understand the definition of things around you. You mean, I asked her, things we may have been seeing the wrong way? Her face lit up. "Yes," she said. "That's ifl" I nodded, and then asked ff she could see about a copy of 16 S~:I~:NTOL~;Y the chart. l'd been to s~veral branches and no one seemed to . %, have any copies. She wcnt into tile small office j~st off the tiny area wilere stacks of Scientology's books were on display. I couldn't see who was in the offme, but I heard a man's voice. I heard the girl ask him if I could buy a Chart-he didn't see me or know who I was. I heard him, slightly incredulous, say, "Sure, if he wants one." As ff to say, why not? sell it to him. He won't make head or tail of it. His arrogance was exactly what I needed. Sure, the inten- tional mystery and complexity of Scientology was far from making sense to me, but after having visited this and other branches, I was getting some very strong feelings about the people in it; talking to them I knew I was beginning to touch the fringes of what it was all about. My very first visit to the 3ø Fifth Avenue branch had been to attend one of the small weekly parties Seientology throws to bring new people in, give them a chance to rap with the gang, buy a book or two, and maybe sign up for something. Almost the first thing I had asked about was whether or not Scientology is genuinely a religion, comparable to, say, Zen Buddhism? The people I talked to said that whereas religion is an abstraction, Scientology's strength lies in the fact that it is concrete, scientifically organized, and works. They all stressed that a lot, that it works. But why bother to call your- self a religion then, I pressed. A blond, crew-cutted fellow who sat behind the desk in the branch's small reception room sat back and said, "It's a religion only in that it's tax-free." tie seemed to think that would satisfy whatever reservations I had about organized religion. I nodded, and then said, as if remind- ~ng myself what it was that put me off religions, that at some p15fnt, by necessity, to succeed, a religion becomes punishing. They-I think there were four of us now-quickly said that there was no element of that in Scientology. I remembered that later, when I was to read in a book called Introduction to Seientology Ethics: 'Yhere are four general classes of crimes TIlE NOW BEI.,IC, ION 17 and offenses in Scieotology. Tbese are EI~l{OI{S, NIISDEMEANOIlS, CBIMES AND HIGH CB1MES." Oh, there is d~cipline. The blond fellow told me that when he didn't fulfill his "statistic," as he called it, a control was put on him which was in effect a penalty. lie spoke in terms of five chits, and explained it was being penalized 5 or xo percent of his salary for the week-the clear implication being that there is a quota system for everyone who works in Scientology. Exactly how it is measored I didn't know yet, but there was this quota system. At one point, explaining sometiling about L. l'~on Iluht~ard, he glanced over his right shoulder and pointed, casnally, the way you would point to a minor obiet d'art as yon strolled down the halls o~ the Louvre, to the obligatory xx x x4 photograph o[ tluhbard, looking down upon 11s. I shonld describe this particular branch o{Fxcc bccause it was typical of many of the ofiqces I wonld event~ally visit. The small room we were in, the reception room, had a desk, with an easy chair next to it. Two easy chairs sat opposite the desk, with a potted plant between them. TIm desk was set at an angle to the door, to face any visitors who came in through the front door, which led directly off ~th Street, inst off Fifth Avenue. 'Fo ~ny right-I was sitting in one of tile two easy chairs lacing tile desk behind which the bl~nd fellow was telling lne that after eight years ill the Navy he retold Scientology to be nnlch better organized than the Navy-to my right was a snlall room with the piles and piles of Scientology books arranged on a table. Next to this room was die "executive" office of the branch. To my left was a hallway which led to several other ~ooms. In the hallway a wall had been made over into a large bulletin board. Most of the notices on it, besides a list of what a good Scientologist does, and a list of what a good Auditor does, and rules for the preclear, were short little notes from people in Scientology called "Successes." Each is a small, heartfelt testimonial to Scientology: "My ability to 18 SCIENTOI,OGY d6~nmtmicate has increased greatly and people find me much more desirable to communicate with." "ljife is really worth living. I appreciate everything Ben is doing more than ever. Everyone come on the Road to Clear and O.T .... IT'S FREEDOM." Each "Success" carries the name of the person making the testimonial and its date. They are all a httle like those votive offerings you find at the shrines of saints in churches throughout Greece, those small silvered plaques depicting parts of the body, put up by people who have been restored to health; in gratitude, once healthy, they bring flowers to the particnlar plaqne because their backache or foot ache or eye discomfort has miraculously disappeared. Beyond the bulletin board, all by itself, was posted a copy of the Classification Gradation and Awareness Chart of Levels and Certificates. I was reading off such things as "Relief Belease" and "O/W ARC Process Case Remedies," and it made absolutely no sense to me, when a young fellow began talking to me. tie proudly showed me where he was on the chart, a Grade IV-"Ability Release," I read. "Moving Out Of Fixed Conditions and Gaining Abilities To Do New Things." "There are several Grade IV's around here," he was saying. Then he pointed to a woman who was sitting off to the side in one of the rooms talking to somebody. "She's an O.T. III," lie said with enormous respect. An O.T., I learned eventually, was an operating thetan, the ultimate. This woman was at the third level of achieving that sublime state, where, if I understood the oblique references made to O.T., you would be revered and listened to, and would possess incredible abilities-being able to walk on water or something, yet wise enough to know that it wa~ not necessary to walk on the water to prove you could do it. The young Grade IV suddenly offered to give me a small demonstration of the first thing you get in the Communications Course. As he was leading me over to some chairs stacked against the wall, he told me the course cost twenty-five dollars. TIIE NOW RELIGION 1,q Later, his girlfriend, a pretty little thing with blonde hair and thin-outlined eyes that were wide and friendly, told ~ne, "lt's twenty-five d~llars for the Commt~nications Course, and if you don't dig it, they refund it." So her heyfriend tried to give me a simple demonstration of what is called Con[rontation. He set a chair opposite mine and sat down, and the point was we were to stare at each other. We were to sit there and dig each other, free of all the little things we let intrude wlien all we should he doing is looking at someone. I suppose fi~e procedure ~uld make people who don't like to do tbat overcome their resistance to it. I suppose I could even convince someone that not being al>le to stare comfortably at a person is a hang-np to get rid ~ff. It all felt a trifle self-conscious-~naking antl we soon gave up on each other. Back in the reception room, the blond guy behind the desk was about to say some~ing when a young English girl walked in. He saw her, greeted her, and said, "I want to get your Success right away." The girl was su~rised. "Already?' she asked. "I only finished my Grades last week." "Yes," the boy said. "We want to get it as quickly as possible when somebody Releases." Releases. Insights. The terminology was getting to me, this private la~nage which made it all a very private world. The girl said, al,~t herself, "We've been clcari,~g np q~ite a few engrams, some mh~or ones. We've located o~e which we can see is going to he a bit of a problem." She seemed proud of that. She had a problem. Sometl~ing to sink your teeth into. My own feeling was ~at if it was a matter of dredging up a cranky wisdom tooth which refused to budge, okay. But these so-called engra~, as used in the lexicon of Scientolo~, are episodes in your past which left deep impressions, no maRer how y~m recorded the event, consciously or unconsciously. Confessing to some clown staring at the needle readings off a s~ple meter, a Wheatstone bridge setup, ~at you warohM 20 SCIENTOLOGY ,xyour older brother groping with Mom did not seem the most fortuitous way to nulhfy the effect of that particular moment. What the young English girl had said was additionally unpleasant because it smacked of the same kind of blithe, guileless simplicity I used to run across in behavioral psychology textbooks. I prefer complexity. Rats in a maze, I believed somewhat naively, isn't you and me, Charlie. I couldn't help but compare the outright blandness of tlao girl's "We've located one which we can see is going to be a bit of a problem" to the wrenching confession which confronts you in the unforgettable documentary film Warrendale. One of the children at Warrendale, the school for the emotionally disturbed, a girl, beautiful, sublimely lovely, reaches into herserf and manages to say to one of the attendants, a calm, caring woman, that what she fears most of all in the whole world is that she will never, ever get welll It is a moment so crushing, so absolutely crushing, I shall never forget it. You not only are made to absorb this fact within the context of the girts emotional state, her illness, but in that moment, because of how we've watched her wake np and dress and eat and lose her temper and scream and c~ and then speak, you know where that confession came from; you know and you finally love the infinite complexity and tragedy of this girl because she is truly alive. My own suspicion that Scientology was dangerously simplistic was further strengthened when I began reading some of the inexhaustible number of Scientology books, almost all of them written by L. Ron Hubbard. All of them seem to be, in their body, somewhat like all the books that keep coming out on the subject of bridge: How To Bid, How To Lead, How To l~e Dummy . . . they go on and on and on. Which makes sense because it sustains interest and inertia. It is, in fact, the simplest way to breathe life. into the movement. Hubbard lives, the books say to us; he lives and he thinks and continues handing down the Word. Despite the fact that I already felt, TIIE NOW HELIGION :~1 firmly, that ~nost of the Scicntologists urging ~ne to rea{l the ~oks had not necessarily done so themselves, I did, from cover to cover. It was a chilling task, both remitting and annoying. What it all got do~ to, what was drenched in complexity, was the folloxving message: You Can Do It, Fellal All By Yourselfl Alone] Because Your Mind Is A Perfect Machind And.. ú you cannot fail. That's the hooker. You cannot fail. I should say ~e phrase in hnshcd tones, with reverence, wondering whether my own material self is capable of absorbing the enormity of that ~nccpt. An~l 11ubl~ard, possibly because of his early experience as a writer of action science fiction, cschexvs lower case and con- tinoally lets y~u have it xvith all-capitals firing. YOU CAN- NOT FAIL. Got that? YOU CANNOT FAll ....CANNOT CANNOT... CANNOT. "~at is one hell of a beautiful promise: attain the unattain- able; it is acccssible. That is so much more attractive than merely learning Itow To Win Friends & In{luence People, or pepping yourself up by Thinking Positive, or even getting caught up in the passion of a fie~ revival meeting and Stand- ing Up For Christ. And as opposed to traditional religions which speak of someday, in Scicntology it is . . ú soon. But then reality seems to step in, cltunps in, iu tlxc person of the franchiscd Scicnt~logy branch, witlx its olF~cc an›l andfling rooms-often converted maids' rooms, tbc wholc place nsn;xlly a converwd apa~qmcnt, And the thought crosses my mind that if, two thousand years from now, the followcrs of thc infallible system known today as Scientology record their humble be- ginnings, will the detailed descriptions of their didcult origins ~clude the surroundings of neat lower-Fifth Avenue apart- ments as well as seedy West Side apartments, where Preclears step ~rongb a kitchen to reach the auditing room, where b~e floors and folding chairs and a lack of ventilation accompanied it all as this determined science of the mind stood up to make itself known. Will all that mean as much to people in ~o thousand years as did the simple caves of the early Christians- ~2. SCIENTOLOCY tf fetid, difllcult, impossible sustaining of a faith which, because it represented a political alienation, was seen to be dangerous and therefore had to be eradicated? Is that what is missing from Scientology as a modern religion, a feeling held in common by its followers that there is something dangerous in the air, something antisocial, something which may push them and their beliefs to an ultimate risk? Scientology has of course received a great deal of criticism, much of it serious and sincerely concerned with what Scientology's processing techniques might do to what is popularly called "mental health." Life magazine published a lengthy, extremely subjective piece written by Alan J. Levy who took Scientology processing up to and including Grade IV. "I have Hubbard to thank," he wrote, "for a true-life nightmare that gnawed at my family relationships and saddled me with a burden of guilt I've not yet been able to shed .... I explored some nooks and crannies of my own psyche that I wish to God had never been unearthed." I asked Bob Thomas what he thought of the article. He was of two minds. "There were," he said, "fortunately, a couple of redeeming features. You get the impression that here is a very vital, powerful, worldwide spiritual movement, in spite of the fact that it [Levy's article] is presented in a very kooky way." I hadn't fonnd fl~e piece at all kooky. What happened was that during the course of the processing, Levy relived tbe anguish of his father's death, feeling he was somehow personally responsible for an inadequate response to the tragedy. Tben, at one level, he was made to isolate the date of what he remembered to be a particularly serious argument he had with his wife. With his auditor's help he ruled the date, Sunday, March x8, ~958. Later, beginning to suffer severe headaches, he discovered that March x8, x958, had been a Tuesday. He felt, he wrote, that he had been made to believe something which was simply not the truth. To this, Thomas said, "He tried to fool the meter-" Levy had not mentioned he was researching a piece for Li[e at any time TIlE NOW BEI,ICION 23 while l~'it~g a~dit~'d by someone using Scientology's E-meter"which alwet~ts gives you a headache. We could've told him that." Thon~as laugl~ed. I asked what might have happened if Le~ had said be was working for Life magazine. Bather than suggest Levy then might not have been allowed to continue, Thomas said, "Ile wonld've continued to have the insights ~at he relates baving had. But it [the lie] caught up to him. Actually," he added, "his insights there are quite typical, quite classic, as a matter of fact, np to tbe point where his basic withholding ~ff himself from full participation catches up to him. IIe ct~ddn't fully participate because be was unwilling to really prt'sent himself as he was, fully. It's like going to a doctor, ~r g<~ing to a dentist to have a tooth pulled, and telling him it's this tooth, not the real one that harts. So he pulls the one that doesn't hurt and you've still got the one that does hurt." As ff I wasn't beginning to think so myself, Thomas said, "These techniques are ve~ powerful, and when you go ~to a situation on a dishonest basis to begin with they can be shattering only because you're using something that's ve~ powerful and direct, at the wrong targets, and you're not really participating validly. Not telling about being a reporter is a 'basic withinold.' WhiCh, in terms of o~r leclm~logy of the reactlye mind. activates tl~' reactive n~i~d. If v~n~ withinold som~'tl~ing, it tends to reactivate tb~ charge iu the reactire mind. That's why we insist on no 'withh~lds,' on a very bigh degree of honesty. So if you have the finagle factor involved at the outset of the tbing, no wonder it didn't go well. I'm su~rised it went as well as it did. But the undeniable ~pression you get as yon read his accounts of the processing is that somethh~g happened, he had some insights, in spite of ú e fact that be wasn't really there to do that." I was impressed with what Levy had tried to do. He had put himself on the line to learn the facts. Feeling what I did about Scientology, his e~erience only made me more un~mfogable, and I wondered if ~ere was a way to experience 24 SC1ENTOLOGY '~e whole thing without getting trapped. I encourageard n~Se Waterbury. But even these few bedrock facts may be open to question. When I was talking to ttorner, he suddenly said, "By the way, if you want to check his birthplace and birth date, you will find there is no record." You mean, I said, in Tiiden, Nebraska? "Yep," Homer said. Well, I asked, where was Hubbard born? "I don't know," Horner said. "But you won't fiud any records there." Is it true, I asked further, that Hubbard's father was in the Navy? "Yes," Horner said, "though I'm not snre whether that was his father or his stepfather. His [Hubbard's] son told me that years ago, and then recently solnebody doing research tried to find a record of his birth in 96 SCIENToI~OGy lie ol~erates h~depcndt'utly. So flsis mt'ans {hat an auclitor xvorking alone can make anywhere from uothing ~p to $25,ooo a year. TIffs is why the a~›litors iu Chicago clou't xvork in the organizatiou, because the minute you go to work in an organization you go on their so-calle›l Unit System, and this can mean anything from $3o a week, to a top executive who might get $15o. The branch office wouldn't be yours any more; it belongs to tlubbard." I asked Bob Thomas about Hubbard's activities on the Apollo, now that he has avowedly severed his connections with the administrative operation of Scientolo~ around the world. "It's like a retreat," Thomas explained, meaning Hubbard's floating domicile, "for advanced Scientologists. Mr. Hubb~d is no longer on the board of directors of any of the organizations. He has relinquished everything but being titular head of Scientology," though he "still contributes any technical advances by virtue of research now going on." Hubbard has, it is true, divested himself of his directorship of the various HASI's and churches, but he is still head of HCO (~), and, according to Thomas, "ten percent is paid to World-Wide for research, and communications." Exactly what tiffs research is Hubbard bimself explained to the persistent British film crew which had located him and his flagship. "I am studying ancient civilizations," he said, "t~ing to find out what happened to them, finding out why ú ey went into a decline, why they died." As to his relationship to Scientolo~ today, Hubbard blithely said, "Let's get my relationship to this completely straight: I am the writer of the textb~ks of Scientology." Which is nonsense. Hubbard's hand is e~dent in almost everything happening in Scientology today. Any doub~'I might have had were dispelled early this year when I received a "loyalty petition" issued by the Committee For Democratic Mental Practices of tim N.A.A.P., P.O. Box 380, New York, N.Y. xoo24. Twelve years after his ridiculous "loyalty oath" which he mailed out to psychologists, psychi- S(:IENT()I,()(;Y (.)7 atrists, psycht~analysts, and "z~iniste~'s elf vari~ls de~,m~iuati~ns who er~gage in mcn/al practice," here was tl~at olcl National Academy of Atuerican Psychology sending out tl~is incredible petition xvl~ich ltegi~s: 'qt is not gener;tlly appreciated in the United States that the field of mental healing coul›t be used by a foreign p~nvcr tu ~r~lcrt~inc o~r dt'tnocr~tic system of government]' W]lat fo]l~nvs is a rhetorical treatise ou hoxv realpractice in fl~e menial sciences is being used m~der our very noses to subvert . . . you name it: individuals, organizations, the whu]e co~niryl The pctitit~n to be tendered (:ongrcss states "that every pea'son engaged in the treatment of mental illness, iuc]uding psychiatrists, psychologists and psychot]~erapists iu the Unite~l States ancl its protectorates, shall solum~ly [sic] declare before any Justice of the Peace that he is not a member of any movement or party, nor is he associated with, for fee or reward, any foreign power or organization whicb has as its aim the undermining or subversion of the Constitution or elected government of the United States of America]' It is a sickening piece of tripe and smells of that age-old giveaway: somebody or something running scared. A much more personal glimpse of what Ilubt~ard is up to was given by Nick Robinson, a young Englishman xvho bad spent months aboard the Royal Scot Man and finally ]eft, bitterly disillusioned. Speaking in a slightly hesitaut, caref~dly pointed manner, he told the British film team whose work I was able to screen, that Hubl~ard "really is in cbarge, all the way. He used to use Telexes eve~ day from his organizations all over the world, especially Saint Ilill in England. And he sends Telexes to Saint ttill, gives them instructions and so on and so on. So he really is involved. On board the ship he's a kind of Jesus Christ-cure-Buddha all rolled into one. His busts and photographs are everywhere. Ile just is God." 3ø SCIENTOLOGY TITden and couldn't." Regarding Ron IIubbard's own military career, Ilorner said, "i'm sure he was in the Navy, but I'm sure a lot of the things he said happened in the Navy didn't." Assuming Hubbard's father was his true father, the family was Scottish on the father's side and came to this country in the nineteenth century. Hubbard has embellished these bare bones by claiming other ancestry as well, particularly a Count de Loup, "who entered England with the Norman invasion and became the founder of the English de Wolfe family which emigrated to America in the seventeenth century." This is an attractive, even thrilling, notion, but in all fairness to the Almanach de Gotha, I mnst mention that in one of Hubbard's science-fiction adventures, he created a character named Mike de Wolfe-de Wolfe being the anglicized version of de Loup-who found himself back in 264o as Miguel Saint Raoul Maria Gonzales Sebastian de Mendoza y Toledo Francisco Juan Tomaso Guerrero de Brazo y Leon de Lobo. De Lobo is Spanish for de Loup, which is French for . . . de Wolfe. Which inspired which? Hubbard lived on his grandfather's Montana ranch until he was ten. A brief biography which appeared in Scientology: The Field Sial7 Magazine, written in a declamatory style which was to become increasingly familiar to me, said that he "could ride before he coold walk," and "later became a blood brother of the Blackfeet (Pikuni) Indians, and his first novel, published in ~936, concerns them." The reference is probahly to Buckskin Brigade, which appeared in hardcover in ~937. Hubbard left Montana to rejoin his family, and when he was twelve was living in Washington, D.C., where Calvin Coolidge, Jr., was supposedly one of his best friends. The sudden death of the President's young son was supposed to have inspired Hubbard's "early interest in mental research." The biography I'm quoting goes on to relate that when Hubbard was fourteen years old, his father was sent to the Far East, and it was not long before the boy found himself in "]{ON" 31 China, spending the next few years traveling tkro~gho~t Asia In northern China and India, the anonymous biograpller ex plains, "he bccame intensely curious about the compositio~ and destiny of Man, and studied on the one hand with Lam~ priests, and made himself agreeable on the other hand to war like people by his ability to ride." In ~93o, this biograph'. continues, t{ubbard returned to Washington, D.C., and wa: enrolled at George Washington University. I found, however that !tubbard had attended lielena High School in Helena Montana, and had then come to Wasbington, D.C., where, h Jnne of ~93o, he graduated from Woodward School for Boys a YMCA preparatory school. When, I asked myself, did h, travel througl~out Asia? tlnbbard's career at George Washington University is ir~ portant because many of his researches and published cot clusions have been supported by his claims to be not only ~ graduate engineer, but "a memt~er of tile first United State course in formal education in what is called today nuclea physics." The facts are that Hubbard never received a Bachclo of Science degree in civil engineering. tie fitraked freshma physics, was placed on probation in S~.ptend~er of ~93~, an failed to rct~r~ to tile m~iv~'rsitv after tl~ ~93~-3:~ acadcmi year. In lalcr .years, in a{lditiors. The figure also fluc~ates enormously. 34 SCIENTOLOGY gels'money from us," 11andol saicl drily, "than it is to get the flag. The flag is awarded only to members. and is treated rather jealously." Hnbbard's expedition that year xvas to Alaska, under the title of the Alaskan-Radio Expedition. In the years since, ttubbard has made two more voyages flying the Explorer's Club flag, one in ~96~, an Oceanographic-Archeological Expedition, and one in ~966, the Hubbard Geological Survey Expedition. Much earlier, by ~94L American science-fiction fans were already familiar with Hubbard's distinctive writing style, which was bolcl and highly imaginative, tlis first serials began to appear in a pulp magazine called Astounding Science Fiction in ~938. One after another, titles such as Slaves of Sleep, Kingslayer, Typewriter in lhe Sky, Fear, Death's Deputy, and Final Blackout were eagerly welcomed by devoted fans. In addition to his own name, Iluhbard also wrote under a variety of pen names, including l{en6 Lafayette (whose work appeared in such magazines as Thrilling ~,Vo~der Stories and Startling), Winchester Remington Colt, and, I suspect, some of the peripheral characters with names such as Jules Monteaim and Kurt yon Racbne who popped up in his stories. Moments in some of his sagas are particularly interesting because they offer insights into the xvorkings of Hnbbard's sense of fantasy, an imagination which was to achieve its full flower years later in Scientology. Typewriter in the Sky was the story of one Mike de Wolfe, who found himself trapped in the past as the nnwilling villain of a swashbuckling tale being churned out by a science-fiction writer named Horace Hackett. How it happened never quite makes sense to Mike, but "he had no doubt ~at this was 'Blood and Loot,' by Horace Hackett, and that the whole panorama was activated only by Horace Hackett's mind. And what Horace Hackeft said was so, was so. And what Horace Haekett said people said, they said." Mike eventually survived what he suspected was going to be a nasty finish, not because Horace Hackerr wanted him dead, but because "nON" 3~ he knew h<,w Ile, race's prolific mind resolved his melodramas The end nf the book finds Mike miraculously back in Ne,a York, at first grateful to have survived, thinking of seeing al of his old friends again. Then, rememt~cring how he haC wandered into lIacketCs bathroom only to hear a typewrite3 begin to type and have everything disappear, only to awake~ on a beach in the year ~64o. Mike grows furious. It was ttorac, who had been responsible for the fate he had suffered, the killing of men he did not know, the falling in love with ~ woznan he knexv conld never he his bcca,,se she was jr,st one of Hack~'tCs er~'ations. And then... "Abruptly Mike de Wolfe stopped. Ills jaw slackened a trifle and his hand xvent up tc his mouth to cover it. 1Iis eyes were fixed upon the fleet) c]otnls which scurried across the moon. Up therc~ God? In a dirty bathrobe?" In a novella entitled Fear, Hubbard told of James Lowry an ethnologist particularly fascinated by the notion of demonel ogy in modern society, who, in what can only be described a~. a moment of blind jealousy, murders his wife and best friend and then blanks out, growing steadily convinced that he i~ being secn't]y controlled by actual demons for reasons whict he cannot ~mderstand. At one point in the story ]~e hotly de fends an article he has written on his favorite subject. "1 hav~ sought," Lowry argues, "to show that demons and devils wen invented to alloxv some cunning member of tbe tribe to gab control of Iris fellows by the process of inventing somethinI for them to fear and then offering to act as interpreter-" Much later, just before everything falls back into some kin~ of order in his mind and he realizes xvhat he has done, Lowr actually confronts what he knows to be his demons. They hav told bim he is the "Entity." "You are the Entity, the center of control. Usually all life at fleeting instants, takes turns in passing this along. No~ 36 SCIENTOLOGY '~' perhaps you have, at one time in your life, had a sudden feeling, 'I am I'? Well, that awareness of yourself is akin to what men call godliness. For an instant nearly every living thing in this world has been the one Entity, the focal point for all life. It is like a torch being passed from hand to hand. Usually innocent little children such as myself are invested [the demon has appeared in the guise of a four-year-old girl with blonde locks, bow lips, and lewd eyes] and so it is that a child ponders much upon his identity." Lowry does not seem to understand completely. The demon explains. "So long as you live, then the world is animated. So long as you walk and hear and see, the world goes forward. In your immediate vicinity, you understand, all life is concentrating upon demonstrating that it is alive. It is not. Others are only props for you .... You are the Entity, the only living thing in this world." Gripping and inventive, the story is interesting because Hubbard later uses this idea of man's capacity to realize his godlike "Entity" in some of Scientology's fundamental beliefs and theories. World War II found Hubbard an officer in the U.S. Navy, commissioned, according to the Scientology biography, before Pearl Harbor. "He was ordered to the Philippines at the outbreak of the war and was flown home in the late spring of ~94z as the first U.S. returned casualty from the Far East." What his wounds were is unknown, but he was in sufficiently good trim to be ordered at once to take command of a corvette, this due, it is said, to his considerable experience with small boats. He spent most of ~942 with his corvette and with the British and American antisubmarine vessels of the North Atlantic,,,rising to command an entire squadron. In ~943 he was back in the Pacific. No mention is made of the name of the ship he served on, in which campaigns, and in what capacity, but Hubbard has said on several occasions that it was he who provided Thomas Heggen with the model for "Mr. Roberts." This has never been substantiated. Heggen, before his un- "nON" 3~ timely death in 1949, would only say about Roberrs: "lie is to. good to be true, he is a pure invention." When the war was over, Hubbard, to continue qtmting hi revealing, anonymously authored, and totally unsubstantiate biography, was "crippled and blind .... He resumed his studk of philosophy," this document goes on, "and by his discoveri~ so ftdly recovered that he was reclassified in x949 for fu combat duty. It is a matter of medical record that he h~ twice been pronounced dead and that in 395o he was given perfect score on mental and physical fitness reports .... R, volted by war and Man's inhumanity to Man, he resigned hi commission rather than assist government research projects. With due respect to Ilubbard's personal feelings of revulsio for war and man's inhumanity to man, I was nnable to cot firm a single one of these critical claims: that he had bee crippled and blind, the nature of his "discoveries," and tlq medical records stating he had "twice been pronetraced dead I flew to Washington, D.C., and learned that the Unite States Navy would not confirm or deny the details of Hul bard's military career. "The records 'of members and former members of the armc forces," I was told in an official lcttcr fr,m~ the l)cpartmcnt , the Navy, "are privileged in nat~rc an{l information therefro cannot be furuislted without the writtcu c!~nscnt of the persc whose records are concerned." I was able t~ learn, in conve: sations I had when I was in Washingt›m, that Itubbard ha been commissioned before the war broke out, that his ran during his military service was that of lieotenant, and th~ his classification or specialty was DVS, something called De{ Volunteer Specialist, if I understood the designation correctl It also seems he did spend some time in a military hospit~ Several ex-Scientologists have told me that Hubbard w, an outpatient while in the Navy, and that he felt free to roa around the grounds and wards and make friends with vario~ patients, particularly those with psychological disturbances. 38 SCIENTOI,OGY may'rue one of those apocryphal tales which only serves to cement the notion of already-developing wisdom and insight, but I think it is essentially true. Gary Watkins, a young man who had been a highly placed auditor * in Scientology at the time of being expelled by the movement, says that Hubbard, in the hospital, would talk to various patients. "He had lots of doubts about the theory [theories of mental illnesses] and would run off and find out what they knew-the experts in the books-about these patients and their cases, and then probably made his own extensions on that, and would sort of meet them casually in the garden and try to treat them." After the war, according to an article in the Saturday Evening Post in ~964, Hubbard "banged around L.A. and Pasadena, where he was known as a fellow of an intense curiosity." Hubbard himself says that he first went to Hollywood as a screenwriter in ~936- This may be so, but the only screenplay which can be directly attributed to him is a fifteen-episode serial made by Columbia Pictures called The Secret of Treasure Island. I could find no mention anywhere of what happened to his wife, "the skipper," as Hubbard had called her, though he was, by the end of the war, the father of two children, a son, L. Ron Ilubbard, Jr., nicknamed "Nibs," now working for a home protection agency in the Pacific Northwest, and a daughter, Kay. Hubbard himself has said only that his first wife died. Whatever the facts may be, Hubbard was certainly a man of nervous versatility. Yet the wandering glider pilot and smallboats mariner who once sang and played the banjo on a radio program in California seemed gripped, in his various stories, by a geBuine determination to explore the helplessness of man ú Scientology's own official definition of an auditor is: "A listener or one who listens carefully to what people have to say. An auditor is a erson trained and ualified in applying Scientology processes to others ~-ho:, k~**.~_ ,q' ~ annli 'on of Scientolo-~' nrocesses xs ~r .............. n,. Th_ _ r cati s: r ' called auditing, and will be define~ and examined at length later. "~{~N" 39 as lie inh~,l~ils I~is t~ody, of being constriclcd 1~y his own shell and thus mlaltle to {liscover the higller meanings of existence. In one tale, Dcath's Deputy, the story of a fighter pilot chosen by Death to lead a charmed life which magnetically stirrounds itself with tragedy after tragedy to create a source of supply for Death, the ill-fated hero is led to meet Death hy a messenger who, when the pilot unconsciously touches his collar and finds no flesh there, says, "Don't be a fool. Does a man have to drag a hody everywhere?" So it was the mind of man which fascinated IIubbard, and his biography emphasizes that life and travel in Asia kindled the flame of this interest. Expeditions into savage wildernesses intensified his hunger for knowledge and resulted, in ~938, in the writing of a book which has never been published. Its subject, according to Itubbard, was "the basic principles of human existence." Its name: Excalibur. Like the steel of its namesake, the title rings on the imagination. "Mr. Hubbard wrote this work in ~938," advertising copy announced in the early ~95o's. "When four of the first fifteen people who read it went insane, Mr. ttnbbard withdrew it and placed it in a vault wllere it has remained until now. Copies to selected readers only and then on signature. Beleased only on sworn statement not to pennit other readers to read it. Contains data not to be released during Mr. Ilubhard's stay on earth. The complete fast formula for clearing. The secret not even Dianetics disclosed. Facsimile of original, individnally typed for manuscript buyer. Gold-bound and locked. Signed by author. Very limited. Per copy... $~,5oo." Somewhat conflicting details abont this phenomenal work were revealed in the July ~952 issue of Science-Fiction Advertiser, a sort of science-fiction newsletter published in Glendale, California. The article was written by a science-fiction devotee named Arthur J. cox and related how, in x948, Hubbard had told his fans about "dying" for eight minutes during 40 SC1ENTOLOGY .~. an operation performed on him while in the Navy. According to Cox, Hubbard realized that, while he was dead, he had received a tremendous inspiration, a great Message which he must impart to others. He sat at his typewriter for six days and nights and nothing came out. Then, Excalibur emerged. Excalibur contains the basic metaphysical secrets of the universe. He sent it arotmd to some publishers; they all hastily reiected it .... He locked it away in a bank vault. But then, later, he informed us that he would try publishing a "diluted" version of it .... Dianetics, I was recently told by a friend of Hubbard's, is based upon one chapter of Excalibur. Wljatever the price tag, Excalibur has actually inspired fans to try and buy it. Jack Ilorner told me of being with ttubbard in Phoenix, Arizona, in x953, when Hubbard was living and lecturing there, "and some gny came to the door trying to bny it. Well, Hubbard sent the guy away-handled him-and then looked at me and Jim Pinkham, and smiled." The moment seemed right, so ttorner, who had begun to wonder if Excalibur really exists, got up enough courage and asked Hubbard point-blank. "I don't really recall word for word what he said," ttorner went on, '%ut he implied that Excalibur was something that had been put there to create interest." "You mean Hubbard made the whole thing up?" I said, stunned. "Excalibur doesn't exist?" "I do not believe it does," Horner said candidly. "I don't believe that such a book did or does exist." Not that Hubbard was incapable of sitting down and knocking out a book he would title Excalibur. He was always prolific, almost driven, and had once said to ttorner, "Any writer who can't write forty~thousand words a week is not worth his salt." To help you appreciate that claim, 4o,ooo words is somewhat more than half the size of the book you are reading at this moment. Hubbard's innate sense of what creates interest was definitely failing into place in the late ~94o's when he wrote something called Original Thesis. He peddled it unsuccessfully to several "RON" 41 publisttcrs, inchMing Shasta, a Chicago house specializing in science fiction which had published some of his other works. It was when he changed the name of his thesis to Dianetics that tl~ings began to happen. Whatever fire had burned inside Lafayette Bonalet tlubt~ard for thirty-eight years had now found the beginning of its nltin~ate ontlet and form of expression. He was home. Or, put another way, he had beg~u to fulfill a promise he once made, according to Jack Ilorner, to wellknown science-fiction writer A. E. Van Vogt. "One of these days," lie s~pposedly said to Van Vogl before he had xvritten Diadem'tics, "l'~n going to come n~t with sotnetlling that's going to make I'.T. Barmini htok like a piker." Jack II~rner grows aln~ost noslalgic when he talks about Ituhbard an{l tljeir eloseness-"abont the same relationship, over the years, that Mr. Nixon had with NIl'. Eisenhower xvhcn lie was in otfice"-and the gol'darned similarities. "We grew np in fairly parallel lives," lie said to me. "I lived all over the Unite{t States; I was in the Navv myself during World War 1I, I lied abont my age to get in. Anti because of having lived in man), co~u~t.ries and arotmd iu different places, I had a very defi~ite sense of eqnatity an›l nf people. Just More lhd~t~ard came out with Dianctics, I xvas saying to myself: 'Why do people remember witat they remember? And xvhy do they forget what they forget?' I xvas doing my own line of thinking on this whole thing when Dianctics came ont. I read what it had to say and I was fascinated! I got hold of thc damn book and I sat down and aoctited three pcople and Boyl it worked jnst like Hubt~ard said it would. I was familiar already with the techniques of Freud and Breuer and pretty well into the history of Westcrn psychology, so I said, 'Gee, hc may not have it all, bnt hc sure got a goo{1 piece of it! Lct's gol' I just dropped everything and got iuvolvccl. I was a very hardheaded, pragmatic atheist at the time Dianetics came out. You talk to me about past lives, I was very skeptical. Because as far as I was concerned, you had one life to live and that was it; you better 42 SCIENTOI, OGy d~'what you co~ld while you were living it. tloxvevcr, when I auditcd enough people, and all of a sudden they kept ›tropping into past lives without my having mentioned them or their having read any books-" Horner suddenly gave a long, machine-gun-like laugh, as ff to break the tension of what he was about to profess to believe, "-you begin to wonder, you know?" The substantial contradictions of fact regarding ftubbard's background seem suddenly unimportant, or, as novelist William S. Burroughs put it in an article called "Scientology Revisited," published in England in Mayfair magazine: "Mr. Hubbard's degrees and credentials seem hardly relevant. Dianetics and Scientology are his credentials and he needs no others." I agree. Let's take a look at the credentials. ENTER DIANETICS k~lLk I can remember, hack in ~95o, a high school friend telling me abont some new thing his mother was involved with. Ite said it was called "Dianetics" and made it possible for you to remember tlxings which had happened to you when you were just a baby. Then he said-and it was hard to believe, coming from an intelligent, level-headed gny-that Dianctics could make you experience flyings which had happened to you be[ore birth. Why would you want to do that, I wanted to know, know things which had happened before yon were born? As I remember, he didn't seem to know. lie showed me a copy of the book his m~thcr was stndying, Dianetics: The Modern Science o[ Mental Ilcalth. Reading it recently, that m~ment came back to me, particularly the book's first sentence. If ever a~ ope~ing sentence introduced a theme with matcl~less daring, it was t{ubbard's declaration that "the creation of dianctics is a milestone for Man comparable to his discovery of fire and superior to his inventions of the wheel and arch." What was Dianetics, a word mannfacturcd from the Greek word dianotta, meaning thought? It was a science of the mind, "an exact science and its application is on the order of, but simpler than, engineering. Its axioms should not be confused with theories since they demonstrably exist as natural laws hitherto undiscovered." Hubbard said his new science was simpler than physics or chemistry but on a much higher level- 43 44 ,~,SCIENTOLOGY he called it an "echelon"-of usefulness. "The hidden source oj› all psychosomatic ills and human aberration has been discf~vered and skills have been developed for their invariable cure [italics his]." To give us all some perspective with which to appreciate the magnitude of his discovery, Itubbard, after a synopsis, an introduction, and instructions on how to read the book-'read straight on through .... Treat it as an adventure"-began Chapter I as follows: "A science of mind is a goal which has engrossed thousands of generations of Man. Armies, dynasties and whole civilizations have perished for lack of it. Rome went to dust for the want of it. China swims in blood for the hope of it; and down in the arsenal is an atom bomb, its hopeful nose full-armed in ignorance of it." Without in any way lessening the impact of the complete text, here is the essence of what Hubbard had found. He postulated that the mind consists of two parts: the analytical mind (what Freud called the "conscious"),. which perceives, remembers, and reasons; and the rcactive mind (what Freud called the "unconscious"), which neither remembers nor perceives, but simply records. Normally, the analytical (conscious) mind is dominant. But, according to ttubbard, injury or anesthesia or, more important, acute emotional shock or physical pain, can "switch off" the analytical mind. Then the reactive mind goes into operation. This reactive mind does not record memories, but what Hubbard termed engramscomplete sound impressions on protoplasm itself, "a complete recording," as he put it, "down to the last accurate detail, of every pSrception present in a moment of... unconsciousness." Unhappiness, emotional upsets, even the common cold, were caused by the existence of these engrams. Dianetics therefore was the discovery, study, and technology for dredging up these troublemakers and getting rid of them. Probably the first man to learn something about Hubbard's discovery and immediately accept it was John Campbell, Jr., ENTER DIANETICS 45 editor of Astot~nding Science Fiction, the magazine which had published many of Hubbard's stories and serials. Hubbard had explained his extensive theories and techniques to Campbell, and provided dramatic proof by alleviating Campbell's chronic sinnsitis. Campbell was enormously impressed, so much so that he and Hubbard quickly established a Dianetics organization in Bay Head, New Jersey, a town not far from Elizabeth, New Jersey, where Campbell's magazine was headquartered. At the same time (this was July of x949), Campbell wrote a long letter to Dr. Josephus Augustus Winter, a general practitioner from St. Joseph, Michigan, who had published several articles on medicine in Astounding Science Fiction, telling him all about Hubbard's investigations. "L. Ron Hubl~ard," Campbell wrote, "who happens to be an author, has been doing some psychological research .... He's gotten important resnlts. His approach is, actually, based on some very early work of Freud's, some work of other men, and a lot of original research. He's not a professional psychoanalyst or psychiatrist... he's basically an engineer. He approached the problem of p.~ychiatry from the heuristic viewpoint-to get results .... "Campbell went on to describe some of IIubbard's results, particularly the taking of an amputee veteran right through a period of unc~nsciousness to discover why he was feeling so troubled, why bc thought there was nothing to Hve fOE. When Dr. Winter, as he was later to describe it in Hs book, A Doaor Looks At Dianetics, wrote Campbell ~ng for more details of what, at first glance, ce~ainly looked interesting, Campbell answered with another long leaer ~at on~ more ~ged the doctor to come and see for himself, and then added, in substantiation of Hubbard's work: "He has one statisfic. He has cured every patient [italics his] he worked. He has cured ulcers, aflhritis, asthma." Winter found this blatant confidence almost too much to believe, but refused to dismiss Hubbard ou~ght. Instead, he ~ote directly to Hub- 46 SCIENTOLOGY bard, fi'~king for even more details. Ilubbard xvrote back to say that he was "preparing, instead of a rambling letter, an operator's manual for your use .... Certainly appreciate your interest. My vanity hopes that you will secure credit for me for eleven years of unpaid research, but my humanity hopes above that that this science will be used as intelligently and extensively as possible, for it/s a science and it does produce exact results tmiformly and can, I think, be of benefit." Dr. Winter arrived in Bay Head on October x, x949, and was quite impressed with Hubbard's theories and the few demonstrations he witnessed. His feelings, however, were not fully secured until after he had returned to St. Joseph, Michigan, to spend Thanksgiving with his family. There, when his little son's fear of ghosts became quite serious, Dr. Winter decided to try some of Hubbard's dianetic methods. When, with only a little assistance, the boy was able to describe accurately the moment of his oxvn birth and the certainly frightening image of the white-masked doctor who had brought him into the world, Dr. Winter was forced to acknowledge that not only had he discovered his son's "ghosts," but L. Ron Hubbard's discovery appeared to be a working science precisely as claimed. Dr. Winter returned to Bay Head to continue his work with Campbell and Hubl~ard. After another short trip back to Michigan for Christmas, he decided he must devote all his energies to Dianctics. tie closed his practice and, with his family, moved to Elizabeth, New Jersey, which was now Hubbard's headquarters. In April of x95o the first Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation was incorporated, with Dr. Winter as its first medical director. The world at large, meanwhile, was only beginning to learn something of this revolutionary discovery. Under what Hubbard has described as enormous pressure from followers, he finally allowed John Campbell to publish, in May of ~95o, in Astounding Science Fiction, an article called "Evolution of a Science." This caused great turmoil among science-fiction ENTEI1 I)IANETI(]S 47 devotees an›l was folloxvcd, very fl~ickly, xvith the appearance of the bo~k, Dianclics: The Modern Science of Mental Ilcalth. Much to evcryo~c's snrprisc, it became an immediate best seller, the first book to achieve snch instant success since Thomas Mcrton's The Seven Storey Mot~ntain. Though most of the reviews xvcrc adverse, people all over the country were not only lmying tim book, lust enthusiastically organizing themselves i~t~ coven-like Diana'tics gro~ps eager to practice the phenotncnal tcclmiques Ilnl~bard reveali'd in his tome. While soci~l~,gists dismissed the wh~dc thing as j~st anotl~er American fad, more of that postxvar hysteria xvhich had produced pyramid chd~s and canasta marathons, they c~uld not pretend fl~at cvcryl~ody wasn't getting into it. I have already mentioned that Ilubbartl had tric{l to sell the book ~md,'r another title, Original Thesis-this xvas the vohm~c he sent l)r. Winter, the "opcrator's mannal" xvhich inspired the doctor to g›~ personally and scc what Diant~tics was all abf~ut. Naming his science "l)ianctics" and then generating a great deal of talk through the Astottnding Science Fiction artich~ finally made the dilFcrcncc and p~t Dianctics on its feet. II~d~bard himself has discussed the torturous pafl~ he followed to develop his science, lint not only h~ terms of hitting npon jnst the right name antl achitwh~g the right kind of exposure. "In a lifetime of wandering arom~d," hc wrote in the Astottnding article, "TIm Evolution of a Science," many strange tl~ings had been observed. The medicine men of the G›~ldi people of Manchuria, the sham;~ns of North Borneo, Sioux medicine men, the cults of Los Angeles, and mootern psychology. Amongst tim people questioned about existence were a magician whose ancestors served in the tour of Knblai Khan and a Itindu who could hypnotize cats. Dabhies had been made in mysticism, data had been studied from mythology to spiritualism. Odds and ends like these, countless o›tds and ends .... First, attempts were made to discover what school or system was workable. Freud ~d occasionally. So did Chinese acupuncture. So did magic heal~g crystals h~ Auskalia and mkacle s~es in South ~efica. 48 ,~, SCIENTOLOGY But eclectic as his bent was, the answers had to be worked out by Hubbard and Hubbard alone. After many long years of wrestling with these questions, he concluded that man, possessed of a brain which is in fact a miraculous, peHect computer, needs a dynamic (italics his) principle by which to examine his existence. With this firmly in mind, L. Ron Hubbard began to postulate, build, and conclude. In charting the hitherto unknown mysteries of man's true existence, he was constantly guided by one basic principle: "a science . . . is something pretty precise .... It has to produce predictable results uniformly and every time [italics his]." I must emphasize one thing here: in all the millions of words which followed the appearance of Dianetics, in all the contradictions and verbal gymnastics which have led followers into labyrinthine confusion as well as predetermined insights, Hubbard has managed to sustain his dedication to this one scientific notion of validity-through-workability with startling fidelity. In moments of rare candor, Hnbbard has boasted that it actually took him a mere three weeks tO write the entire weighty text of the original Dianetics book. I don't doubt him. It is known that he wrote on a special IBM electric typewriter which had much-used words such as "the," "and," and "but" slugged in as entire keys. He also typed on a continuous roll of paper to avoid the interruptions of changing sheets. However long it actually took Hubbard to write Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, the style of the book is diffuse, rambl/ng, and repetitive, and very quickly introduces us to one of the basic characteristics of a new school of thought: its own vocabulary. Words such as Anaten, BasicBasic, Chains, Clear, Denyet, Perceptic, and many more, peppered the writing, bringing a reader to a grinding halt as he stopped to ask himself exactly how Hubbard had chosen to employ a particular word. Hubbard justified his rampant ncologism in a lengthy footnote-footnotes becoming an essen- ENTER DIANETICS 49 tial technique in everything he wrote. Hc explained that verbs and adiectives wcrc being used as nouns because old terminology was useless in defining the elements of his new science. It was much simpler to invent language and give it mint-new definitions. Dr. Winter's book, A Doctor Looks At Dianctics, threw more candid light on Hubbard's use of language. Winter said that when he and Hubbard and Campbell first developed the advanccd aspcets of Dianetics, organizing it and codifyjag its principles, "we concluded that terminology shonld be revised with the following criteria in mind: Oldcr terminology or terminology from other medical fields should bc avoided, becanse the acceptance of a term from a certain school of thought might imply acceptance of the tenets of that school of thought." Whcn~vcr possible, "we would coin a new term," so that Dianctics would possess its own validity, its own sul}stanti~ltion of its discoveries. * The usefulness of this tactic has been, fl~rough thc years, reinforced by a small Important Note which appears as the frontispiece o{ virtually every book writtcn on cithe~'..l)ianetics, or its successor, Scicntology: "In studying Scicntology (Dianctics) bc very, very certain you never go past a word you do not fifily understand. The only reason a person gives np a study or becomcs confused or nnablc to learn is that he or she has gone past a word or phrase that was not understood. If the material becomes confusing or you can't secm to grasp it, there will be a word just earlier that you have not understood. Don't go any further, but go back to BEFORE you got into trouble, find the misunderstood word and get it defined." ú A curious exception to this neologism was the word engrara itself. It had already been defined as a psychical change cansed by some sort of stimulation in x936, in the 17th Edition of Dorland's Medical Dictionary. Even earlier, in x923, Richard Semon used the term in his book Mnemic Psychology. Dr. Winter hotly denied that the term had been lifted from the Semon book, though he acknowledged finding it in the Dorland. 50 SCIENTOLOCY ~,t Once xve actually nnd~'rstand the clefiniti~ms of 11ubbard's analytical and reactive mincls, we are intrc~dncccl to thc l~igh drama of how engrams become implanted. Wrote Ilubl~ard: A woman is knocked down by a blow. She is rendercol "tinconscious." She is kicked and told she is a faker, that sbe is no good, that she is always changing her mind. A chair is overturned in the process. A lancet is running in the kitchen. A car is passing in the street outsicte. The engram contains a running record of all these perceptions: sight, sonnd, tactile, taste, smell, organic sensation, kinetic sense, ioint position, thirst record, etc. The eugram would consist of the whole statement made to her when she was "unconscions": the voice tones and emotion in the voice, the sound and feel of the original and later blows, the tactile of the floor, the feel and sound of the chair overtun~ing, the organic sensation of the blow, perhaps fl~e taste of blood in her month or any oilier taste present there, the smell of the person attacking her and the smells in the n~om, the sound of the passing car's motor and tires, etc. The intensity of an engram's moment of implantation was balanced by the delicate pn~l~ing designed to dredge it up years later. Called auditing, it was performed when a person was in what was called dianctic rc~erie, a snpposed partial sleep which simplified recalling an engram, bringing it up to the surface and, in the ever-expanding jargon of Dianetics, "boiling it off." The one engram dianetic auditors were determined to locate as quickly as possible was the one Hubbard named the Basic-Basic, or BB, which, Dianetics believed, was formed a few weeks after conception, or even earlier, in the zygote, the fertilized ovum. Tracing a BB was extremely sophisticated auditing, and one usually "ran" countless lesser engrams which had been experienced prior to the moment of birth before confronting this ultimate nemesis. That there were plenty of engrams to locate from the time of the formation of the embryo is argued convincingly by Hubbard in his description of life in the womb. "Mama sneezes," he wrote in ENTEn DIANETICS 51 Dia~cti~'s': The Mf~dcrn Science of ~fcntal 1Icalth, "l~aby gets knocked h~nc~msc'i~ms.' Mama runs lightly ancl blith{'ly into a tahle and ba13y g~'ts its head stored in. Mama has constipation and ba13y, in tim anxi~tus effo~, g{~ts s~tnash~'d. Papa hecomcs passinnate' ancl baby has the scnsatiot~ of being put into a nmning wasl~ing machine. Mama gets hysterical, baby gets an cngram. Papa hits Mama, baby gcts an engram. Junior bonnces ou Mama's lap, baby g~'ts an engram .... " Then' are also the noises, the inccssant cacophouy of the interior universe: "Int~'stinal squeaks and groans, flowing xvatcr, l~,lcl~,s, tlatulali~n and other ho{ly activities of the motl~{'r pr<~d~c{' a c{mti~M s~und .... XVhen mothcr takcs q~ini~{' a l~igl~ riuging noise' may come into being in the foctal t'ars as w~'11 as her owu-a ringing xvhich will carry thn~gl~ a p~'rs~n's xvh~lc life." The teclmi~lncs of auditing ancl locatin~ engrams were macle immeasnrably simpler by Itubbard's strongly helcl convielion that fl~{'re was one eugram common to alm~st all of us. "What happ~'ns to a child in a womb?" he wrote rhetorically in "The Evolution of a Scicnce." "The cornroe>nest events are accidents, illncsses-and attcmpted aboaions7 [italics and emphasis his] Call the last AA. Wliere do people get ulcers? In the womb, nsnally, AA. F~11 registry of all p~'rcei~tics clown to the last syllalde, matcrial which can b~ fi~lly dramatized." Milch as wc woul{1 do, thd>barcl asks the question which is on our mh~{ls. "II{>w does the foetus heal np with all this damagc?" Ilis answer: "Ask a doctor about twenty years hence-I've got my hands fnll." But what he was talking abont was not jnst one attempted abortion: "Twenty or thirty abortion attempts are not uncommon in the ahereee, and in every attempt the child could have been pierced through the body or brain." Pierced, because the AA is usually done with knitting needles. It is no wonder that he firmly believes these horrible experiences produce the worst possible endares. ,5~ SCIENTOLOGY A ~iarge proportion of allegeally feeble-minded cbildren are actually attempted abortion cases the wrote] whose engrams place them in fear paralysis or regressive palsy and which command them not to grow but to be where they are forever. Morning sickness the writes further] is entirely engramic, so far as can be discovered .... And the act of vomiting be- cause of pregnancy is via contagion of aberration. Actual illness generally results only when mother has been interfering with the child either by douches or knitting needles or some such thing. If the husband uses language during coitus, every word of it is going to be engramic. If the mother is beaten by him, that beating and everything he says and that she says will be- come part of the engram .... A woman who is pregnant should be given every consideration .... For every coital experience is an engrarn in the child during pregnancy [italics his]. Hubbard's extensive discussion of things sexual, his concern with abortions, beatings, coitus under duress, fiatulence which causes pressure on the foetus, certain cloacal references, all suggest to me a fascination which borders on the obsesslye, as ff he possessed a deep-seated hatred for women. All of them are being beaten, most of them prove to be unfaithful, few babies are wanted. According to everything he has written, however, Hubbard is merely trying to describe how man responds to threats, no matter what dramatic form they may take. Hubbard believes that man is motivated by the need to survive; he writes it in capitals, SURVIVE, and calls it his First Dynamic. To this he adds three more Dynamics, the urge to survive via the sexual act, the urge to survive as a group, and the urge to survive as Mankind. Dttrin'g auditing, with a patient in dianetic reverie, there was a reported tendency to yawn and stretch, immediately interpreted as visible proof that the session was progressing successfully and engrams were being brought to the surface. Unexpected aches and pains also appeared mysteriously, and then disappeared just as mysteriously. These, Hubbard ex- ENTER DIANET1CS .~3 plained. were the lingering effects of psych~som~ttic ills which world never return. After the particular, Iong-songht-after engram was finally brought up and '3~oiled off," the patient had a sense of enormo:~s relief, so intense that he often began to langh nncontrnllably. Dr. Winter reported that shortly after arriving at the FouRelation in Elizabeth he was completely taken al~ack by the sight of a patient who had been extremely morose suddenly breaking out in laughter, not to stop for several hours. Ihd~t~ard brushed this off as being normal, and said there was one patient who had laughed for two days. Dianctic.~: The 2~Iodcrn Scic~ce of Mental tlcalth contains several vivid examples of anditing at work. At one point Hubbard described a technique he called the "repeater," and gave a vivict example uf how it was used on a yonng girl who had resisted confronting her "basic area" for seventy-five hours. The techniqne involved the repeated use of what appears to be a key phrase in the person's life to take them back to that time, that "hasic area" where trouble originated. The incident is reprinted in script form, with the anditor's and the girl's dialogue accompanied by parenthetical observations explaining what is happening and why. The auditor leads the girl, whom he (Iluhbar{t) describes as being "very bored and untooperative," back to where she sud{lenly feels a pain (somatic) in h{~r face which grows stronger and stronger. Suddenly the girl hears a voice, her father's. The auditor asks her to repeat his words, The girl says he is talking to her mother, and complains of the pain, or pressure, on her face being uncomfortable. The auditor prompts her to repeat the words she hears. l'he girl says she hears her father telling her mother he won't "come in you now." As we realize the girl is rememl~ering her parents having sexual intercourse while she was in her mother's womb, the girl is telling the auditor that the moment she recalled her father's voice, the pressure on her face became less. The auditor, patience personified according to the script, insists the girl stay there ~ SCIENTOLOGY and re'i~'eat what her mother is saying. The girl says her mother is angry, and is telling her father she doesn't want him. "Say," the girl says at this point, "the somatic stopped." The parenthetic explanation is "(Coitus had ended at this point.)" The auditor then asks the girl to start all over again. She does, wonders what her parents are up to, realizes herself what is happening, and is momentarily embarrassed. The auditor calmly asks her to go through the event once again. She does so, in detail, recalling her father's words and then her mother's angry answer. The auditor insists on yet another repetition. This goes on until, according to Hubbard, the pain disappears completely. tie ends the scene by saying that the girl "feels quite cheerful . . . but doesn't think to mention that she doubted prenatals existed." According to Hubbard, it takes some twenty hours of auditing before a person who is aberrated becomes a "release," someone free of all major neuroses and ills. Hubbard calls it "a state superior to any produced by several years of psychoanalysis, since the release will not relapse." Beyond being a release lies becoming a preclear and finally a clear, someone completely free of engrams. "Clears," Hubbard explains, "do not get colds," their wounds heal q~fickly if injured, their eyes are keener, and their I.Q.'s visibly increased. "The dianetie clear," he put it quite simply, "is to the current normal individual as the current normal is h~ the severely insane." An auditor, the person responsible for bringing someone to this obviously desirable state, needed very little qualification to practice his ability. A careful reading of the original dianetie text was considered sufficient, though student auditors were strongly~rged to go to Elizabeth, New Jersey, and take the professional course at the Foundation. What with best-sellerdom and the extensive coffee-klatch practicing of dianetics techniques, L. Ron Hubbard, Dianetics, and the startling results it claimed received so much attention that it was inevitable that before too long, professional as- ENTEF~ I)IANETICS 5,5 sociatiot~s xv~n~ld take a closer look at his activities. The }l~bbard ])ian~'tic l{esearch Fom~dation, Inc., had, early in the summer of ~95o, made a presentation of Dianeties to a ~oup of psychiatrists, educators, and lay people in Washington, D.C. It was the only genuine such presentation ever made, and Dr. Winter found it to be something of a failure. Some of the psychiatrists [he ~ote in his book]-perhaps the more progressive and open-minded ones-had evinced an interest in the novel posh~lates and intriguing conclusions of diat~etics .... I did not feel that the Washington venture w~ a s~ccessf~l one-at least, not from the medical point of view. It was noteworthy that most of the people whose interest in diat~etics h:~d been augmented by this presentation were meanhers of lhe laity, rather than the profession, and I thonght that I could detect in their attitudes the re,or of the convert, rather than the cool, objective interest of the scientist. The professional people evidenced an interest in the philosophy of diat~etics; their interest was repelled, however, by the manner of presentation of the subject, especially the miwarranted implication that it was necessary to repudiate one's previous beliefs before accepting dianelies. In September of ~95o, the American Psychological Association called on psychologists not to use dianetie therapy, "in the public interesU' Stntggling to maintain circumspection, the Assoc~ialion unanimo~s]y adopt~'d a reso]t~tion at the last session of a me~'tittg of its eo~lncil of n-pn'sct~tatives which stated that, "While suspending j~dg~nent concerning the eventual validity of the clain~s made by the author of 'Dianetics,' the association calls attention to the fact that these claims are not sHpported by empirical evidence of the sort required for the establishment of scientific generalizations. In the public interest, the association, in the absence of such evidence, reammends to its members that the use of the techniques peculiar to Dianetics be limited to scientific investigations designed to test the validity of the claims." From Los Angeles, where he was lecturing and setting up 56 SCIENTOLOGY anothe;'Ilobbard Dianctic Research Foundation, L. Ron Ituhbard ansxvcrcd that he was ready to furnish proof of every claim made in his book. He xvcnt on to say that as long as a year earlier he had made such an offer to the American Psychological Association and had never heard from them. He said he had already submitted proof to several scientists and associations, and expressed total agreement with the notion that the public xvas entitlcd to proof. He said he was ready and willing to give it in detail. And then he made what I can only charitably call a tactical bhmder. Speaking to 6,ooo people in the Los Angeles Shrine Auditorium, ttubbard introduced a girl namcd Sonya Bianca and said she was a clear, possessing total rccall of all perceptics (sense perceptions) for her entire past, as well as kinetic abilities. It xvas a disaster. Miss Bianca not only conld not remember basic formulas in physics, the subject she was supposedly majoring in, but could not give the color of Hubbard's tie when Iris back xvas turned, and certainly could not, exercising her kinetic powers, knock off somebody's hat at fifty feet. In a matter of minutes the audience was streaming out of the hall in moods ranging from gagging hilarity to plain disgust. But Hubbard, with a sense which suggested anticipation, explained the whole thing away as having been his fault. He had, he said, called Miss Bianca on stage by saying, "Will you come here now, Sonya?" and in doing so, using the "now," trapped her in present time. At about the same time, the first cracks began to appear within the Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation in Elizabeth. Dr. Winter was growing increasingly annoyed at Hubbard's attthoritarian behavior and his flat refusal to use some semblance of a scientific approach-scientific in Dr. Winter's terms. In his lectures in California, Hubbard was already talking about something he called the Theta, and MEST (a conglomerate word created from the first letters of matter, energy, space, and time). There was also talk of doing away ENTER DIANETICS 57 with dittnt'tic rr't~r'ric iu auditing sessions and replacing it with something calloct an clcctropsychomcter, a crude polygraph or he detector dcvch~pcd by an inveterate West Coast gadgcteer named Volncy Mathison. Bather than be in reverie, a person being au{litcd would hold two cans connected to the small box which had a meter on it, and a minute current would be passed through tim pcrson's body, giving various readings on the mctcr as tim person answered various questions. Dr, Winter, bearing these reports, grew increasingly apprchensivc. Jack Ilorncr, who was at the foundation taking the auditor's course, remembers tile disagreements wlfich flared between the two men. particularly with regard to tile business of "past lives," which w;ls offcnsivc to Winter who was struggling for order anti scientific neatness. Yet he was constantly being undermined. "There was a bulletin on the board," Ilorncr tells, "xvhich sai›l: 'Any Student Running Past Lives Will Be Suspended.' So of conrsc everybody started rnmfin~ past lives." In October of x95o Dr. Winter finally severed his relations with the Foundation and left to establish Iris own dianctic practice. The book he wrote soon after, A Doctor Looks At Dianetics, is rev›ialing not only because of the way tie openly criticizes Hubbard and some of Iris methods, but because Dr. Winter argues emphatically that there are valid and valuable aspects to Dianctics. To begin with, he. strongly doubted that what tlubbard had called a paticnt's "sperm dream" actually occnrrcd. tte also disputed, rather critically, tlubbard's claim that anyone could be an auditor-Hubbard had once described a potcntial auditor as "any person who is intelligent and posscssf,d of average persistency." Dr. Winter wrote that "sometl~ing morc than enthusiasm for a new idea was needed to make a good therapist." Finally, the doctor wondered aloud why he had never encountered anyone who was actually Clear. While he did support the principles of the existence of prenatal engrarns, and the importance of precise methods for locating troubles whose cause was psychosomatic, he was 58 SCIENTOLOGY complottqy put ol[ and ategored l~y the science-fiction elements of tlubbard's thinking. At about the same time that Dr. Winter was leaving the New Jersey foundation, the flamboyant, totally confident Hubbard was already having problems with the board of his California Besearch Foundation, barely a few months old. Jack Homer had been sent to Los Angeles to help establish the training courses and remembers one incident when Hubbard summarily fired two men from the L.A. staff. "It seemed very unjust," Homer told me, "so I went to see him about it. You have to understand that I was only about twenty-one at the time." Brash, committed, and unafraid to face the boss. "I went to his office and I said, 'This is ridiculous. These people are not Communistsl' And he paced up and down, and he said, 'Look, I've got a battle to fight. I may lose some people along the way, but I'm going to win the battle.'" If Hubbard meant the frictions between himself and the Los Angeles staff, and problems with Dr. Winter back in New Jersey, and mounting criticism from outsiders, then the battle had surely been joined. In January of ~95x, the New Jersey Board of Medical Examiners instituted proceedings against the Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation, Inc., for ctmducting a school which, it was charged, was teaching medicine, snrgery, and a method of treatment, without a license. The New Jersey operation quickly closed its doors, and Hubbard moved to Withira, Kansas, where he incorporated another Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation. Despite all the movement and allegations and internal difficulties, the work of the fotmdation had by this time taken on a somewhat formal look. Both the West Coast and Wichita foundations offered a one-month professional Dianetics auditor's course for $5oo. There was a second course consisting of a series of fifteen lectures involving two teams which would "co-audit" each other. This course cost $zoo per person or F, NTEI/DIANETIf:S 50 $35ø per learn. A tl~ir{t course consisted of one tw~-ho~r sessiou c{~n{h~ctcd l~y a "profcssi~nal auditor" who would lead each member of a team through dianctic reucric-it was still being nsed-undcr the observation of the team member, the "co-auditor" in training. THs course cost $~5. In addition to ~e courses, the foundations advertised "associate" memberslips in the IIubl~ard Dianctic Besearch Foundation. This entitled one to receive copies of The Dianetic Auditor's Bulletin, the fonndation's official publication which told subscribers all about the latest developments iu Dianctics. The "associate" meml~ership cost $~5 a year. The pul~lic excitement and c{mtroversy generated by Dianctics at tl~is time was matched l~y nphcavals in Ilubbard's personal life. IIe had ma~ied a second time, and in April of ~95x, Sara Northrup Hnbl~ard sued him for divorce, testifying that doctors had told her that her husband was suffering from "paranoid sehizophrenia." She also charged that he bad subjected her to "systematic toaure" by beating and strangling her, and denying her sleep. The divorce was granted in June and gave Mrs. Iluht~ard custody of their fourtcen-n~onth-old son, Alexis, and $2oo a month snpport. In a snrprisc move, however, it was 11ubbard who actually won the divorce decree on a cross petition in whi/'h he charged ~ross neglect of duty nn the part of Mrs. II~d~l~ard. Tl~e cx-Nlrs. IIubl~ard evenit,ally r{'tnarricd. Mcanxvhilc, tlultbard's r{.lalions with tl~c L›~s Angeles Dianetic Fo~tndation had dctcriorat~'d to sttch a point that he snmmarilv broke with them that satne year, ~95~. The operation in Wicl~ita was also doing ltadlv and on Februarv ~, 1952, filed a volmttary petition for ]~ankruptcy. A Withira businessman eventually bought it from the bankruptcy coup, publicly annouttcing that he would have absolutely nothing to do with tlnbbar›l. To anybody und›'restimating Hubbard's imagination and rcsilience, it seemed obvious that he w~ finished. SCIENTOLOGY The mo