You did a fine job in the Navy. No one there is now “out to get you.”
You are psychic.
You do not masturbate.
You do not know anger. Your patience is infinite.
Snakes are not dangerous to you. There are no snakes in the bottom of your bed.
You believe implicitly in God. You have no doubts of the All Powerful. You believe your Guardian perfectly.
The judge in the Armstrong suit, where this document was presented as evidence, offered his own amateur diagnosis of Hubbard’s personality in a crushing decision against the church:
The organization is clearly schizophrenic and paranoid, and this bizarre combination seems to be a reflection of its founder LRH. The evidence portrays a man who has been virtually a pathological liar when it comes to his history, background, and achievements. The writings and documents in evidence additionally reflect his egoism, greed, avarice, lust for power, and vindictiveness and aggressiveness against persons perceived by him to be disloyal or hostile. At the same time it appears that he is charismatic and highly capable of motivating, organizing, controlling, manipulating, and inspiring his adherents.… Obviously, he is and has been a very complex person, and that complexity is further reflected in his alter ego, the Church of Scientology.
IN 1948, ten years after his first attempt to establish himself as a screenwriter, Hubbard had returned to Hollywood, setting up shop as a freelance guru. “I went right down in the middle of Hollywood, I rented an office, got a hold of a nurse, wrapped a towel around my head and became a swami,” Hubbard later said. “I used to sit in my penthouse on Sunset Boulevard and write stories for New York and then go to my office in the studio and have my secretary tell everybody I was in conference while I caught up on my sleep,” he recalled on another occasion. He painted a far different picture in a letter to the Veterans Administration, which was demanding reimbursement for an overpayment: “I cannot imagine how to repay this $51.00 as I am nearly penniless and have but $28.50 to last me for nearly a month to come,” he writes. “My expenditures consist of $27 a month trailer rent and $80 a month food for my wife and self which includes gas, cigarettes and all incidentals. I am very much in debt and have not been able to get a job.” Instead of repaying the VA, he boldly asks for a loan.
In Hollywood, Hubbard began perfecting techniques that he first developed in the naval hospital and that later became Dianetics. He boasts to Hays, “Been amusing myself making a monkey out of Freud. I always knew he was nutty but didn’t have a firm case.” He adds that he has been conducting research on inferiority complexes: “Nightly had people writhing in my Hollywood office, sending guys out twice as tall as superman.” For the first time, he floats the idea of a book, which he tentatively titles An Introduction to Traumatic Psychology. He thinks it will require about six weeks to write. “I got to revolutionize this here field because nobody in it, so far as I can tell, knows his anatomy from a gopher hole.”
Hubbard was casting around for a new direction in his life. He took up acting at the Geller Theater Workshop, paid for in part by the VA, but that didn’t satisfy him. There was a larger plan stirring in his imagination. “I was hiding behind the horrible secret. And that is I was trying to find out what the mind was all about,” he recalls. “I couldn’t even tell my friends; they didn’t understand. They said, ‘Here’s Hubbard, he’s leading a perfectly wonderful life. He gets to associate with movie actresses. He knows hypnotism and so has no trouble with editors. He has apartments and stuff.’ ”
IT WAS THE LARVAL STAGE of Hubbard’s astonishing transformation—from the depressed, rejected, impoverished, creatively exhausted figure he paints in the Affirmations, to his nearly overnight success as a thinker and founder of an international movement when his book Dianetics was finally published. He wrote his friend Robert Heinlein, “I will soon, I hope give you a book risen from the ashes of the old Excalibur which details in full the mathematics of the human mind, solves all the problems of the ages, and gives six recipes for aphrodisiacs and plays the mouth organ with the left foot.” He writes a little about recovering from the war, then remarks, “The main difficulty these days is getting sane again. I find out that I am making progress. Of course there is always the danger that I will get too sane to write.” He is angling for a Guggenheim grant for his book on psychology. Meantime, he was so pressed financially that he begged Heinlein for a loan of fifty dollars. “Golly, I never was so many places in print with less to show for it,” Hubbard complained. “I couldn’t buy a stage costume for Gypsy Rose Lee.”
Hubbard was writing these letters from Savannah, Georgia, in the waning days of 1948 and the spring of 1949. He said he was volunteering in a psychiatric clinic at St. Joseph’s Medical Center, “getting case histories at the request of the American Psychiatric Assoc.” It is a shadowy period in his life, but it was in Savannah that he began to sketch out the principles that would form the basis of his understanding of the human mind. He claimed to be getting phenomenal results on nearly every malady he addressed. “One week ago I brought in my first asthma cure,” he writes to Heinlein. “I have an arthritis to finish tomorrow and so it goes.”
It’s unclear whether Hubbard himself was receiving treatment in Savannah. “My hip and stomach and side are well again,” he writes to Heinlein, adding that he is “straightening out the kinks that have held down production on the money machine.”
In his letters, Hubbard continually speculates about the book he hopes to finish soon. “It ain’t agin religion,” he boasts to Heinlein. “It just abolishes it.… It’s science, boy, science.” He makes a vague reference to the research he’s performing on children. “This hellbroth I cooked up works remarkably well on kids,” he remarks. “Took a scared little kid that was supposed to be stupid and was failing everything and worked on him about thirty-five hours just to make sure. That was last month. So now he turns up this afternoon with all A’s and all of a sudden reading Shakespeare.” He was also noting improvement in himself, both in his work and in his recovered sexual powers. “I am cruising on four hours sleep a night. But the most interesting thing is, I’m up to eight comes. In an evening, that is.”
Heinlein was eager for details. Hubbard responded by outlining what he would later call the Tone Scale. It describes the range of human emotional states, from one to four. At bottom, there is Apathy, then Anger. These lower tones were governed by the unconscious, which Hubbard says should be called the “reactive mind.” The third level, which was as yet untitled, is the normal state for most of humanity; and the fourth is a condition of happiness and industriousness. Hubbard’s experimental technique aimed at raising an individual out of the lower tones and into the superior state of the fourth tone. His method, as he described it to Heinlein, was to drain off the painful experiences and associations that an individual has accumulated in his lifetime. Once that’s done, “astonishing results take place.” Asthma, headaches, arthritis, menstrual cramps, astigmatism, and ulcers simply disappear. There is a huge boost in competence. The reactive mind is eliminated, and the rational mind takes over.
At the end of April 1949, Hubbard sent a note to Heinlein that he was moving to Washington, DC, for an indefinite stay. There was no word about Sara. Three weeks later, the thirty-eight-year-old Hubbard applied for a license in Washington to marry twenty-six-year-old Ann Jensen. The application was canceled the next day at the request of the bride. Perhaps she had learned that Hubbard was already married to his second wife and had previously committed bigamy. In any case, Ann Jensen’s name disappears from Hubbard’s life story.
He and Sara moved to Elizabeth, New Jersey, where John Campbell, Hubbard’s editor at Astounding Science-Fiction before the war, resided. Campbell visited Hubbard often and became one of his first and most important converts. “Dammit, the man’s got something—and something big,” he wrote excitedly to Heinlein.
Campbell underwent the treatment, which employed “deep hypnosis.” In that entranced state, Ca
mpbell was able to retrieve traumatic memories of his birth. “I was born with a cord wrapped around my neck, strangling me,” he recounted to Heinlein. The doctor who delivered him, whom Campbell now remembered had a German accent, had barked at Campbell’s mother, saying, “You must stop fighting—you are killing him. Relax!” Later, the doctor put some corrosive medication in the baby’s eyes, and said, “You’ll forget all about this in a little while.” Campbell characterized these instructions as “unshakeable post-hypnotic commands of tremendous force,” which governed much of his subsequent behavior. “The neighbor bratlings could tease me unmercifully—and did—because I couldn’t fight,” he told Heinlein; his mother would often attempt to console him by telling him that he would forget the painful experiences of his childhood soon enough, with the result that many of the most important moments of his life were lost to him. “Ron’s technique consists of bringing these old memories into view, and then erasing the memory,” Campbell explained. He writes that although he now doesn’t remember his actual birth, he does remember retrieving it and relating it to Hubbard, who then erased the real memory, with its painful associations, leaving Campbell with the experience of knowing what happened to him without actually having the memory continue its sinister influence. Obviously, the line between a real memory and an implanted one, or a confabulation, was very difficult to draw.
This was the most potent medicine ever discovered, Campbell continued, but also the most dangerous weapon imaginable if not properly handled. “With the knowledge I now have, I could turn most ordinary people into homicidal maniacs within one hour.” And yet, as an editor, Campbell recognized the commercial possibilities: “This is the greatest story in the world—far bigger than the atomic bomb.” He added in a postscript that he had also lost twenty pounds in twenty-five days—another commercial bonanza. Campbell was beside himself because Hubbard had yet to actually start writing the book. “The key to world sanity is in Ron Hubbard’s head, and there isn’t even an adequate written record!”
In December, Ron and Sara moved into what Hubbard termed “a little old shack” in Bayhead, New Jersey, with eight bedrooms, near the beach. In March 1950, he sent the Heinleins a handmade miniature book catalogue from “Hubbard House” publishers, proclaiming the spring collection:
Announcing
A New Hubbard Edition
Completely New Material
Not a revision
Co-Authors—Ron & Sara Hubbard
Release Date March 8, ’50—11:50 A.M.
Weight—9 lbs. 2 oz. — Height—21 in.
Alexis Valerie
Has received rave notices from all reviewers!
Alexis was the image of her father, who delighted in her precociousness. “Ron is going at a little less than the speed of light all day and every day,” Sara wrote to the Heinleins, “then, in the middle of the night he goes in and tells Alexis all about it.”
Ron promised to send Heinlein a galley of Dianetics as soon as it was available. He reported that it was 180,000 words, “begun Jan. 12, ’50, finished Feb. 10, off the press by April 25.” When one of his followers asked Hubbard how he had been able to dash it off so quickly, Hubbard said that his guardian spirit, the Empress, had dictated it to him.
Like several other prominent sci-fi writers of the Golden Age, including Heinlein and A. E. van Vogt, Hubbard had been strongly influenced by the writings of Alfred Korzybski, a Polish American philosopher who created the theory of general semantics. In New Jersey, Sara read Korzybski and quoted several passages aloud to Ron, who immediately grasped the ideas as the basis for a system of psychology, if not for a whole religion.
Korzybski pointed out that words are not the things they describe, in the same way that a map is not the territory it represents. Language shapes thinking, creating mental habits, which can stand in the way of sanity by preserving delusions. Korzybski argued that emotional disturbances, learning disorders, and many psychosomatic illnesses—including heart problems, skin diseases, sexual disorders, migraines, alcoholism, arthritis, even dental cavities—could be remedied by semantic training, much as Hubbard would claim for his own work. He cited Korzybski frequently, although he admitted that he could never get through the texts themselves. “Bob Heinlein sat down one time and talked for ten whole minutes on the subject of Korzybski to me and it was very clever,” he later related. “I know quite a bit about Korzybski’s works.”
From this secondhand knowledge, Hubbard saw the need for creating a special vocabulary, which would allow him to define old thoughts in new ways (the soul becomes a thetan, for instance); or invent new words, such as “enturbulate” (confuse) and “hatting” (training); or use words and phrases in a novel manner, such as turning adjectives or verbs into nouns, or vice versa (“an overt,” “a static,” “alter-isness”); plus a Pentagon-level glut of acronyms—all of which would entrap his followers in a self-referential semantic labyrinth.
Hubbard granted his friend and acolyte John Campbell a scoop by letting him buy a lengthy excerpt of his forthcoming book. Thus the world got its first look at Dianetics in the pages of Astounding Science-Fiction. “This article is not a hoax, joke, or anything but a direct, clear statement of a totally new scientific thesis,” Campbell warns his readers, who might be confused by finding a work of scholarship in a pulp magazine. “I know dianetics is one of, if not the greatest, discovery of all Man’s written and unwritten history,” he wrote to a puzzled contributor. “It produces the sort of stability and sanity men have dreamed about for centuries.” He assured a young writer that Hubbard would win the Nobel Peace Prize for his work.
The book itself, Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, appeared in May. It was completely unexpected, given Hubbard’s history as a writer. He intended it to stand as a capstone to the “fifty thousand years of thinking men without whose speculations and observations the creation and construction of Dianetics would not have been possible.” In Scientology, Dianetics is known as Book One. “With 18 million copies sold, it is indisputably the most widely read and influential book on the human mind ever published,” the church maintains. Scientology dates its own calendar from 1950, the year Dianetics was published.
Hubbard’s theory is that the mind has two parts. The analytical, or conscious, mind is the center of awareness, the storehouse of all past perceptions. Nothing is lost from its data banks. Every smell or pattern or sound attached to one’s previous experiences is present and capable of being completely recaptured. This is the mind that observes and thinks and solves problems. It is rational and aware of itself.
The other form of mentality is the reactive mind. It is the single source of nightmares, insecurity, and unreasonable fears. It doesn’t think. It is a repository of painful and destructive emotions, which are recorded even while an individual is sleeping, or unconscious, or still in the womb. The recording is not the same as a memory, in the sense of being a mental construct; it is physically a part of the cellular structure and capable of reproducing itself in generations of new cells. “Cells are evidently sentient in some currently inexplicable way,” Hubbard speculates. When awakened by some stimulus, the recording—Hubbard calls it an “engram”—turns off the conscious mind and seizes control of an individual’s actions or behavior.
Hubbard compares the engram to a posthypnotic suggestion. He describes a man in a trance who has been told that every time the operator touches his tie, the subject will remove his coat. When the subject is awakened, he is not consciously aware of the command. “The operator then touches his tie,” Hubbard writes. “The subject may make some remark about its being too warm and so take his coat off.” This can be done repeatedly. “At last the subject may become aware, from the expressions on people’s faces, that something is wrong. He will not know what is wrong. He will not even know that the touching of the tie is the signal which makes him take off his coat.” The hypnotic command in his unconscious continues to govern his behavior, even when the subject recognizes that
it is irrational and perhaps harmful. In the same way, Hubbard suggests, engrams work their sinister influence on everyday actions, undermining one’s self-confidence and subverting rational behavior. The individual feels helpless as he engages in behavior he would never consciously consent to. He is “handled like a marionette by his engrams.”
Although there were no recorded case histories to prove his claim that hundreds of patients had been cured through his methods, through “many years of exact research and careful testing,” Hubbard offered appealing examples of hypothetical behavior. For instance, a woman is beaten and kicked. “She is rendered ‘unconscious.’ ” In that state, she is told she is no good, a faker, and that she is always changing her mind. Meantime, a chair has been knocked over; a faucet is running in the kitchen; a car passes outside. All of these perceptions are parts of the engram. The woman is not aware of it, but whenever she hears running water or a car passing by, the engram is partly restimulated. She feels discomfort if she hears them together. If a chair happens to fall as well, she experiences a shock. She begins to feel like the person she was accused of being while she was unconscious—a fickle, no-good faker. “This is not theory,” Hubbard repeatedly asserts. It is an “exact science” that represents “an evolutionary step in the development of Man.”
Hubbard proposed that the influence engrams have over one’s current behavior can be eliminated by reciting the details of the original incident until it no longer possesses an emotional charge.4 “Dianetics deletes all the pain from a lifetime,” Hubbard writes. “When this pain is erased in the engram bank and refiled as memory and experience in the memory banks, all aberrations and psychosomatic illnesses vanish.” The object of Dianetics therapy is to drain the engrams of their painful, damaging qualities and eliminate the reactive mind entirely, leaving a person “Clear.”
WRITTEN IN a bluff, quirky style, and overrun with patronizing footnotes that do little to substantiate its bold findings, Dianetics nonetheless became a sensation, lodging itself for twenty-eight weeks on the New York Times best-seller list and laying the groundwork for the category of postwar self-help books that would seek to emulate its success. Hundreds of Dianetics groups sprang up around the United States and in other countries in order for its adherents to apply the therapeutic principles Hubbard prescribed. One only needed a partner, called an auditor, who could guide the subject to locate his engrams and bring them into consciousness, where they would be released and rendered harmless. “You will find many reasons why you ‘cannot get well,’ ” Hubbard warns, but he promises, “Dianetics is no solemn adventure. For all that it has to do with suffering and loss, its end is always laughter, so foolish, so misinterpreted were the things which caused the woe.”
Going Clear Page 8