------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 tolt 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 sail 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" tlubbarl 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 inlividual aberrations which xvill proluce 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 anl 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 3 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.. 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 . . soon. But then reality seems to step in, cltunps in, iu tlxc person of the franchiscd Scicnt~logy branch, witlx its olF~cc anl 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 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-callel 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 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 coult 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." 3 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 Washingtm, 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 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 anl 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 anl 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 otds 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." 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 sail: '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 revialing 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 $35 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 tlnbbarl. To anybody und'restimating Hubbard's imagination and rcsilience, it seemed obvious that he w~ finished. SCIENTOLOGY The more I learned about Hubbard the more fascinated I became to find how eagerly everybody kept underrating him. The reason, I guessed, was because we tend to give others much more credit for insight, objectivity, and personal selfconfidence than we should. Hubbard survived to succeed because enough people wanted him to succeed. At the same time, news stories about him and his activities have always been smugly snide, written in that almost traditional "God-forbid-we-Should-give-thecrackpot-credence" style. Which is also understandable, except for the fact that a man like Hubbard thrives on being dismissed by the establishment. Late in ~952, Time magazine reported the appearance of Scientology, saying: "His [Hubbard's] latest elegy is compounded of equal parts of science fiction, dianetics (with 'auditing,' 'preclears,' and engrams), and plain jabberwocky." The jabberwocky was substantiated by quoting from one of Hubbard's new books, Scientology: 8-8o: "An individual who cannot get out of his body immediately can look around inside his head and find the black spots aneW'turn them white .... " I would be perfectly prepared to dismiss this sentence as utter nonsense, except that a sincere Scientologist I met during my inquiries told me, with no prompting or being brought around to the subject, that "the greatest thing was the day I suddenly looked inside my head and I turned the black 60 SCIENTOI~OGY {31 spots whitel" To me. tiffs seemed there than a believer swallowing everythi,g and anything the leader says; here was an apparently rational hein~ demonstrating that he had been brought to a sta~e where he was capable of doing-to himself-that which L. Ron Hubbard said could be done. How the hell do you just dismiss that? In the spring of ~952, Hnbl~ard resigned from the bankn~pt Hubbard l)ianetic Research Fo~mdation in Wichita "to furtl~er pursue." in the words of the Fom~dation. "investigations into the incrcdilde and fantastic." l{nbl~ard ignored the jibe and itnmediatelv set ~p sometl~ing which i~e called The Ilubl~ard College. lie had married once more-I~is new wife was a Texas girl named Mary Sue Whipp who had been active in the research foundation-and was busy developing the tenets of his new science: Seientolog}.', an exact definition of which would be "Knowing how to know." Scientology introduced theories and teehniques which made the engrams and reveries of Dianetics look like a mild dress rehearsal. I will go into their absoh~tely m{mnmental proportions later, but tor the moment, to suggest a little sometl~ing of what llul~l~ard was abont, listen to tiffs from one of the new books, Scientology: The Fundamentals o[ Tbot~:bt. "Probably the greatest discovery of Scientolo~," tt~d~l~ard wrote, "and its most forceful contribution to the knowledge of mankind has been the isolation, description an{1 handling of the human spirit. Accomplished in July, ~95x, in Phoenix, Arizona, I established along scientific rather than religious or humanitarian lines that that thing which is the person, the personality, is separable from the body and the mind at will without causing bodily death or mental derangement." He named this "thing" the theta, after the Greek letter 0, and said it possessed the capacity to create. What it created ttubbard called MEST, that acronym of the first letters of matter, energy, space, and time, the stuff of existence as we know it. Hubbard taught 62 SCIENTOI, OGY these th'~orics and the techniques necessary to achieve a state of enlightened discovery of one's own thcta. This became his new definition for clear, replacing the old dianetic notion, which now became the preliminary state to clear, and made of the person studying Scientology a preclear. Hubbard taught all this at his Hubbard College, awarding graduates a degree of "Registered Dianeticist," with a license to give courses in dianetic processing in their own offices and schools. The cost of the course, which, when concluded, provided not only the degree but necessary films and texts, was originally $~,ooo. By March x, ~952, the price bad gone up to $~,5oo, and a few weeks later, on the twentieth, it went up to $2,ooo. On June ~, Hubbard raised it once more, to a fiat $5,ooo.* At much the same time, he organized another corporation in Kansas, Scientific Press, Inc., which published and distributed the writings and texts used by his students and his "Registered Dianeticists." tie also went to Phoenix, Arizona, and organized the Hubbard Association of Scientologists (HAS), stating that its purpose xvas to publish material related to behavior studies and to train qualified people in Scientology. In early ~953 ttubbard went to Philadelphia and incorporated the Hubbard Association of Scientologists of Pennsylvania, Inc., and in the fall, opened HAS branches in Camden, New Jersey, and London, England. Things did not go well for Scientology either in Camden or Philadelphia, so early in x954 he closed down both those operations and returned to Phoenix, now his headquarters, and incorporated the Hubbard Association of Scientologists International (HASI), Inc., presumably ~o facilitate Scientology's overseas expansion. He began publishing a periodical, Scientology, and offered a "Summary Course In Dianetics & Scientology" for $382.5o. Records give no indication of how many people actually signed up for any of these cotuses, no matter what the cost. S<:i~.:N'rt~,<~<;..' (;:1 lie als~ s~'t ~p a lhd~barcl Colh'go Cradi~ate Sch~,ol a~,d chargett a H:~t $25 registration fct,, o/fcrin~ a ard at Saint tlill. In the years that followed Itnbbard's arrival at Saint Hill, there was both a mellowing and a refinement in his policies for bringing new people iuto Scientology. The somewhat grisly metb~ds of "Illness Ilcs{'arches" and "Casualty Contact" seem to have been forsaken f~r a more direct, snappy, businesslike approach. In an tlCO Bulletin of April 9, ~96, Hubbard wrote: When the prospect comes in, see him or her at once (No waiting). Be courteous, friendly, businesslike. Rise when they enter and leave. Call reception to show them out ff they stay too long. Be willing to take their money. Always prefer cash to notes. We are not a credit company. Always see the student or the pc [preclcar] before they leave the place after service. You can often sell more training or processing .... It is a maxim that unless you have bodies in the shop you get no 74 SCIENTOLOGY .~e, income. So on any pretext get the bodies in the place and provide ingress to the Registrar when they're there. By x965, through obvious trial and error, Hubbard was outlining the only way a local organization should set up its courses and services. Writing in an HCO Policy Letter dated August ~3, ~965, he said: One must NEVER recruit a body of people and then carry iust that group up, opening new courses only when they are ready and closing the lower ones when emptied. I can tell you by grim experience that that is NOT the way to handle basic courses .... One must continually nightly recruit new people and one must have in existence the next area up for them to move into .... The assembly line must exist before one can get trafllc to put on it .... The key is standardize. Even out the traffic flow. Hubbard went on to describe the proper allotment of space for the courses being given. tie was emphatic on the need for an organization to have a separate reception room. If you don't have a public reception centre and only have your org Comm Centre you ~mght to be ashamed and no wonder your receptio~ist and comm lines iam up. Public Reception ought to be separate. It shonld be plastered with promotion, personality graphs, tone scales, anything promotional. And the evening Introductory Lecture is given every evening. Same lecture. Hubbard went on to urge heavy advertising of the free introductory lecture. tie also urged each organization to "Get a Chaplain on the iob and prominently display this sign: If you are in trouble with your training or Processing and nobody seems td' listen, see the Chaplain, Room . He can help." Then, Hubbard explained, "groove in the Chaplain to be a Problems OtBcer, to listen and try to straighten up goofs by auditors and supervisors and suddenly your student and pc loss rate will almost vanish." Finally, Hubbard urged everyone to "Be Good. Your courses now have to be good. Your SCIENTOLOGY 75 income dcpcnds not on enrollment but rccnrollmcnt . . be cri$p." A proper, steady flow of new people into Scientology was particularly important to Hubbard, at Saint ttill, because the local churches and organizations throughout tim world could take fledgling scientologists only np to a certain stagc. Beyond that, actually to approach and then realize the pure state of ~clear," they all had to make the trip to England, at their own expcnse, of course, and take their advanced grades of release; for the truly ultra-dedicated there xvas also another course, the Saint 1Iifi Special Briefing Course. Quite obviously, if the sourc'c of nexv Scicntol~gists was imprnpcrly managed, the n~mber of people, considering a normal statistical attrition or percentage of dr~pouts, who would ultimately make that pilgrimage to Saint Ilill, would simply dwindle. In ~9C~3 Scientolo~ faced its first major challenge when the Unitcd States government filed stilt requesting "seizure and ~ndemnati~m of a certain articlc of device, hereinafter set fo~h," in accordant,, with laws established and cnforved by the Food anct Drug Administration. What the FDA was talking about was the E-Meter, and a complaint was fih'd on ]an~ary 4, ~963 A lawful writ was issued and iu short order the Foundlug Ch~rch of Scicntolo~ in Washington. I).C., xvas raided. E-Nlctcrs and books were seized, and further charges were file& Ilut~bard knew the FDA had been nosing around his acridties and tried to promulgate a change in the use of the E-Meter by Scicntology. In an ttCO Policy Letter dated October z9, ~, he wrotc that "regardless of any earlier uses of psychogalvanometers in Dianctics or Psychology or in early Scientolo~ publications when research was in progress, the Electrometer in Scicntology today has no other use" except to "disclose truth to thc individual who is being processed and thus free him spiritually." The E-Meter, he went on, "is a va~d k 76 5CIENTOLOGY religio~ instrument, used in Confessionals, and is in no way diagnostic and does not treat." This declaration did not seem to help Scientology's predicament. The meters were seized, and the government charged that in that the labeling for the E-Meter contains statements which represent, suggest and imply that the E-Meter is adequate and effective for diagnosis, prevention, treatment, detection and elimination of the causes of all mental and nervous disorders and illnesses such as neuroses, psychoses, sct~izophrenia, and all psychosomatic ailments of mankind such as arthritis, cancer, stomach ulcers, and radiation burns from atomic bombs, poliomyelitis, the common cold, etc., and that the article is adequate and effective to improve the intelligence quotient, and to measure the basal metabolism, mental state and change of state of man; which statements are false and misleading .... Scientology appealed, arguing that the search and seizure had been illegal, but some montl~s later, from Saint Hill, Hubbard, something of a pillar of calm, issued an HCO Bulletin which said, "Government attacks have entered a more desultory stage. Meters will go to ju~ trial eventually and we will certainly win. The U.S. Government Attorney handling the case became terribly ill and had to resign it." Hubbard was wrong and Scicntology lost its appeal that the case be thrown out of court. The case was finally heard, and on April x9, ~967, more than four years having gone by, a decision was returned against Scientology, directing that the meters and all accompanying literature be destroyed. Scientology immediately appealed, again claiming illegal search and seizure. At the same time, Scientology's lawyers deposited a brief which suggested that all E-Meters be labeled as follows: '~he Hubbard Electrometer is not intended for use in or effective for the diagnosis, cure, mitigation, treatment or prevention of any disease." It was their hope that this disclaimer would satisfy the FDA and inspire withdrawal of the destroy order. Though the government did not accept the scs~7,~x,oc;v 77 proposals, all mclers still in use were subsequently labeled with a mcssage which reads: "The E-Meter is not intended or effective for the diagnosis, treatment or prevention of any disease." In February of 1969, the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., handed down its decision on Scientology's appeal. It reversed the decision of the federal jury and stated that until the government can offer proof that Scientology is not a religion, the E-Meters and the literature seized are protected by our rights of freedom of worship. The decision, which was handed clown hy Judge J. skclly Wright, said that from the point of view of Scientology, "auditing or processing is a central practice of their religion, akin to confession in the Catholic Church." Since the E-Meters do state that they are not used to diagnose or treat physical ills, but merely to work on the spirit, all accompanying E-Meter literature must be treated as Scripture. Possibly because of the FDA's publicized interest and activities in ~963, Australia's Scientologists found themselves, that same year, the object of much scrutiny and criticism. By November of the ye~|r outcries reached such proportions that a formal board of inquiry, in the person of Queens counselor Kevin Victor Anderson, was named. Scientolngy hacl arrived in Australia in 1956. l)nring the years which followed, it had become strongly established, particularly in Melbourne, in the state of Victoria. From the very beginning, Scientology's activities had drawn some curiosity on the part of civil authorities, but it was not until the press began to attack it publicly that demands were made in the Legislative Council that something be done. The Board of Inquiry was the result. Hubbard had visited Australia in ~959 and, enthusiastic about the success his branches were enjoying, advanced the notion that Australia would be the world's first totally clear continent. Based on something he called his "Special Zone 78 SCIENTOLOGY Plan," Be {lcvised a plan throngh which he intended to hring the A~stralian I.ahor Party into Scientolo~y. In ]annary of ~96~ he wrote Pcter Roger Willjams, Scientology's continental director for Australia, New Zealand, and Oceania: My goals for the Zone Plan are to make my organization a Scientology Organization with all executives HPA (Hubbard Professional Anditor) graduates, an{1 to use our publications to improve administration, management and communication in the. Labor movement and interest the Australian Labor Party and Trade Union officials in taking scientology' training. The Anstralian Labor Party as an organization using scientology principles would soon win a Government as soon as the next Federal election. With Australia let by a government employing scientology principles we should soon have a civilization which can extend influence overseas." 'In the beginning, Australian Scientologists welcomed the Board of Inquiry enthnsiastically and proclaimed that the flnlings wonld once and for all vindicate Scientology and Dianetics. Hubbard himself went cvcn further and said that the Board had actually been appointed because of Scientology's insistence that such an official investigation be made. The Melbourne HASI offices cooperated fully and made their records available to the Board. Demonstration sessions were organized, both in anditing and exercises, and facilities were provided for the playing of Itubbard's taped ]ectnres. ttub- '" The notion of scientology using its principles to improve management is not at all far-fetched and has become something of a reality. Several management consultant firms based on Scientology are active in the United States. For two years now, a successful scientologist named Alan Walter has been working with executives at the home office of Tenneco Oil Company, Dallas, Texas. Another management course is being taul~ht in Austin, T,.exas, by a man named .loire McCoy. McCoy has also made a proposal to the administrator of the entire public school system of the state of Florida and it is claimed that a program is being developed by which all Florida pubhe school teachers will be instructed in Scientology techniques to achieve more effectiveness in their classrooms. Furthermore, General E!ectric's Information Systems Department in Bethesda, Ma~land, is said to be considering a management proposal made by Scientology Consultants to Management, a firm operated by Paul and Gloria Nickel. S(;1ENT()I,()(:Y 7.0 hard ]~h~s~'lf w:~s it~viled t~ appear l~'f~rc tl~' B{~arl, lint decline{1. Then, iu ()ct~b{'r of 1964, Ilubhard's law}'ers re- qnested that lhe state of Victoria pay his way from England to fly to Australia to give evidence. The request was refused, and the B~ard concluded that Ilubl~ard ha{1 no intention of ever making such a trip; knowing his request wonld be rejected, he was using tim rejecti{m to criticize the conduct of the Board and its snhseq~ent findings. All enthusiasm was gone and no more cooperdition was given. Any notions of a Scientological A~stralia had beeu dashed in May of ~ 964, prior to the ~964 Vicl~>rian ~'lections, when Willlauds, Scientology's continental dir~'ct~r. hale with the llritish Government, not even faintly. If I went in today, or tomorrow, through Immigration, they would tip their hats and say, 'I low are you, Mr. Hubbard?' as they have been doing for years." Regarding all the criticism of Scientology, he said, "Why do they just fight it and say there's something bad? They never specify what's bad. For instance, right now, they say we're breaking uF marriages. Why, that's a lie-" As he said this his intonation lilted, and his voice became full of sweet reason. "As a matter of fact, they're saying that at the moment when you've got this book-" he held up a book to the camera "-which was just about to go on the press: How to Save Your Marriage." Hubbard glanced down at the book, still held to the camera, his whole attitnde one bordering on disbelief that Scientology could be causing so much of an uproar back in England. When asked about rnmors that he had amassed several million dollars in Swiss bank accounts, ttubbard answered that "one tends to overlook the fact that all during the thirties, and actually during the late forties, I was a highly successful writer, and a great many properties and so on accumulated during that period of time. The amounts of money in Switzerland are minimal. I don't have Swiss bank accounts; there is a bank account in Switzerland. I don't know how much money is in it, but not very much. While there were very, very large sums that I made when I was very young .... "He paused to fix his unseen interviewer with a level stare as I, watching his admirably smooth performance, wondered what final satu- rating generality he would offer to put us all in our places. He said, "Fifteen million published words and a great many successful movies don't make nothing." I wanted to stand up and cheer. Here he was, twenty years after giving us Dianetics-^.a. 2o, he designates tiffs year-and Scientology is shaking people up all over the world: the Australians have banned it in some of theft states, the British are going to "look into it' with what S(;IENT()I,()(;Y !)1 I am s~:rc xvill 1~' <'~'r~'mt>~ial pr~bily, Am~.ric~l~s arc wo~lcring why the'jr kils arc tlocking to it, an(l a tiny tlcct ~>f ships is throxvh~g a cl~ill ovcr vario~s Mclitcrrancan port authoriti~s as it heaves h~t~ vicxv. I remembered the girl I hal spoken xvith at the Scicntolt~gy Congress, Ma~-Lon, and her meaningless statistic that Scicntology hal grown 5oo percent over a very few months. I dccidcl to look into Scientology's groxvtb more closely. It was already clear to me that Scientol<~gy's expansion primarily cnc~nl~;tss,'s the English-speaking world, with twentysix city centers n~nv spread across England, the U.S., Canada, Australia, Ncxv Zc;~la~d, South Africa, anl l/hodcsia. Scic~tology claims cq~al success in otltcr cou~trics, but at the present time only three non-EngIish-spcaking centers are active, in France, l)cn~nark, and Sxvcdcn. Tbc olwions pr~blcm for non-English-speaking nationals would be one of lan~age, although Scandinaviaos study English at school and from my own exp'ricncc soldown seem at a disadvantage when speaking the language. Scicntology hotly disputes the primacy of English, sayling that its texts, at least most of thong, trat~slate freely and directly into any foreign tongue. One of Hubl~ard's books, Scicntologft: The Fttndamcnlal.s o[ Tltf~tt~ht, carries a note at the end of the introduction, xvhich reads: "This text has been organized so that a complete tra~slation of all of it will deliver without interruption or destructive change the basics of Scicntology into non-English tongues:' I think it's an overly atnbitious promise. While Scicntology's rampant neologism was part and parcel of making it all valid for people absorbing the meaning of preclear, "thetan," and "cngram," the full }h~hbar~lian ~aning of these and all his other words simply would nf~[ translate with ease. A second cqnally serious consideration for foreigners is that processing and training in a local organization can only bc carried up to a certain level. Beyond it, scientologists mnst go either to Saint Hill, in England-now become di~cult, although I've heard English- 92 SCIENTOLOGY men ~y that someone determined to get into the cormtry woulcln't really have much ~o~fi>le-or to Los Angelcs. When it became apparent that a scientologist determined to achieve the state of clear would have at least some difficulty in getting into England, Seientology set up an advaneed organization in Los Angeles, offering both the highly regarded Saint Hill Special Briefing Course, as well as the higher Grades of Release nnavailable locally. Hubbard also directed the formation of an Advanced Organization, staffed by members of his elite "Sea Org," to take students beyond tim state of clear towards becoming that absolute perfection, an operating th~an. I found additional clnes as to how many people are in Scientolo~ in figures printed in recent issues of The Auditor, Seientology's monthly journal. Discussing the Saint Hill Special Briefing Course, it said that since its inception in April of ~96x, 6~4 students had completed the course, ~ people have achieved the state of clear, and ~x,3o7 have achieved Release. These fi~res are just for Saint Hill in England, and appear to increase at the rate of 5o persons a month. If you figure that clear is the culmination of some ~elve grades of advancement, and you allow for some attrition, you begin to get some idea of the size of this thing. Bob Thomas, when I talked to him at his New York office, graciously tried to pin it down more precisely. On a worldwide basis, he conse~atively estimated, "well over a million people" are now involved, with a central organization of about ~oo,ooo of what he called "card-car~ing members." He told me that between one and ~o hundred new people encounter Scientolo~ for the first time each week in New York alone, and between 5o to 75 percent ol them go on to take at least the most elementa~ course offered, the Communications Course. We got into the whole subject of costs, eider for Scientology processing by itself, or for both it and Scientology training, and how much you might have to lay out to achieve ~at state of Total Freedom: clear. ~omas ~mpared it to ~e . ;, ;~, ~, S(:IENT~II~OGY 93 price tag on a n~edh~m-pricecl car. I_,ooking thro~gh one of Scientology's brochures, I found the figure broken down more or less as follows: $75 to achieve the first Grades of Release which are called O through IV; $5oo to take the Dianetics Auditor's Conrse; $~,~oo to take the Power Grade, Grade V-VA; $775 to take Grade VI, referred to as SOLO because you do it alone; and $800 for Grade VII, clear. Power Processing, Grade V-VA, is also offered as a twenty-five-hour intensive, five daily sessions of five bouts each at an overall cost of $5oo, wifl~ a minimum of two intensives req~ired. The Saint I{ill Special Briefing Course costs $775. At a certain level of processing and training, students are nrged to own their own E-Meter, the latest model of which is tim Hubt~ard Mark V E-Meter, sold for $x4o. Eve~ time I get a new brochure or newsletter from Scientology, I see a new package plan being offered. On somctl~ing called Triple Flow Grades, people are encouraged to prepay and get a 5 percent discount. On the training side, there is now a package to take you to Level IV on the Dianetics Auditor's Course for $1,235-5 percent off the nsual $x,3oo ff you pay in advance. There are all kinds of inc~intive plans offering discounts xvhich range from 5 percent to 5o percent on courses and processes, all of the discounts contingent on yonr making a long-term commitment-nsuallv bv written c{mtract-to ridlow tl~e npward path of scie,,tolodi~'ai advancement. A free six-month membership in ttASI otfers a straight 2o percent discount on all Scientology books which normally cost over $~.25, as well as on tapes, recor{ls, E-M{~ters, and other miscellaneous items available from Scientology bookstores, one of which is located in every Scientology office throughout the world. In additiou to two pamphlets which sell for 5o cents, there are now eleven books available at $~.~5 each, nine hooks selling for $2.oo each, eleven books selling for $3.o0 each, three-among them the original Dianetics text-selling for $5.00, and two selling for $7.00. With only oue exception, something called Miracles for 94 SCIENToLoGY BrcakI~Lst, written by Buth Minslmll, the majority of the books -those which aren't anonymously anthored-are writtcn by L. Bon Hubbard. A steady flow of mailings which I-and everybody else in or out of Scientology who happens to be on the mailing lists-received, told me that the books are available and that the bookstore officer was my "terminal for information you may have concerning books." Scientology recently offered an extension course, to be taken at home, for $5.00, consisting of what were called Four Lesson Tablets-"each containing 2o lessons, 8 questions each," each lesson pertaining to one of four books, available at a total cost of $16.25. In addition to the books, scientologists can also buy magazines, charts, the Creed of the Church of Scientology ($.5o), a photograph of L. Bon Hubbard-~2" x t5"-a "Study Self~Portrait," pins, car badges, scaryes, and ties. Tapes are available at $3o per roll, and a record called "Dianetics Modernized for Scientology Students Practice" which includes Hubbard's personally written instructions costs $~5.oo. With all these materials, I thought time and time again, is it any wonder that people's immersion in Scientology is total and absolute? A pertinent curiosity is the picture fcatnred on some of the paperback books which shows an old man, a sad-eyed, white-haired, bearded fellow with unnsually flared nostrils. I asked Bob Thomas whether this figure represented anything. "A symbol of knowledge," he said, "and as a symbol it has an impact." I looked again at one of the books, Introduction to Scientology Ethics, when I got home. The old man is sitting behind a desk, his arms resting on it. His face is weary, but there was a kind of . . . timelessness about it. His robes are black and his left hand is lying lightly on his right. The back of his chair is high and square. He looks like a jndge. A wise, stem judge who will brook no nonsense. As I looked at him, I couldn't help remembering a series of stories Hubbard had written many years ago for Astounding Science Fiction, using the pen name Rene Lafayette. The stories were called Soldiers SCIENTOI,OGY 95 of Light and tt~ld of a time in the future xvhcn mcticine bas become so s~perior and purified that its practitioners are something akin to superbeings, "soldiers of light." Lafayette'sor Hubbard's-hero in these stories was Old "l)oc" Methuselah, a man of enormous insight and sagacity, who, as his name implied, is a thousand years old and blessed with a wisdom accumulated over those centuries. In discussing tl~c various prices, Minister Thomas was careful to explain that all course costs are on a money-back guarantee and arc established by "the Organization." The base rate, if one can call it that, is "$~5o per grade of release... achieved to the satisfaction of the clicnt," thongh private practitioners like him have the right to charge more, based, he was not loath to sng~cst, on what the traffic might bear. "Tbc charge is for a particular result," he explained almost loftily. "In my career I've only had one person who asked for his money back, anct I gave it to him." There is, Thomas went on, "no legal requirement by WorldWide to be franchised. You don't have to be a franchised anditor to be a professional, but most professional auditors desire to be franchised because of the administrative assistance and adviccs that are given. The requirements are very stringent. You've got to adhere to the policies of Scicntology and the ethical cod{,s of Scicntoh~gy. A professional a~ditor who is not franchised floes not work directly with the organization," but is still "bound by certain codes of ethics." As for the xo percent which gocs to HCO (WW), a professional, nonfranchised auditor may or may not pay it. As Thomas explained, "it's np to them." Some cities in the U.S., like Chicago, do not have incorporated Scicntology churches or organizations. The reason was explained to me by Jack Homer. "An auditor," he said, "can operate under a franchise agreement as long as he doesn't get too big. tie gives ten percent of his gross to the organization. That's fair. tle's allowed to teach very rudimentary courses. THE REAL TRUTH The substance of what Scientology proposes as the trnth about life, existence, and the condition of man is infinitely more complex thau those rather cn, de Dianetics concepts about an analytical mind, a reactive mind, and the existence of traceable engrams. All of L. Ron Hubbard's frantic comings and goings were "firmly" based on a genuine philosophy which he had put together, a philosophy which combined, with typically billowing grandeur, the highest aspirations of pure Eastern thinking and the meanest invention of the best science-fiction bravado. Before I can explain the techniques this daring man developed for the achievement of both the knowledge and states of enlightenment he offers, we have to tackle exactly what Scientology says it believes. If I were to call L. Ron ttubbard eclectic, it xvonld he a mild understatement. The foreword of one of his early books, Scientology 8-8oo8, acknowledges a debt to Sigmund Freud, as well as someone Hubbard claims to have met in the Navy, a Commander Thompson who was supposedly one of Freud's pupils. The foreword then goes on to list a few other people Hubbard feels he should credit as the source for his ideas: Anaxagoras, Aristotle, Roger Bacon-the acknowledgment is in alphabetical order-Buddha, Charcot, Confucius, Rents Descartes, Will Durant, Euclid, Michael Faraday, William James, Thomas Jefferson, Jesus of Nazareth, Count Alfred Korzybski, James Clerk Maxwell, Mohammed, Lao Tsze, van Leeuwenhoek, 101 102 SC1ENTOLf)GY Lucrekius~ Isaac Newton, Thomas Paine, Plato, Socrates, Ilerbert Spencer, the Vedic IIymns, and Voltaire. The implication is clear: Not only is Hnbbard well read and immensely discerning, but he hiu~self may deserve a place among such august and heady company. ttubbarcl has a very specific notion of where, in the progression and scheme of things, Scientology belongs. In an outline for the lectnres he gave as part of Scientology's Professional Course in Jtdy of x954, he blocked out the earlier forms of wisdom which preceded Scientology. He began with the Veda, the sacred Hindu literature, and then moved to the Tao, the thinking of Lao-Tsze and "The principle of wu-wei (nonassertion or non-compulsion) control by permitting self'determinism." This was followed by the Dhyana, a discussion of its source, and the introduction of Gautama Sakyamundi, with extensive quotes from the Dharmapada, verses attributed to Sakyamundi who was considered the founder of the Dhyana. From there Hubbard moved on to the Hebrews and their definition of the Messiah. Then to Jesus of Nazareth, his age, his teaching and healing, his use of parables, his principles of love and compassion amongst peoples, and his Crucifixion. From there Hubbard discussed fi~e spread of Christianity into "The Barbarism of Europe: Religion with fur breech-clouts," the closing of the trade routes, and the appearance of "Western Seekers of Wisdom." Itis lectures ended with Webster's definition of religion, and the qualification that a religion or religious philosophy had as its goal "the freeing of the soul by wisdom," a goal achieved by Scientology. Hubbard had, as was mentioned earlier, already lectured on his ideas concerning the theta, man's true spirit, and MEST, the produc~ of theta in the form of matter, energy, space, and time, as early as late ~95o. Codifying his thinking further, he stated what he believed to be a basic truth in a book called The Creation el Human Ability. "Considerations,~ he wrote, ~take rank over the mechanics of space, energy, and time. By TIlE REAL TBUTII lo3 this it is meant that an idea or opinion is, fundament~tlly, superior to space, energy, and time, or organizations of form, since it is conceived that space, energy, and time are themselves broadly agreed-upon considerations. That so many minds agree brings about Reality in the form of space, energy, and time. These mechanics, then, of space, energy, and time are the products of agreed-upon considerations mutually held by life." "Reality," John McMasters had said in his talk, "is agreement." Everything Scientology postulates is based upon this one idea. Everything said thus becomes valid and acquires its own importance, its own existence as a consideration. What this means further is that every idea Hubbard then introduced might very well be absolutely true. His problem was first to define what it was he had discovered to be the truth, and then develop a way through which his followers could achieve the same revelations and states of enlightenment. The evolution of Hubbard's achievement of his many considerations first appeared in print in ~95~, in a book called Science of S~trviv~,l. In it he explained that all life is composed of two elements: statics and kinetics. A static was that which possessed no motion and was witbent widtb, length, breadth, depth, and mass. Its capabilities were nnlimited, and it conld be represented by the mathematical symbol tlieta (0). The kinetic he called MEST, the physical universe in terms of matter, energy, space, and time. In Scientology 8-8008 he summarized all this as follows: "It is now considered that the origin o{ MEST lies with theta itself, and that MEST, as we know the physical universe, is a product of theta." Put another way, colloquia!ly, all matter, energy, space, and time are, well, a figment of our imagination. It is all here because we are thinking it. It is important to understand what the theta and its entity the thetan has represented to Hubbard over the years, because what it is, how it has behaved, and why, have produced many 104 S(:IENTf)LOCY of lh~ considerations funl~scrvcd hem tltat tim science of Scicntology does not hxtrudc into the 1)ynamic of the Supreme Being. This is called the Eighth Dynamic bccause the symbol of infinity stool upright makes the numeral "8." This can be called the INFINITY or GOD DYNAMIC. "Tlxe kcystone of living associations," lhd~t~ard wrote in Scientology: The Fu~da~nentals of Thought, is "The ARC triangle." lie called it liEo's "common denominator." The A stands for Affinity in the sense of emotions such as loving or liking. The R re~resents Beality, that which people agree is real. The C is Comm~micalions, the most important of the triangle's three coroners l~ecause it is "the solvent for all things." tIubbard explains that a commt~nication must consist of something to send t~ someone who is prepared to receive it. And when people have something in common, the same level of "affinity," why communication is simple. But he points out that as we go lower on the "tone scale" our affinities become more solid, so while on the high levels our communications are cn~dite and friendly, on the bottom you find that most solid of solids: WAR. "Wilere the affinity level is hate," he tells us coldly, "the agreement is solid matter, and the communication . bullets." This tone scale which Itubl>ard mentions first appeared in Dianetics is a classification of human emotions in a particular order, from the very bottom-apathy~to the very top'enthusiasm. Each level was given a number and arranged in a descending order of desirability. What was important was not the particular number opposite an emotiou, bnt that it was either higher or lower-better or worse-than another emotion. The tone scale, Ilubbard wrote, "plots the descending spiral of life from full vitality and consciousness through half vitality and half consciousness down to death . . . the whole intent of Scientology is to raise the individual from lower to higher strata on this scale by increasing intelligence, awareness, and ability." (The tone scale is diagramed on the following page.) 110 SCIENTOI,OCY "~' ~ 40.O Serenity of Bcingness 8.o Exhilaration ~ 4.o Entlmsiasm 3.o Conservatism 2.5 Boredom 2.o Antagonism x.8 Pain TIlETAN L5 Anger PLUS BODY 2.2 No Sympathy Social 2.2 Covert Ilostility training and Lo Fear education sole gq~arantee o.9 Sympathy of o.8 Propitiation sane conduct o.5 Grief o.374 Making Amends TIlETAN o.o5 Apathy SCALE RANGE ~ o.o Being a Bocly (Death) Failure Well below body death --0.2 Being Other Bodies Regret at "0" down --2.o Ptmishing Other Bodies Blame to complete unbeingness --2.3 Besponsibility as Blame Shame as a thetan --L5 Controlling Bodies --2.2 Protecting Bodies --3.o Owning Bodies --3.5 Approval From Bodies --4.o Needing Bodies .~ --8.0 Itiding TIIE REAL TBUTII 111 At tim same time that Scientol{~gy's intention is to raise a person on the tone scale and improve Iris abilities, it is also Scientology's goal to rehabilitate the thetan by removing aberrations. This is critical because if it can be done successfully during this lifetime, the thetan will enjoy all future lives free of any kind of problems. If, however, aberrations are only "keyed ont," which is merely being released from some portion of the reactive mind, the death of the current body-Scientologists often refer to onr bodies as "this piece of meat," or "this meat of ours"-xvill not free the thetan from suffering the reappearance of aberrations. Fnrthermore, a properly freed thctan will not have to return to an implant station to obtain a new body. So Scicntology's techniques locate the thetan and bring its past cxpcri~'nces out into the open. Like Dianetics, there was one aberration which was absolutely "basic" to the liberation ff the thctan. "The one basic engram," as Ilubbard described it in Scientology 8-80, "on top of which all this-life engrams are more locks . . . was received by the human race many, many centuries ago, and probably was a supersonic shot in the forehead, chest, and stomach, incapacitating, and reducing, the size and hmction of the pineal gland." It was a major "breakthrough" in Sci{,ntology when Ilubbard ann~unc{'d that the actual sources of alwrrations for the thetan were the implants themselves. l)uring a thctan's sojourn at an implant station the gf~al To Forget was implanted, and all during previous lives, the thetan was having a wide variety of ofl~er goals implanted. Thus trapped by this goal To Forget, it became a monumental task to unlock those goals which had been over-implanted by the goal To Forget. This particular goal, according to Hubbard, was implanted on the planet Helatrobus some 38 trillion to 43 trillion years ago. In an HCO Bulletin, July 24, 2963, Hubbard described other implants which had been perpetrated upon thetans prior to the Helatrobus Implants. ! E: k 112 SCIENTOLOGY Hel~iYrohus Implants 38.2 trillion >,cars ago to 52 tril- lion >,ears ago. Aircraft Door Implants ~6 trillion years ago to 3~5 trib lion years ago. The Gorilla Goals 3~9 trillion years ago to 83 tril- lion trillion trillion years ago. The Bear Goals 83 trillion trillion trillion years ago to about 4o.7 trillion tril- lion trillion trillion years ago. The Glade Implants 40.7 trillion trillion trillion tril- ([ormerly called lion years ago to 5.9 trillion Black Thetan) trillion trillion trillion trillion years ago. The Invisible Picture Goals 5.9 trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion to a date not fnlly de- termined. The Minion Implants Not yet determined. The Story of Creation Implants 7 trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion years. Ten days earlier, in an HCO Bulletin dated July ~4, x963, Hubbard revealed in fascinating detail how some of the various goals were "laid in." The Aircraft Goal "was given in the mocked up fuselage of an aircraft with the thetan fixed before an aircraft door .... "The Gorilla Goals were given in an amusement park with a single tunnel, a roller coaster and a ferris wheel .... The symhol of a Gorilla was always present in the place the goal was given. Sometimes a large gorilla, black, was seen elsewhere than the park. A Mechanical or live gorilla was always seen in the park. Titis activity was conducted by the Hoipolloi, a group of operators i/f meat body societies. They were typical carnival people. They let out Concessions for these Implant "Amusement Parks." A pink-striped white shirt with sleeve garters was the uniform of the Hoipolloi. Such a fignre often rode on the roller coaster cars. Monkeys were also used on the cars. Elephants sometimes formed part of the eqnipment. The Hoipolloi or Gorilla goals were laid in with fantastic motion. TIlE REAL TRUTII 113 Blasts of raxv ~']{''tricity and explosions were hoth used to lay the lie'ms in. [The Black Thetan goals] were given in a glade surr~unded by the stone heads of "black thetans" who spat white energy at the trapped thetan. The trappcd thetan was motionless. Of course all this struck me as being insane garbage. While the wordy repostulations of affh~ity, reality, and communications, and the cycles of action and the dynamics were all something I co~fll swallow simply because they were primarily the taking of existing concepts or notions or even relationships and rcwording tl~t!m, giving them new names, so that you would see th/'m his way, tim Goals struck me as being pure science fiction. Talking to a Scientologist one day, trying hard to maintain ol~jectivity and an open mind, I snddenly hlurted out that beliewing in something like the Gorilla Goals was stretching it. The scicntologist looked mildly snrprised. "Why?" he said. "Gorilla Goals?" I shot back. "Well," he said thoughtfully, "I might have agreed at one time, except that a couple of months ago I got this bad toothache. And I k~iew there was no reason for me to have it; I'd gone to the dentist and there was noticing wrong with my teeth. So I sat down and thonght about why I had this tooth- ache. And all of a sudden, I saw a gorilla." "A gorilla?" The sci~'ntologist smiled, ahut~st apologetically. "I know how that som~ls. But I did. I saw this very big gorilla." "... Because your toothache had something to do with a goal connected to the time you were a gorilla, or something?" I said. "Something like that," the scientologist said calmly. The weird tiring is that just at this point, where Hubbard runs the risk of really losing me, he combines a couple of these elements to produce yet another principle which is not wildly fanciful. i~ ~4 SC~ENTO~.OC, 'lq';e idea that your having a goal-created ellergy. which had actual mass led him to define something he called GPM: "goals-problems-mass." The idea quite simply was that in past lives a person acquired, one way or another, pleasantly or unpleasantly, a wide variety of goals, all of varying natures of importance. But each, because it was a goal, acquired certain obstacles it had to overcome. Problems arose, and as such, as the mind or theta grappled with these problems, mass accumulated. It may have been solely in the form of stored-up energy, but it was definitely mass, and it was, according to Hubbard, measurable. In a book called Dianetics: ~955, Hubbard had written: "If there were no energy being created by the awareness-of-awareness unit (the thetan ), then one would be at a loss to account for mental energy pictures, for these things, being made at a tremendously rapid rate, have considerable mass in them-mass which is measurable on a thing which is as common and everyday as a pair of bathroom scales." The E-Meter. In what I humbly would have to call an astounding revelation made known in an HCO Bulletin of May x~, ~963, known as the "Heaven" bulletin, L. Ben Hubbard announced that GPM implants had been done in Heaven. "The contents of this HCO Bulletin," he wrote, "discover the apparent underlying impulses of religious zealotism and the source of the religious mania and insanity which terrorized Earth over the ages and has given religion the appearance of insanity." In no uncertain terms, he explained why and how the implants occurred. "For a long while, some people have been cross with me for my lack of co-operation in believing in a Christian Heaven, God and Christ. I have never said I didn't disbelieve in a Big Thetan but there was certainly something very corny about Heaven et al. Now I have to apologize. There was a Heaven. Not too unlike, in cruel betrayal, the heaven of the Assassins in the x2th Century, who, like everyone else, drama- I TIlE I~EAI, Tll[TT!I 11.5 tizecl the xv]~l~, tra~'k implants-if a lilt more so .... The symbol ~ff tl~e cn~eificd Christ is very apt indeed. It's tim symbol of a tlwtan betrayed .... "Ihd~bard knew this because he had visited lieavon twice. "The first time I arrived and the moment of the implant To Forget was dated at 43,89L6~x,x77 years, 344 days, ~o hours, 2o minutes and 4 seconds from ~o:o2xk r.~t. Daylight Greenwich Time May 9, ~963. The second series was dated to the moment of the implant To Forget as 42,68~,459,477,3~5 years, ~32 days, ~8 hours, 2o minutes and ~5 seconds from ~x:o2~z P.M. Daylight Greenwich Time May ~9, ~963." The implants, Hubl>ard wrote, were electronic and done on a nonvisible thetan who arrived by ship in a doll's b<~dy. Txventy-nine goals were made the first visit, 2x the secoud. Each time the first tbree goals were identical: To Forget, To Bernember, To Go Away. All of what Scieutology believes and theorizes can, Hubbard explains in The Creation of Human Ability, be broadly divided into two general categories: Scientology and Para-Scientology. Under Scientology we group those things of which we can be certain and only those things of which we can be certain .... Para-Scientology is that large bin which inclucles :~11 greater or lesser uncertainties. Here are the qnestionable things, the things of which the common normal observer cannot be sure with a little study. Here are theories, here are gronps of data, even gr~ps commonly accepted as "known." Some of the classified bn~lies of data which fall in Para-Scientology are: Dianetics, incidents on tile "wholetrack," the immortality of Man, tile existence of God, engrams containing pain and unconsciousness and yet all perception, prenatals, clears, character, and many other things which, even when closely and minutely observed, still are not certain things to those who observe them. Such tt~ings have relative truth. They have to some a high degree of reality; they have to others nonexistence. They require a highly specialized system in order to observe them at all. Working with such uncertainties one can produce broad and sweeping results: one can make the ill 116 ScIENToLOGY ~,ell again, one can right even the day which went most wrong; but those things which require higt~ly specialized communication systems remain uncertain to many .... Also under the heading of Para-Scientology one would place such things as past lives, mysterious influences, astrology, mysticism, religion, psychology, psychiatry, nuclear physics, and any other science based on theory. Rather than be any sort of refutation of Scientology's beliefs and theories, the notion of a Scientology and a Para-Scientology confounds only because with continued development of various avenues of thinking, it became increasingly difilcult to separate what was a concrete Scientological "consideration," and what represented Para-Scientology's 'q~ighly specialized system in order to observe them at all." That there is no true division between the two categories is evident from the Axioms, which represent the fundamental substance of all which Scientology believes, and which Hubbard calls "commonly held considerations," In all, there are 58 Axioms, 7 Pre-logics, and :~4 Logits. They range from Axiom ~: "LIFE IS BASICALLY A STATIC," to Axiom 39: "LIFE POSES PBOBI.EMS FOR ITS OWN SOLUTION," to Axiom 48: "LIFE IS A GAME WHEREIN THETA AS THE STATIC SOLVES THE PROBLEMS OF THETA AS MEST." Pre-logic ~ is: "SELF-DETERMINISM IS THE COMMON DENOMINATOR OF ALL LIFE IMPULSES.'' LOGIC ~8 is: "A POSTULATE IS AS VALUABLE AS IT IS WORKABLE." I have already pointed out that in explaining the origin of the word Scientology, Hubbard never mentioned the German social psychologist, Dr. A. Nordenholz. Nor does Hubbard acknowledge any possible debt to Nordenholz in his extensive listings of his researches into Eastern and Western thinking. But Nordenholz is important. Very little is known about this man who wrote several books which examine the social phenomenon of the individual i TIlE REAL TI:II, ITII 117 agai,,st tl~e c',,nccpt of the "self" as created bv the conscious mind. 1I~ was b~rn in B,,cnos Aires in x86~, the son of the German eonsnl there, and retnrned to his fatherland where he became a farmer, scientist, Doctor of Law and Philosophy, and was int~rest~'d in the links binding economic and social problems bolh in the question of industrial production and in the question of s~cial identities. In ~9o4, he j~,ined Dr. Alfred Hoetz to found a periodical in Germany called The Racial, Social, Biological Archive, lnclttding Racial and Social Hygiene. It was pnblished regHlarly until July of ~944, and though Dr. N~rd~'nholz's cor,tribnti~ns disappear during the ~9~o's, it has bccn speculated that the Archive was an important soorcc of much of the racial thinking of Hitler Germany. In ~934, Nordenholz published a book called Scientologie: Wisse~wha[t vonder Beschaffenheit ~nd der Tauglichkeit des Wisse~ (The Science of the Co~stitt~tion & Usefulness of Knowledge and Knowing). It was painstakingly and faithfully translated into English recently by Woodward B. McPheeters. Nordenholz begins by stating that the problem of a science of knowing or knowledge, which he names Scientologie or Eidologie, is isolating knowledge as "a particnlar appearance of the world." "What is Knowing?" he goes ~n to ask. "What IS Knnwlcdge? What can we know, what mnst xv~' knoxv abont Knoxvlcdg{'/Knowing, to do j~,stic~~ to and to justify the xvorld? The question is thns nothing less fl~an self-knoxving, determination of the nature of self, and also of s~qf-rcalization and self-understanding of Knowlcdg{~/Knowing. ls this possible? If possible, h~w can the systemization of Knowledge/Knowing i~eff be accomplished? ttow can a Science of Knowledge/ ~o~ng be proclnced?" Nordenholz goes ~n to establish certain definitions and ~ncludes that "the world is nothing but knowledge, merely an ex~action from knowing .... Only out of the equally valued mutual operation of Knoxvledge/Knowing as shaper & 118 SCIENTOI,OCY creati~, and world as created & shal~ed, is it ptlssible to arrive at tile trne science of the world .... Out of this circmn~tanee comes the right nf Scientologie to treat the world as belonging to its eonnterpart, as an appendage of the consciousness." Having tbus established tile relatio~ship between knowledge/knowing and the world, Nordenholz declares that "Unaware thinking within the world has always simply perceived TIlE state or current condition." lie explains that consciousness can be raised to a position of independence, or isolation, and then states: "The consciousness, which always remains a part and particular creation of the world, is incompetent to create from a nothingness because of this very worldliness. In order for the consciousness to be able to create, it has to first find a fountainhead source out of which it can create, and this Something is a Beinghess." Nordenholz next introduces the notion of Axioms as a decreed system to get out of a cycle he identifies as: "the systemization of consciousness & reason demands knowing..." versus "knowing demands a system ~ff consciousness & reason." He defines axioms as "comprehensions, propositions, declarations, which are initially set in place as if they stand of their own power and dignity, as if they were capable of, but do not need, a verification or confirmation from another source." He then goes on to structure Scientologie as follows: ~. In axioms: exposition of the axioms and the axiom systems of consciousness. 2. In systems: erection of the forming or moulding system of the eonseiousnesses, the comprehension system of the reason, all form the axiom svstem. 3t"In demonstration: justification c~f the produced comprehension systems and with that, working back to the underlying basis of the axiom systems. 4. In study of the origin, nature, methods, and limits of know]edge: establishment of tile Total-system of sciences from the foundation of Scientologie systems of knowledge and comprehension. TIlE BEAI, TBI7TII 119 The m~>st imp~rtant axi~nn, to appreciate N~rdenlu~lz's possible inlt~cnce tm L. ll{m II~d>llar{l, was tt~c Axiom {if Me{lialion: "The consci~msncss, nominated as the creator of the world, Ilrcsnpp~ses a wellspring, a so~rce, out of wllich it can scoop; a I~cing. wldch somehow and in some mcasure can be reached thrn c~msei{~usness, b~t which exists there by itself BEFOBE and independent from the conscio~sncss. TIm assumption {~f a creator activity of ttle consciousness is dependent upon the Stann. Though tl~,' (;r~'ative Proc,ss{'s {lid not seem to xvork well with everyone. I{~d~bard xvas intrig~ed by their pot~'ntial and never aband~m'd th~'m complctt'ly. As Gary cxplai,~cd it to me, "Most pcople w{'r~'n't np to it. llc [lhd>l~ard] f<~nnd it was helpful to a p~i~t, l~,t h~ c~,l{ln't stabiliz~ a case at Illat level. ttc wo~dd I~{.11~ Illen~ np to fa,~tastic lev{'ls of alfility, but he had trcm~',~ll~,~s pr~l>le~us. Ilc could not stalfilize a case at the level h{' ~.~11 l~,.lp fl~cm achieve. People conld create actions, and elo tlfi~gs Ilia! were ont }[ accord xvith their responsibility level."* 'rl~<' ~:l~alh'nge was to raise the resp~msit~ility level. With time, as tl~e Grades of Bel~ase were furtl~er developed, that responsil~ility level was achievcd. In ~968, Ituhl~ard announ~!etl wl~at he called "~oo Percent Gains Attainal,le by Standard Tech." Each and every process now wol'ks exactly as it is dcfinet. The data used is stable. Everything works. The refinement and redefinition of the early Creative Processes had weeded out the failures, while the more esoteric techniques were now ready to be used. It is these which have now been restructur~'d into the levels above clear, the Grades of operating thetan. I do not kuow exactly what goes on above clear. The levels there are designated O.T. (opcrezting tiletan) levels, and there are eight of them, all available at a special 5 percent discount fe~ of $~,85o. Scientology brochures explain that O.T. I is a steI above clear, and in O.T. II "a being further expands, regain'. abilities and hecomes ready for O.T. III." In O.T. III, "th~ student goes through the 'Wall of Fire' that no one could eve~ approach without resultant sickness and death before L. Ro~ * As an example, Gary suggested a brilliant salesman, silver-tongued an~ immensely persuasive, who can sell you a million dollars worth of good but then cannot deliver because he has not worked up to the millio~ dollar level in terms of stocking and supplying. 15o SCIENTOLOGY ttubbaf~l found the wav f~r you to go thro~gh saf{'ly and reach the other side, shining and free from the curtain of degraclation that has lmng like a poisonous veil over this planet." What Hubbard sees to be the "Wall of Fire," I don't know. I asked Gary Walkins if he coulcl explain wbich abilities Itubbard would be perfecting at the O.T. levels. "They could be anything," he said. "Beading people's minds, communicating without verbal sounds, lifting objects at will, the ability to exteriorize and be at any point on the planet at your own decision, wittrout negating your responsibility for having a body-if you ask me now I can tell you if it's raining in Washington-that type of thing." Gary rejected actnally doing any of these things as cheap parlor tricks. When I pressed him on what a person wonld do with snch super-al~ilities, he explained that it was snctdenly realizing you could do them which was important, an explanation which coincides with Scientology's definition of the O.T. V Course: "Gradient scale drills to handle matter, energy, space and time from outside your body," and the O.T. VII C~rse wt~ere "one confronts at sonrce the originalion of thonght and progresses up to realms wherein is revealed the total tn~tt~s of spiritual existence and power." Gary explained this more prosaicall),. "The ability to have full awareness in present time," is how he put it, "knowingly, so that you knew what was going on. You could walk into a room and be fully aware of eleven conversations at the same time and walk around and call people by name and contribute to the conversations at the right moment. A tremendous ability to command others, for worthwhile purposes, with affinity, in an enjoyabl~ manner; have people do as you would have them do. Tremendous auditing ability in all counseling and perceptive abilities. The ability not to be subject, emotionally, to people who are victimizing themselves as a solution to life. Also, to destroy an object at will if you wanted." As to what processes are being used, Gary says, "If it is an extension of TI.:('IINI(,)IIES, I)1/1I,I,S, ANI) I'I',I')(:ESSES 1.51 wl~at I ktl,~w 111~w're d<~h~g to titat p<~int tl~e,, it w~n~l{t I~' helping a p<,rs{~n ~'l~'ar ~p th{'ir resislance t~ al~iliti{,s wl~ich they l~:sve~" l}s~ts~' al~ililics he menli~ned bcf{~re. Once' ;t persian l~:ts bec'nm~' clear and has ]earne{1 t~ ne~ale negations. tll~'n' at{' slill, as Gary p~t it, "many areas of life which l~' {l~{,st~'l want ~o e~mfront and is ~mwilling t~ {1~." lle is ~mwiIling. at 11~:tt p~int. 1~ steal~ll~e concept of eradicating resistanc'~'s is s~Hl~,lllil~g witl~it~ his c',~pa{-ily, "b~t lie does not like stealing in tl~e actual world." 11ubbard. at these levels, does n~l sav ll,~'n, are II~ings pe~tple dislike, he simltty says that ll~'n. "is s~t~{,111i~g lll~'y catl~l~t do. The'n," Gary c~mtim~es, explainit,~: h~w I I~l~l~ard mig}lt stn~cture tl~e advam. ed lechniqut~s ~t~ 11~{. ().'1'. l~wels, "v~ ]~ave to raise your abilitv to confrotll Wl~al is. and yo~r xvillingm'ss to lt{, Ca,~se over What Is, ther{'i'~3r{' g{'t 11~e ich~a of s~ncb~{ly stealing s~mething theref~3re ~'t ll~' i{lea of stealing s~m{'thin~. And the person says, 'Y{'s, l c~,~Id have that command.' Boom~ What else {lon't you like, whal Elleel in life wonld you be unwillh,g to be Cause over?" Jack IIomcr define{1 it somewhat more specifieally. "TIle Level V1 n~aterials-" the O.T. levels progt-ess fnm~ I thro~gh VIII, "-leave a person in the positi~m wl~'re I~e is pretty well in control of his own existence, Iris own life. One eft lhe things abo~t cl{'ar is Illat y{~u realize yo~ are surrot~nd~'d lty peoplc still reacting to 11~eir own cnvin~m~cnt, wl~o are not clear. Thcre's not m~ch game when you've got t~t play it alone. So e O.T. techniques go into the control and bandling of the other dynamics." What Ilorner thinks they're using are the Boute I exteriorization techniques from tlubbard's book The Creation o[ Ilnnuzn Ability, for example B~-4, which is "be three feet back ~ff your head." Other processes in this Boute rect the person to "mock up" tl~ings and then either destroy ~em or s~staiu them. By "mock up," Scientology means "a mental model, construction or picture created by a thaan.~ One exteriorization process which is only whispered about, 152 SCIENTOI, OGY but xvhioh everybody seems to knf~w attaint. is called B2-.45, and is one of the 75 Route 2 processes also {lisc~sscd in The Creation of II~an~an Ability. No description aceompa~'~ies its mention in the book. Only a small note: AN ENORNIOUSLY EFFECTIVE PROCESS FOR EXTEBIORIZATION BUT ITS USE IS FROWNED UPON BY THIS SOCIETY AT THIS TIME. What the process stands for, I was told, is B2-.45, the 45 being a .45 pistol. Hubbard is said to have marched out onto center stage at one of the Sciento]ogy congresses in Washington, D.C., in the late firties, pulled out a .45 loaded with blanks, fired it into the audience, and announced to the stunned assemblage, "I just thnnght you'd like to see what R2-.45 looks Iike$" What no one is willing to sav out loud is that tiffs may be one of the advance{1 processes being taught somewhere at the present time. "ETHICS" I~111 Scientolo,-.y's tbeories ant beliefs may bc hard to take; the processes and t~,cl~niq~cs may ~mwittingly reveal so~nctl~ing single-znind~'~l ;t~l pcrvasive al>out the direction of Scicntology's drive': I~nt it is in his n'action to {lerisi{~n, criticism, and attack fn~m l~i:tscd and nnbiascd outsiders that L. l{on 1Iubbard gives St:ic~tology gennine dimension, an nndcrlying quality which invisil~ly cloaks the whole phenomenal movement. It is Scicntology's ethics which scare the hell out of me. Itubbard has been getting it from all sides cvcr since the day he came out with I)ianetics. Hc's not only used to it by now, but time has convinced him that you m~st use criticism and attacks to make yourself stronger. You face up to ttxc adversity of ridicule and ontsidc threats l~y pointing straight at them and challenging them to a sort of "anyplat(t, anytime" showclown. II~}~bard instinctively knew he }~acl to make something of each anti every attack, exposing it to the co]~l light of Scientol~gical reason, and use it to convince his brother Seientologists that someone somewt~ere was airaid of Seientology. There co~ld be only one reason someone might be afraid d Seientology: They were afraid of the t~th. In the late firties, he wrote a pamphlet called "Why Some Fight Scientolo~," which was distributed to Scientology churches and organizations around the world. "Unfortunately," he wrote, "the person who does not want you to study Scientology is your enemy as well as ours. When he harangues against us to you as a 'cult,' x53 154 SCIENTOI.OGY a 'hoax,' as a very bad thing done by very bad people, he or she is only saying, 'Please, please, please don't try to find mc out.' Thousands of such protesting people carefully investigated by us have been found to have unsavory pasts and sordid motives they did not dare (they felt) permit to come to light .... "Hubbard never identifies the protesters, massing them as a great unknown you know are there because he says they're there. It is an implied enemy, there because cold logic will tell you, even if you're the hardesbnosed scientologist of all, that there must be somebody out there against youl Hubbard's polemic contirades. "'You had better leave Scientology alunc!' is an instinctive defense, prompted in all cases investigated by a guilty conscience. Once they hear a few truths from Scientology such people become afraid. They know we know. And if we know this much and if you are furttJer informed, they feel you will find them out .... Beware the person or group who rights Scicntology, for that person fights Truth-not the truth of natural laws but the truth about himself." At the same time that thd~bard was xvarning Iris minions against outside threats, he realized that Scicntology was only as strong as its internal structnre. Ilis houschold security system, developed over the years, he calls "Ethics," and defines it as "reason and the contemplation of optimum survival." One of the first things Ethics tackled was to develop ways through which those individuals with unsure, vacillating, or even dangerous attitudes about Scientology could be unearthed, bronght to the surface, and, if possible, straightened out, remedied, and helped. So Hubbard instituted security checks. WheS'he first introduced them, they became an integral part of processing. An HCO Policy Letter of May ~2, x96x, introduced "The Only Valid Security Check." It consisted of ~5o questions, some of which were: Have you given your right name? Have you ever stolen anything; forged a signature, check or "~.:T~:S" ~55 docu~.~ct~: l~l'.~.kt~ailcd anyb~ly; been I~la'kmailcd; cheated; smuggled ;,~ytl~it~X; enlcrcd a cormtry illegally. l~ccn h~ prison; tried t~ a~.t t~rn~al; * indulged in tlrtn~ket~ncss; done any reckh.ss driviu~; hit and rut~ with a car; burglcd any place, eml~czzlcd moncv? It;rye yfu~ cvcr assaulted anyonc, practicct cannibalism, been in jail? tlave vnu cvcr raped anyone or been rapeel, been involved in an :tl~rlitn~, committed adultery, bigamy, prac'ticcd homosexuality, l~;~d h~lcrcoursc with a mc~nber of your family, bccn sex~;~llv ~f;titl~fifl, practiced sex with animals, practiced sodo~. slept xvith a n~t-~nl~cr nf a race of anolhcr color, commiH'~l c~lp:tl~h~ ltomicidc, c~n3n~iltcd a j~slifiablc cringe, boml,cd :~ttvo~c, ~nn'd~.rcd anvnt~c, Iiiddc~ a I~o~ly. attempted suici~h, c';t~sctl a suicide, kid~appcl anv~c, aitlccl an informer, l~clr;tycd ;tnyonc for mo~cy, threatened anyone with fi HFe~IFIII? Arc my quest iotas cmba~assing? Do you have any bastards? ttow co~tld you help mankited? What is (]~mmunism? Do you know of any secret plans against Scicntology? Do you plan .~,~ steal a Scientology orgaidzation? Are y,u~ upset absent this security chcck? Wliat unkinl thougl~ts have yoll had while doing this check? What is important to tmdcrstand at this plaint is not tl~at It~d~bard xvas c~mvi~ccd s~eh :t security cl~cck was beneficial, but that l~c firmly I~clieved tl~ere xvere operating forces within Scicntology wldch represented a specific langer. Thus, because Iris First Dynamic was to SURVIVE] it xvas only natural he take measures to insure that su~,ival. Tbe disgusting ex~emes to which hc was willing to go were made clear in May of ~96o, when hc wrote a letter to Mrs. Penelope Elizabeth Willjams, wife of Scicntology's director for Australia and New 'I don't kuow if this question is d~igned to make sure that nobody escapes, or simply asks ns to admit that at times, kno~ng we were not quite oursch'cs, wc n~vcrthelcss, knowingly, ~icd to pass ourselves off ~ "normal." Talk aleout a Catch-a~l 156 SCIF, NTOLOCY Zealand. In the If'tier, I|uhbar{t r~wealcd so~m' {lamalag discoveries ahout his associate and apparently faithful colleag~e, Jack ttorner. "Ilorner," he wrote, "blew up in our faces an{! has had his certs. cancelled. We have criminal backgronnd on him. Bape of a girl pc in Dallas and countless otl~ers. This will do something to (~). Noxv, I firmly believe you will be able to find a criminal background this life on (~), as no such occurrence anywhere in the world has failed to find one. I'd grab him when he comes in and security check it into view." Everybody, tlubbard was positive, has something to hide. After 196~, the security checks were no longer part of general processing and were only nsed for security purposes. A sense of necessary caution was already being felt, and a few people began dropping oat of Scientology, concerned with the realization that somebody on the inside was actnally watching them. At tlm same time, whisperings began about the only genuine palace revolt ever to shake Scientology. The extended adventure could not have been more timely. Hubbard responded to it with all the zeal of a latter-day Torquemaria. It gave Seientology a very big plus as it struggled to expand as a spiritual movement deserving legitimate attention and fear because the revolt was nothing less than heresy. And every "religion" needs it. It all began and developed with a man named Harry Thompson. Thompson had been one of England's most successful auditors, earning something approximating $~o,ooo a year, according to Gary Walkins. Ite was quick to absorb what Scientology believed and how these beliefs might be achieved, and easily'lngratiated himself with Scientology through his genuine sincerity and expertise. Then, according to Gary, who now teaches Thompson's system in New York, Thompson "made a very simple discovery which aligned all the information in Scientology, as to why it was correct when it was correct, and why it worked when it did, and why it didn't when "ET~{:S" ~57 it didn't." 'l'l~l~ps~n went into rctr~'at at l~is lir.~ outside Londou ;m{l sp~'nt tl~ree years {leveloiling an g~><~N:I,L7Slf)NS l.~!) vi~<'~'~l II~l I 1~:~1 l~een on the tl~irl tl{~c>r at~l I ]~'.~d tak{'n picts~rcs ~f s~s~'llsing m the third {l{~r tl~at I shoultln't have. 1 have no id{'a what's on the tldrd {leer either than the hall with the env{~lope stuffcrs. I know fl~ere's sometl~ing in those rooms, l~t I didn't get to see the rooms, because there's a desk, with a girl behind it-same kind of smile-that separates yon, and beyo~d her, who knows xvhat goes on. If I was crazy, I'd sndh'nly imagine it's becanse they do it in the nude or something. B~t 1 really {ton't know what they ~1o. "So Nina examined me furtlier, and then she mentioned Yvonne Chalkrib'r, who is the repnrter from Life, the researcl~er, she me~li~nt'd h,'r name, and asked, 'Do ytm know Yvonne Chabrier? 1)~t vtn~ know Yvonne Chaltri'r? . . Yvonne Chabrier?' And I said, 'Yes, I do.' I didn't xvant to lie; I felt yet [tm~iy lying. And she sai], 'tIow do you know her?' and I said, 'Wcll. I originally came over here for Lilt, trot they've already closed the story.' And then she really got upright, and she walked out of the room, and said, 'I want you to come with me and mect this oilier ~y,' I forget his name, Owen, or somethiug, and he was in one of these little cubi{'les. And he sat loxvn antl he was much niccr. IIe lid the same thing of cross-examining me, lint he was more int'r'ste{1 in what Li[e was doing. I exp]ai~led h3 him that I di{ln'l kn~w xvhat Li[e was np to. xvllich I reall), di{ht'L beca~se ll~cv hal 13tiered me very little." When it was all over, B~{I n~l ot,lv apoh~giz{'d f~tr what he had done, b,~t turned over all of his film, exposed and unnsed. "I explained to them that I really believe in this sh~ff and that I thought fl~ey were doing a lot of good for a lot of people that had nothing else. That I would like to cotne back sometime. in the fnlnre, and take it up seriously. And they said, 'Maybe. in the fnture.' He, the guy, explained to me that I couldn't stay simply because I hadn't come of my own accord. They only are interested in people who come on their own; even ff your brother sent ytm, he said, 'We won't take you. You mine 19o CONCLUSIONS because ycm want to come.' So, Nina gave me mv fifty-{tollar deposit back, and I went back and got my coat in the room, and I thanked the teacher, Bobble, and I spent too l{mg talking to her, because Nina came in and she was very uptight about me talking to Bobbie, and Bobbie was confused. I said, 'Thank you very much, I hope to meet you again in the future.' And Nina kind of looked at her, and then looked at me, and I said to Bobbie, sort of, like, 'Nothing to worry about.' And then I put my coat on, and went home." Bud pauses in his narrative and looks back on the whole experience, and then says, slowly, "I really did believe. I believed right tmtil the moment they came and took me out of the class. I was like one of those lonely souls, I felt just like the other people in the class .... "lie tries to laugh, but it goes dry. "There are really beautiful people in this, and I was really upset when they asked me to leave. I really was. I was more upset than they were. Because I wanted to find o~t, like I'm dying to find out what happ~ns in tile Fourth or Sixth Glass. I wanted to see what lhey did. Th~'y really fed me the bait, and I bit!" He starts to laugh a~ain, lint instead stops and says, wistfully, "The girl who gave the first lecture, Bobble, was heautiful. She sat on the edge of this desk, and crossed these long legs of hers, and these big eyes, and she was very soft-spoken, and she said, 'Now is there anything you don't understand?'" A few weeks later, Bud received a letter from the Church of Scientology which began "Dear Bud," and expressed something akin to sorrow that he had asked for his money back. It went on to express the hope that he would return, that whatever had ha~'pened could be worked out and forgotten. When we last talked, Bud was seriously considering returning so that he could find out, finally, what does happen in the Fourth or Sixth Glass. Yes, Scientology may be a form of voluntary brainwashing, but conversely, we, as social animals, seem to need phenomena C~)N(;I,IIS|{)NS 1,(}1 s~eh as Sci{'~t~l~,gy. B~fllo May, the well-known psychotheral~ist, discnss{'d this question when he rcviexved 1)r. Winter's bo~>k, A Doaor Looks At Dianctics, in }95~. May suggested lhat the're is something in us which is satisfied by a psycho-soeioh~ical mov~ment which, as he put it, is a "confusion of fantasv wifl~ scientific claims. Apparently," he wrote, "mo{tcrn pe~tph~ r{'ach out on the one hand for scientific authority antl on tl~e olher hand they seek some realm of fantasv io which th{'ir irrational tendencies can t{,mporarily have f~11 play." Speaking lh{'n as a b~,havioral scientist, May cone]hales: "l)~ws tiffs imply that modern man is not only anxious. d{,~n'a~ding security. lint also s~[f~'rs in our commercial a~d ind~slria] societv from a suppression of fantasy life and in~aS~inali~n, and th~s seiz~'s upon the nexv forms of magic?" Nin~'l~'en years after that was written, xvilh life accelerated h~ an almost maniac pitch, and a bnr~e~ning interest h~ all f~rms of the occult as offering us some kind of au an.vwcr, man is l~oking to the seemingly irrational t~ explain the irrationality of modern times. Tl~e ansxver to May's question is Yes. If it xx ,.*re otherwise, Scicnt~]~gy xvonld be unh~'ard of and, though !hd~bard wo~Id be tl~e last to admit, unnec'es- SaFy. Ill Scientology inur~'s itself against outside criticism by insisting that anytiring written or said against it must be judged relatively, viewed against the equally "relative" merits of other forms of psychotherapy and spiritual activity, and be seen in a "proper" context. When Life magazine published the long article on Scientolngy in ~9~, L. Bon Hubbard ~ote the magazine a letter in which he said: "Those a~aeBng Seientolo~ run mental institutions. ~ey make millions out of it. They advocate brutal, murderous actions against ~e insane. They are terrified of losing the avalanches of money gouged out of governments. They see Seientology taBrig it aH away 192 CONCLUSIONS with kind, effective measures. There is no question in their minds but that Scientology works. That's why they are attacking it. A thousand other philosophies and religions arise every year with no outcry from the madmen in charge. The hundreds of thousands of victims of the enemy, as in all fascist actions, cannot complain. They cannot even talk. They're dead.' Such an answer has become quite traditional with Hubbard. In an HCO Bulletin of May 5, x959, he wrote: "The person who goes to a psychiatrist usually finds himself betrayed. He does not receive help, he receives brutality in the form of electric shocks, brain surgery and other degrading experiences. Even in the highest form of psychiatry it was common advice for the psychiatrist to tell the wife that the best cure for her troubles was to betray her husband, and vice versa." Surprisingly enough, when not speaking from what sounds interestingly close to personal experience, Hubbard has on occasion acknowledged that processing might cause a "nervous breakdown" which would require "observation" in a mental hospital. Describing what he named the "Sad Effect" in an HCO Policy Letter, he wrote: "We could call this Tearcull Apathia Magnus and everyone would be in great awe of it. But I see no reason to follow the Latinated nonsense of yesterday's failured sciences. Call it something simple and the auditor will feel he can do somethin~ about it and even the preclear will cheer up a bit. So it is 'the Sad Effect.' This is a state of great sadness, apathy, and misery and desire for suicide." In Hubbard's now rare confrontations with the outside world, I found that you can never be sure whether he will be precise and ,decisive, as when he discusses the computer4ike qualities of the mind and the statistical perfection of Scientology's Standard Tech, or mildly introspective and almost puzzled, as when, while discussing man's 'brain and its function during that filmed interview which is shown at all the free introductory Scientology sessions, he suddenly interrupts him- CONCLUSIONS 193 self to say, "What it [the brain] does? Well, I'm not quite sure .... "And some moments later, in this same film, discussing the insane, he says, "The insane are, well, they're insane." This is not to imply that Hubbard is ever at a loss for something to say. He measures the mood of a moment, and then, with persistently winning charm, satisfies or confounds a critic or questioner with just the fight answer. The last question asked by the interviewer who accompanied the British film crew which visited Hubbard on board his flagship was "Do you ever think that you might be quite mad?" I ball expected Ilubbard to rise up in righteous wrath and indignation and summarily order the intruders off the vessel, but he merely rnlled the question over in his mind and then said, with obvious relish, "Oh, yesl The one man in the world who never believes he's mad, is a madman." And his broad face, giving him the look of a homey, beardless Santa Claus, split into a wide grin of sheer pleasure. Recently, Eric Barnes, the Church of Scientology's public relations director for the Eastern U.S., appeared as part of a panel discussinn on a television program and said, "Nowhere in all the eighteen years of attacks that have been made agaiust Seientology-and always done in the same pattern-nowhere has anyone come up with one person who has been harmed by Seientnlogy." What Barnes meant was that tbe eases on record involving individuals who bave taken Scientology processing and ended up in mental hospitals cannot be introduced as evidence against Scientology because these persons were unwell before Seientology ever touched them. When Dr. Lewis L. Robbins, a prominent practicing psychiatrist who was also on the program, asked Barnes if Scientology makes an effort to determine whether or not someone might be emotionally or psychologically unfit, Barnes answered: "When someone walks in who's obviously rational, who sits and talks .... We discover that someone has had institutional processing, or has been treated by a shock treatment, or 194 C;ONCLUSIONS ]obotomy, or leucotomy, which are the tools of the psychiatric trade, or convulsive drugs of one kind, we say, 'We're sorry, we cannot help you.' And that is the end of it." Simplistie but neat. So the onus of any criticism is put on the critic. And what Hubbard knows is really sticking in everyone's craw is the fact that Seientology workst The only alternative for me then is to make some further observations about Hubbard's stubbornly heuristic approaches, and see where that leads. Bollo May, in his review of Dr. Winter's book, wrote: "The one useful point in dianeties, in my judgment, is helping the patient to experience his feelings. Yet even this is not original: it is a form of abreaetion, one of Freud's earliest techniques. As any psychologist knows, the difficulty is that the event about which the patient works out his feelings usually has no demonstrable relation to present reality .... " This question of somehow defining what is fantasy and what is real brings us to some questions regarding the E-Meter, that indispensable Scientology tool which John MeMasters, the world's first clear, has said measures "disagreements," not lies. In his already quoted study of the polygraph, or lie detector, Dr. Burke M. Smith stated: "To be effective an instrument or a test must be valid and it must be reliable." No attitude could be more scientific, pragmatic, and in accord with what Hubbard has said over and over again. Dr. Smith went on to explain that sufficient evidence to evaluate the polygraph was lacking because "in the few eases in which effectiveness has been evaluated, confessions of guilt or attempts to deceive have been commonly taken as criteria for determining.validity. The trouble with this is that in many cases the confession may have come before or during the examination, which is thereupon said to have been eonclusivel" Dr. Smith cites a specific example, the ease of a young bank manager who was subjected to what Smith called a "routine" polygraph examination. "He showed violent response (:()N(:I,ITSI(')NS 1(,),~ to the ~F~'sti~t: '11ave you cvcr stolen any m~ney from tim bank or its cnst~m~crs?' On a peak-of-tension test to specify the amount of money stnlen, he showed strong reactions at the mention of tim sums $8oo and $~,~oo. Ile could not remember taking any such sum but, confused and convinced of ~e maehine's infallflfility, he confessed to having stolen $~,~ and told how he must have done it. The bank's auditors could find no such shortage or manipulation, and so the manager was referred for psyc~a~ie examination." It was found that "the patient had strongly ambivalent feelings about his mother and xvife a~d felt g~filty al~out persnnal Gnancial dealings with them involving the sums ot $8oo and $i,loo. Both the mother and thc wife were customers of thc bank." The same polygraph test was repeated hy anotl~er examiner who also concl~,ank manager was lying and must t~e guilty ~>f theft becanse nf his responses to questio,ls where tim word "customer" was used. Dr. Smith wrote: "Clearly the original polygraph results were not valid. It was not decepti~n I~ut an autonomie response to unconscious attiCdes that had caused the strong polygraph reactions. The same effect was sh<~wn on a trivial qncstion inch~clcd as a ~ntrol: 'Do you drink coffee?' The manager answered. quickly and truthf~lly, 'Yes.' but the polygraph showed a strong emotional reaction. The young man co~dd n~t explain tl~is, but psychotherapy revcal'd that co{[ce-dri~king had been absolutely forlfidden during Iris chi]dho~d; the n~m~rv of that prohibition bad been lost or suppressed but remained potent. . . . In fact," Dr. Smith concluded, "any word that happens to have stn~ng emotional connotations for an individual and that is included in a critical question may elicit a response that is erroneously attributed to an attempt at deception." Dr. Smith describes other "pitfalls that can lead to 'false positive' or 'false negative' interpretations of a record. Some people are emotionally highly sensitive even to supposedly neutral stimuli; otl~ers are unresponsive. A person who believes 196 CONCI,USIONS what he says is true may shoxv no cm<~lional r~'sponse even when lie says what is ol~jectively untrue. A person xvho is ashamed of his name may shoxv emotion when tie quite truthfully answers 'Yes' to 'Is your name AdoIf Schicklgruber?'" Finally, Dr. Smith raises certain ethical questions. "To say or imply," he wrote, "that the machine is infallible is to use a lie to detect a lie. To elicit admissions through fear of the machine or misrepresentation of its record is to force a confession .... A person undergoing even a routine polygraph test may inadvertently reveal, particularly in the preexamination interview, information ahout himself that he would not voluntarily have revealed. The polygraph operator is not a physician or a lawyer or a priest; he is anxious to pass on whatever details he can find to his superior or to the man who has hired him. If his findings cast doubt (rightly or wrongly ) on the integrity or reliability of his subject or reveal idiosyncrasies or weaknesses, the subject's welfare or entire career may be harmed. Can such invasions of privacy be justified? It is said that taking a polygraph test is voluntary. Is it really voluntary, however, if a refusal can be interpreted as evidence of guilt or seems likely to jeopardize a job?" Yet Scientology uses the E-Meter as an infallible tool in identifying and locating the most fundamental element of man: his spirit. And people being processed trust auditor and meter implicitly, not only because of Scicntology's aura of religious counseling and benevolence, but because the needle does react, and the auditor seems to know why. One girl I talked to, who had taken assist auditing because she was having serious problems with her boyfriend, who was a Scicntologist, said~.of her auditor and the meter: "I never doubted that he was capable of auditing me. As I remember it, vaguely, he would ask me to take the cans in my hands, which of course at first horrified me-these jam cans in your hands-and the E-Meter would react. I always believed I made it react, if I had something on my mind." C)N(;!~IrSI{}NS 1!)7 The fa~'t tl~:~t a p{~lygraph, much less an E-Nlt'lt'r, is incapable <~f t,'11ing fact from fiction is totally ignored by Scientology. t'c,~plc spin tales of past lives as Nlark Antony, Cleopatra, being zappcd by nasty Martians on some distant planet, pinpointing a dramatic moment 38 trillion years back, and come away from an auditing session convinced they have been telling the trulh. It is as if Scientology ultimately tvants everyone to l~elieve in Gorilla Goals and "Boodtoos" and Being Three Feet In Back Of Your Ilcad. ~v It is nai'vc and facile simply to label Scient{tlogy a fraud and a con; that is not cvcu the point. A con is when you get somebody to pay out m{~ncy for something you say you will do for them, or sell them, and then you do neither. Scientolo~ gives its disciples exacthJ what it promises, from the very first moment a lecturer defines "reality" in Itubbard's terms. If, at tliat moment, you "agree," you accept the definition and believe yourself to be a bundle of chaotic distortions and spiritual contradictions xvhicll Itubbard's system can salvage and enshrine in the universe as a truly free-fl~ating spirit, then Scicntolo~ obviously succeeds. TIic only flucstion y~t~ liavc to ask yourself is xvhcthcr or not L. lion Ilubbard's vision of life is one you fondamcnt~tlly aJcc with. Evcrythit~g else, the nowtcminatcd "suppressions," tim heartbreaking disconnections, the so-called "billion-year" contracts which bind youngsters to Scientolo~ for "ever," tim accusation tim it is tampering with people's minds, all tliat is secondary. That may sound outrageous to yon, lint every step of Scientology evolves from the several declarations I,. Ron Hnbbard makes about what life reall~ is. If you agree with his basic assumptions, ttlen whatever tampering is done to your psyche is nothing less than what you have "agreed" you want done so that you, too, can 198 CONCI,USIONS achieve that perfect state of emptiness which he deftnes as clear. It is a cruel truth, but one I feel I must subscribe to if I am to believe that any sincere determination to keep people from hurting themselves is not enough to justify banning a philosophy or religion. In a society which chooses to call itself free, any body of thought can call itself a philosophy and any one individual can found a religion. If you can make yourself forget the menace of Scientology's Ethics, and forget about some of Hubbard's weirder inventions, one thing remains as a simple and genuine danger. Scientology's intention is to create a Brave New World with no room for outsiders, which, if you stop and think for a moment, is you and me. The pitiable converse to this akeady as every time a devoted scientologist leaves the warmth and security of any of Scientology's intensely active centersremember that every Scientology office always has something going on-and returns, for a time, to the erratic panorama of contemporary society. I know of several instances when members of families have returned from Los Angeles, home of Scientology's American Saint Hill Organization, or from England, or particularly from the Sea Org, one of Hubbard's floating sanctums, and for two days have impressed their loved ones with the love and purity which seems to glow from their very being. Then, because they are not surrounded by fellow Scientologists whose presence recharges their cells with the Right Words and predetermined responses to that constant expression of Scientology's truths, these people dim and darken. Nothing around them seems sufficiently real. It is as if they have come down off a very sweet and shining trip, and only a return to the safety of their Scientology world will restore their functioning realities. Finally, I don't really know what L. Ron Hubbard believes. I've often wondered whether or not he ever read Dr. Nordenholz's book with its dry postulatings of what might be done CONCI,USIONS 199 with man's c~nscioosness, or whctl~er Buckminster Fuller's vivid blasts aleout the Game of Life made more than a passing impression. When he wrote of his visit to tteaven in his HCO Bulletin of May ~, ~963, complete with a description of the Gates, was he only speaking in allegory? Does he really believe that theta~s have done all the things he has written and said they have done, possess all the powers they are presumed to possess; and raising Scientologists to an advanced level of ability where they will be able to absorb it all is the true heart of Scicntology? Or is it simply a brilliantly conceived system of program~ning a human being so that after a certain amount of "processing," at a certain level, he will be prepared to believe . . . anything? When all of L. lion Hubbard's theories and mouthings are reduced to their essentials, when the thetan stands alone, stripped of his theological trappings of "games," "past lives," "randomity," "time tracks," and "implants," one tiny, nagging suspicion lingers on: Is it possible that all of us are simply involved in yet another of this man's vivid flights of fantastic fiction, and it is all nothing less than a superbly evoked living nightmare, manip~t~ttct somcxvhcre by a giant typewriter in the sky? EPILOGUE On Friday, November 9~1, ~969, John McMaster, the first human on earth to achieve Scientology's beatific enlightenment known as Clear, sat down and wrote a long letter to his leader and mentor, L. Ron Hubbard. He began by recounting his unpleasant eneounter in ~967 with the Sea Org's Ethics Mission-the Sea Org being Hubbard's floating arm, persistently expanding and making its presence felt by popping up iust off shore from this or that Scientology organization to watchdog what was going on. McMaster recalled, gratefully, how Hubbard himself had stepped in to save him from the Ethics Mission; "You came to my rescue" is the way he expressed it. He went on to say that he had been wrong to let the matter drop at the time, "beca~se what happened to me has happened in the last two years, Uniustly to many, many people across the earth." In his letter, McMaster described the activities of the Ethics Mission as "the tyrrany [sic] of form monitoring function." Growing gently cautionary, he declared that "People are afraid to talk about their basic feelings even in a session. Many have told me so. Our organizations are not safe enough and hitting them with savage and vicious ethics does not help." The point he was making was that using Ethics to solve Scientology's problems was in reality creating greater and more dangerous problems. Then he dropped his bomb: he tendered his resignation from the Sea Org and thus from Scientology itself. His reason? So that such a thing of form monitoring function stops dead and it shall never Imppen to me or any other person again. 9,01 202 EPILOGIIE It is impossible to know from tim letter whether one specific incident finally prompted tile man to take a more careful look at what he ]lad been living for so many years. He cites but two; the alleged kidnapping and dungeonfag of an extremely successful Scientologist named Alan Walter, and ~e as-yet unsolved m~ders of two Scientolo~sts in Los Angeles late in ~. Concerning Walter, he wrote that ~e man ~couId not be the sour~ of the cu~ent e~sfing ~n~fion-~ I assume a ~ndiHon which would have been defned by Hubbard as ~presenting a clear threat to Scientology. "Whatever his negative actions may or may not have been, they could have had no si~cance whatsoever if there had not been vast 6e]ds of fe~le soil for them to ~ow in." What McMaster treats with such delicate c~cumspecfion is the wild nmor extant in Scientolo~ c~cles ~at Walter had been called to a meeting ~th Hubbard when one of ~e ships was anchored off Ca~z. He had flown over, had been piped aboard ~th pomp and ceremony, and had then been seized, shackled, and ~own below dec~ where, the tale ~ntinues, he lingers even yet. Con~m~g the b~tal killings of the ~o Scientolo~sts, McMaster ~tes: "~ese last ~o ghastly murders of our students near ASHO in Los Angeles, one of whom is Clear, need never have happened, if we hadn't been moc~ng up Enemy so solidly." To ~te~ret that as simply as possible, Scientolo~ teaches its foHowers to deal wi~ that which represents an Enemy by in ~e~ ~ng it substance, a tangible rea~ty-~ny clay fi~fines, for ~ample-and then dea~ng with ~ese mock-ups decisively. ~e only sha~efing ~nclusion to be &a~ from what MeMotee says is ~at ~ese ~o had ~me to represent ~e Enemy so sorry fo~omeone that ~ey were dealt ~th too derisively. ~e ~sual ~ssibiR~ of ~s makes ~e blood ~n ~ld. Hubbard's response to ~e McMaster leRer-ff one ~ to be~eve ~e l~d tale now c~culafing ~ong those who fled the movement at about ~e same ~e-w~ to send some of ~ ~, . ~ '~,. ~: ~ ~ EPII, OGUE 2o3 Ethics squad over t~/Staten Island where McMaster was living and allegedly try to kidnap him. McMastcr is said to have managed a telephone call to another formidable ex-Scientologist named Bernard Green, who in turn called McMaster's lawyer. The upshot of this story is that the Ethics mob melted away, apparently fearful of attracting the attention of local police. What followed sounds even more like a badly written espionage melodrama. Convinced that all airports were under surveillance by members of the Ethics Mission eager to grab him, McMastcr was spirited on board a Greek freighter bound for his home, South Africa. Now safely there--he was met by his father who had apparently been alerted to local efforts at nabbing his son-he still entertains hopes of some kind of a rapprochement. At least that is what Bernard Green told me. He used that word, rapprochement, when he said a meeting had actually been proposed between McMaster, himself, and Hubbard on neutral territory, in Switzerland. Green seemed to find this perfectly plausible, that the three of them might all sit down and calmly discuss their various grievances. (Let me remind you again that an overwhelming number of former Scientologists would return to the movement instantly if they felt Hubbard had made certain sincere changes in the organization's strncture.) McMaster himself closed his letter by saying he wished to return home and do "the Hubbard Standard Dianetic Course and continue to distribute our Tcch to the people of earth." Obviously, he wanted to keep the door open, hoping still that Hubbard might see the tragedy of his ways and make some changes. I suppose I can understand a man of the devotion of John McMaster closing his eyes to instances of inelegant punishment performed in the name of Scientology. After all, his own radiating sense of forgiveness, his electric innocence and apparent inner peace, have served. as living proof that Scientology can indeed do what it claims. What I cannot understand is an offensive air of righteousness that pervades the conversations 204 EPILOGUE of some of the many other Scientologists xvho left simultaneously with the dissemination of the McMaster letter. Bernard Green, for example, who is a small, chunkily built man with an incessant bouncing joviality about him, claims to have been Hubbard's confidant for twenty years, from the very beginning, having assumed numerous responsibilities in spreading The Word to the four corners of the globe. He recounted some of the more grisly tales floating around throughout the movement's disenchanted members with a relish bordering on glee. The stories, none substantiated, are certainly terrifying: a seventy-two-year-old woman hurled down a flight of stairs by members of the Sea Org's Ethics Mission; two children, one five years old, the other four-and-a-half, put into chains on one of the Sea Org's ships; a man in Los Angeles punished for some anti-Scientological action by having highpressure water hoses turned on him until he was pounded senseless. There is also an allegation that the Church of Scientology in Manhattan operates a "jail" in Brooklyn for enemies of the movement. The atrocities, and they can certainly be called that if true, seem to represent an inspiring aspect to be recalled by all who have left what one ex-Scientologist soberly refers to as "the paramilitary structure of Scientology." Green, a man who clearly seems to be enjoying the upheaval he is part of, asked if I believed any of the stories. I could only say that they didn't sound impossible, considering that the policies of Scientology's Ethics do indeed exist, are available in one of the movement's widely sold books, and are apparently being energetically practiced by Hubbard's Sea Org Missionaries. What of course I cannot and will not understand, ever, 'Is what took everybody so long if, as is now claimed, these horror stories have been common knowledge for literally years. Green's answer that all of them were being led on by what he calls "the golden carrot"-Hubbard's promise of Total Freedom-is totally inadequate. Unless, of course, they were led to believe not that Scientology was capable of !'ZI'11~()(;~?I,~ 205 developing at~d ~'xph~iting their existing abilities, b~t that it could and wutdd make them all Super-Beings. Super-Beings, as history has taught us, can blithely ignore most of what goes on around them l~ccause they are involved in the business of being Super. We must never forget that no matter what Ilubbard has done, he has commanded an incredible a{fccticmate loyalty from those who carrel-ehested man with red hair, even now, Jolm McMaster closes his l<'tter as follows: I shall never withdraw my allegiance from your love or the proc{uct of your love, nor shall I withdraw allegiance from all p~ple of earth and their attempts to attain Infinite Freedom, particularly those who work with our Tech to further man's attempts to attain Infinite Freedom. I shall contirade to give your love to the world. As always, my love to you, (signed) John MeMaster. The entire letter, its tone so sincerely beseeching, so devoted, and-yes-so almost obedient, made me remember all over again the first time I had ever sec'n Jolm McMaster. His manner in front of that adoring crowd, and his certainty, and his loving benevolence, and his infinite patience with that in all of us which is most unceRain-our capacity to believe-it all came back. And now he had quit. Once more, I heard him saying to all of us, "How can there be two sides to the t~th?" I think John McMaster may finally have answered that question for himself. ================================================================= If this is a copyrighted work, you are acknowledging by receipt of this document from FACTNet that on the basis of reasonable investigation, you have not been to obtain a copy elsewhere at a fair price, and that you are and will abide by the following copyright warning. WARNING CONCERNING COPYRIGHT RESTRICTIONS: The copyright law of the United States (Title 17, United States Code) governs the making of photo copies or other reproductions of copyrighted material. Under certain conditions specified by law, libraries and archives are authorized to furnish a photocopy or other reproduction. One of these specified conditions is that the photocopy or reproduction is not to be "used for any purpose other than private study, scholarship, or research." 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