Chapter 5
- The creation of Dianetics is a milestone for Man comparable to his discovery of fire and superior to his inventions of the wheel and arch.... This is useful knowledge. With it the blind again see, the lame walk, the ill recover, the insane become sane and the sane become saner.
- -- L. Ron Hubbard
Who are you? Have you lived before? What is your name? Say your name over to yourself a few times. Say it over and over. Come on, say it some more. Now say your name a few more times. Now say it a few more just to make sure of it.
That is right. Better go back and do it a few more times if you missed.
All right. Now let's ask it again. Who are you? Where did you really come from?
How do you know you haven't lived before?
Dianetic techniques indicate that you have. And Dianetics, which has revealed so much to the Western World, comes up now with this strange data. You are you. But you may have lived elsewhere under another name without even suspecting it yourself.
- -- L. Ron Hubbard, Have You Lived Before This Life?
The book Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health is to Scientologists much the same as the Bible is to Christians: the indisputable word of God (Hubbard) which provides the rationale for belief and the basis for faith. Interestingly, just as there are many Christians who do not read the Bible, there are many Scientologists who either have not read Dianetics, or who have tried to read it and been put off by its style, which one writer calls "abstruse, rambling, repetitive, studded with confusing neologisms and littered with interminable footnotes." (1)
In spite of its style, however, the Dianetics book was a publisher's dream. Although the original printing of the book was a cautious 6,000 copies and initial sales were slow, by the end of 1950 sales had reached over 150,000 copies. The book sparked an avalanche of interest across the country in this new do-it-yourself psychotherapy.
Part of the success of the book had to do with the sweeping promises made by Hubbard throughout the book. Never one to be modest, Hubbard claimed that in Dianetics, "the hidden source of all psychosomatic ills and human aberration has been discovered and skills have been developed for their invariable cure."
He grandiloquently surveys the scope of Dianetics in the beginning of the book: "A science of mind is a goal which has engrossed thousands of generations of man. Armies, dynasties and whole civilizations have perished for the lack of it. Rome went to dust for the want of it. And down in the arsenal is an atom bomb, its hopeful nose full-armed in ignorance of it."
"No quest," he continues, "has been more relentlessly pursued or has been more violent. No primitive tribe, no matter how ignorant, has failed to recognize the problem as a problem, nor has it failed to bring forth at least an attempted formulation."
In Dianetics, he concluded, the answer has at last been found.
His promises of salvation were like manna from heaven for the thousands of souls who sought then, and still seek, relief from the vicissitudes of life. Like shipwreck survivors in a tossing sea, people by the thousands grasped desperately for the lifeline Hubbard was dangling from the passing rescue ship. The recently formed Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation in Elizabeth, New Jersey, was soon inundated with calls and letters requesting more information about the new "science."
The problem, according to Hubbard, was basically simple. The mind is actually like a computer. "The optimum brain," he writes in Evolution of a Science, a small book telling the story of his discovery of Dianetics, "should be able to recall any perception, even the trivial, asleep and awake from the beginning of life to death. It should think with such swiftness that vocal pondering would be utterly unable to keep pace with a thousandth part of one computation. And ... it should never be wrong." (2)
The mind, which in Dianetics theory is composed of what are called the "memory banks," "contains a complete color-video record of a person's whole life. Every perception observed in a lifetime is to be found in the (memory) banks. All the perceptions. In good order." (3)
The memories, he continues, "are filed by time. They have an age and emotional label, a state of physical being label, and a precise and exhaustive record of everything perceived by organic sensation, smell, taste, tactile, audio and visio perceptics plus the train of thought of the analyzer of that moment." (4)
But something must be wrong. Most of us cannot remember every memory, awake and asleep, of our lives. Why not?
There is, Hubbard explains, a villain in the piece, a villain known in Dianetics as the "reactive mind." The reactive mind is the dark side of the mind, similar in function to the subconscious mind of psychoanalysis.
The reactive mind thinks in identities. It is a stimulus-response mind. Its actions are exteriorly determined. It has no power of choice. It puts physical pain data forward in an effort to save the organism. So long as its mandates and commands are obeyed it withholds the physical pain. As soon as the organism starts to go against its commands, it inflicts the pain. (5)
The contents of the reactive mind are "engrams," and other memories which function as reminders of the engrams, called "locks."
An engram is an energy picture. It is made during a period of physical pain when the analyzer is out of circuit and the organism experiences something it conceives to be or which is contrary to survival. An engram is received only in the absence of the analytical power. (6)
The engram contains the memory of actual physical pain and unconsciousness, known in Dianetics as "anaten."
For example, suppose Johnny is playing with his sister Susie in the kitchen while Mommy is doing the laundry. It is raining outside. There is the sound of running water and the smell of bleach in the air.
Susie hits Johnny on the right side of his head with a toy, hard enough to cut his skin and knock him unconscious momentarily. The elements of an engram are present: pain and unconsciousness. The memory of this experience would be filed in Johnny's reactive mind as an engram.
Years later, the adult Johnny finds that every time it rains, he tends to get a headache, and it is always on the right side of his head. His mysterious headaches also occur whenever his wife does the laundry and he hears water running or smells the odor of bleach. Experiences which are similar in content to an original engram produce the same body responses as in the engram being "restimulated."
But through Dianetic auditing, Hubbard promises, Johnny can be taken back in time through earlier and earlier memories of headaches (the locks) to the original engram which holds the chain of memories in place in the mind. Once Johnny is able to recall the original memory of the time when he was hit in the head by Susie, then the engram is discharged and can no longer produce reactive effects in the present.
In this way, Hubbard promises that freedom from all psychosomatic problems can be achieved with Dianetic auditing. The person who, through auditing, discharges all the engrams from his reactive mind will achieve the state of "clear," in which he no longer has a reactive mind. Its contents have been refiled in the analytical mind and are available for conscious recall by the "clear."
Refile the reactive memories and the whole conscious lifetime of the individual springs into view, brilliant and clear, unmodified by the by-pass circuits which are madness. Reduce the reactive mind and the optimum mind for the individual comes into view. (7)
If Dianetics had sprung full-blown from the mind of Hubbard, and if Dianetics in practice yielded the stellar results promised for it, then Hubbard might have achieved legitimate fame.
The fact is that in Dianetics, Hubbard's genius was more for synthesis than for thesis. While in the Oak Knoll Naval Hospital in 1945, Hubbard spent many hours in the medical library, doing research which would find its fruition in the publication of Dianetics five years later.
One man who has researched Hubbard's researches, Jeff Jacobsen, says that in creating Dianetics, Hubbard may have drawn from the works of at least seven well known researchers in the field of the mind, some of whose writings were published just prior to Hubbard's stay in Oak Knoll. This writer states that Hubbard drew from the work of two men, Drs. Sadger and Pailthorpe, who published in the Psychoanalytic Review in 1941, and who stressed the importance of prenatal memories in mental pathology. (8)
Other sources for Dianetics cited by Jacobsen include Freud's abreaction therapy, in which early memories are relived, thereby discharging their power in later life; Korzybski's General Semantics, in which a concept very similar to the reactive mind is explored; the book The Mneme by Simon, where the word "engram" was originally coined; and the science of Cybernetics, which was very popular at the time Hubbard was writing Dianetics.
Hubbard always claimed that a great deal of research and testing had gone into Dianetics:
The discoveries and developments which made the formulation of Dianetics possible occupied many years of exact research and careful testing. (9)
Discovered, computed, and organized by L. Ron Hubbard, mathematician and theoretical philosopher, DIANETICS has been under study for twenty-five years and in active formulation for the past eleven. (10)
By early 1950 over two hundred patients had been tested; of those two hundred people, two hundred cures had been obtained. Dianetics is a science because by following readily prescribed techniques, which can be specifically stated, based on definitely stated basic postulates, a specifically described result can be obtained in every case. (11)
Hubbard applied the first step of the scientific method: he stated his hypothesis. Unfortunately, he ignored the remaining steps of the scientific process. It was his promise of scientific testing that drew some of the early professionals into Hubbard's early circle.
Hubbard's failure to produce even a single empirical test for Dianetics was also the reason why many of these same professionals left Hubbard almost as quickly as they had come.
Jacobsen states, "Anyone can make as many outlandish claims as he wants, but the research must be accessible and reproducible to support those claims if he brandishes scientific validity." (12)
Dianetics, and Scientology for that matter, have yet to be subjected to empirical validation by the scientific method. And until they are, these "mental sciences" remain just another brand of snake oil.
As the practice of Dianetics evolved during the early 1950s, Hubbard began to introduce the concept of past lives into auditing with increasing frequency, another clue to his relationship with his mentor, Aleister Crowley, in whose occult circle the pursuit of past life memories was a frequent diversion.
The addition of the occult belief system in reincarnation surfaced publicly in Scientology in 1958, in another strange Hubbard book, Have You Lived Before This Life? In the Introduction to this book, Hubbard writes:
In the past the term reincarnation has mystified man. The definition has been corrupted. The word has been taken to mean to be born again in different life forms, whereas its actual definition is to be born again into the flesh or into another body. In order that there can be rebirth, something must enter in. This is the being, the person himself. It is YOU.
The existence of past lives is proven in Scientology.
The concept of reincarnation and Man's belief in the past and future continuum is as old as Man himself. It can be traced to the beginnings of thirty-one primitive cultures and has dominated almost every religion through history as a pivotal belief.
The Egyptians, Hindus, Buddhists, Jainists, Sikhists, Brahmans, Neo Platonists, Christians, Romans, Jews and Gnostics all believed in reincarnation and the rebirth cycle.
It was a fundamental belief in the Roman Catholic Church until 553 AD when a company of four monks held the Synod of Constantinople, (without the Pope present) and decided the belief could not exist. They condemned the teachings of reincarnation as heresy and it was at this time that references to it were expunged from the Bible.
Without reference to the subject as the written word, the belief fell to the mystics and spiritualists of the middle ages. These too, were defeated, but the belief persisted and again was rediscovered in the 19th century in the beginnings of psychology.
Freud and Jung acknowledged Man's belief in his own immortality and reincarnation. Their mistake was only in assigning this basic truth to imagination or fantasy.
Today in Scientology, the stigma of the subject has been erased and verification of the existence of past lives is fact.
To some these facts may come as a surprise. To others it may be as casual as looking at an old photo album. But to everyone it will be a unique and enlightening adventure into the past, all in the course of discovering a brighter future. (13)
The "remembering" of past lives in Dianetics has become tradition. In Dianetic auditing the student is coaxed to remember earlier and earlier experiences. He will know from other students that memory of past lives is expected. The expectation is enforced by a process called "Review auditing," in which the student reluctant or unable to "remember his past lives" is given special "remedies" to handle this obstacle. The fact that the Review auditing is even more expensive than regular auditing -- at several hundred dollars an hour -- provides incentive for the student to overcome his inability to "remember" as quickly as possible.
In Dianetic auditing, procedure is followed strictly by the book. A set of rote commands is used in this auditing, and they must be delivered exactly as written. The "items" to be "run" are various physical or psychosomatic problems that are located in an assessment done on the E-meter before the Dianetic auditing is begun. Examples of "somatics" that can be run in Dianetics are: a sharp pain in the forehead, pain in the stomach, a burning sensation in the eyes, feeling hot, an itching sensation on the skin, or a feeling of fear, sadness, anger, etc.
The commands used in Dianetics go something like this:
"Locate an incident containing `a sharp pain in the forehead'."
"When was it?"
"What is the duration of the incident?"
"Move to the beginning of the incident and tell me when you are there."
"What do you see?"
"Scan through to the end of the incident."
"Tell me what happened."
"Is there an earlier incident containing `a sharp pain in the forehead'?"
Etc.
An interesting example of "running past lives" is given in Hubbard's book, Have You Lived Before This Life?, and is reproduced here. The dialogue alternates between "Preclear" (person being audited) and the Auditor.
AUDITOR: Are you interested in running "pain in the left side?"
PRECLEAR: Yes.
AUDITOR: OK. Locate an incident of another causing you "pain in the left side."
PRECLEAR: Yes. Go to one.
AUDITOR: Good. When was it?
PRECLEAR: It was my accident two months ago.
AUDITOR: Good. Move to that incident.
PRECLEAR: OK.
AUDITOR: What is the duration of the incident?
PRECLEAR: Well, less than a minute.
AUDITOR: OK. Move to the beginning of the incident.
PRECLEAR: Uh huh. (eyes closed)
AUDITOR: What do you see?
PRECLEAR: A street and the inside of my car.
AUDITOR: All right. Move through the incident to a point "less than a minute" later.
PRECLEAR: (Preclear does this and then opens his eyes)
AUDITOR: Tell me what happened.
PRECLEAR: I started up when the light turned green then suddenly I heard brakes and it was like a big bump -- but really hard -- as the other car crashed into the side of my car. I smacked into the car door just as it buckled, then my car slid off to the right and came to a stop against a street lamp.
AUDITOR: OK. Move to the beginning of the incident. Tell me when you are there.
PRECLFAR: All right.
AUDITOR: OK. Scan through to the end of the incident.
PRECLEAR: (silent) OK.
AUDITOR: Tell me what happened.
PRECLEAR: I was starting into the intersection and I heard the screech of brakes. And then a smash as his car plowed into mine. The car door buckled just as I was slammed against it. Then my car skidded to the right and into a street lamp post. I was startled. I felt my side and it was all bloody. Then it started to hurt. I held my hand there to stop the bleeding. I thought I'd die.
AUDITOR: All right. Is there an earlier incident of another causing you "pain in the left side?"
PRECLEAR: Yes, there is.
AUDITOR: Good. When was it?
PRECLEAR: 1962 -- spring.
AUDITOR: All right. Move to that incident.
PRECLEAR: Uh huh.
AUDITOR: What is the duration of the incident?
PRECLEAR: About a week.
AUDITOR: OK. Move to the beginning of the incident.
PRECLEAR: OK. (eyes closed)
AUDITOR: What do you see?
PRECLEAR: The football field and stadium at my high school.
AUDITOR: All right. Move through the incident to a point "about a week" later.
PRECLEAR: (silently does this, then looks up)
AUDITOR: Tell me what happened.
PRECLEAR: I went out for the track team and after school we jogged around and around the field -- to get into shape. I got an excruciating pain in my side almost every day for two weeks.
AUDITOR: OK. Move to the beginning of the incident. Tell me when you are there.
PRECLEAR: I'm there.
AUDITOR: Good. Scan through to the end of the incident.
PRECLEAR: (silently does this) OK.
AUDITOR: Tell me what happened.
PRECLEAR: We ran around and around the field and the coach pushed us a little harder each day and each day the pain would turn on in my side. It hurt terribly.
AUDITOR: All right. Is there an earlier incident of another causing you "pain in the left side?"
PRECLEAR: Ummm ... (long pause) yes, I guess so.
AUDITOR: Good. When was it?
PRECLEAR: World War I, I think. It was 1917.
AUDITOR: All right. Move to that incident.
PRECLEAR: OK. I did it.
AUDITOR: Good. What is the duration of the incident?
PRECLEAR: 2 or 3 minutes -- It's pretty short.
AUDITOR: OK. Move to the beginning of the incident.
PRECLEAR: OK. (eyes closed)
AUDITOR: Fine. what do you see?
PRECLEAR: Well, I can see No Man's Land in the flashes of explosions and a soldier coming at me with a bayonet.
AUDITOR: Good. Move through the incident to a point "2 or 3 minutes" later.
PRECLEAR: (silent -- then opens his eyes)
AUDITOR: What happened?
PRECLEAR: I was up over the embankment out in front of the trenches and suddenly I saw a soldier coming at me with his bayonet. He stabbed me in the side with it.
AUDITOR: All right. Move to the beginning of the incident. Tell me when you are there.
PRECLEAR: Uh huh.
AUDITOR: Scan through to the end of the incident.
PRECLEAR: (does so, silently) Uh huh.
AUDITOR: Tell me what happened.
PRECLEAR: I was out in front of the trenches -- we were running forward. There were cannons firing and there were flashes from explosions now and then. I suddenly saw an enemy soldier. I called out to warn the men I was with. The soldier leapt at me with his bayonet and stabbed me in the side. It hurt a lot and I bled a lot. I was taken back to a field hospital behind the lines where I died a few days later.
AUDITOR: All right. Is there an earlier incident of another causing you "pain in the left side?"
PRECLEAR: Let me see ... yes, there is.
AUDITOR: Good. when was it?
PRECLEAR: Oh, it had to be... it was, 1823.
AUDITOR: All right. Move to that incident.
PRECLEAR: OK
AUDITOR: Good. What is the duration of the incident?
PRECLEAR: 5 minutes.
AUDITOR: All right. Move to the beginning of that incident.
PRECLEAR: All right. (eyes closed)
AUDITOR: What do you see?
PRECLEAR: A gate house, 2 horses, trees, a road.
AUDITOR: OK. Move through the incident to a point "5 minutes" later.
PRECLEAR: (silent -- then opens eyes)
AUDITOR: What happened?
PRECLEAR: I had ridden up the road towards a big estate. I'd stopped at the gate house and was just getting back onto my horse when he shied and threw me against another rider next to me. I hurt my side against his boot and stirrup. It was very painful and I had to be helped back onto my horse and I rode slowly on up the road.
AUDITOR: All right. Move to the beginning of the incident. Tell me when you are there.
PRECLEAR: Yes.
AUDITOR: Scan through to the end of the incident.
PRECLEAR: (silent) OK.
AUDITOR: Tell me what happened.
PRECLEAR: I had been riding fast to give my neighbor some news -- I was very upset -- I don't know what about though it seems like someone had died or was dying. I stopped to tell the gateman what had happened. I ran out to get on my horse and as I was mounting, the horse shied and threw me to the left. I landed against the boot and stirrup of a rider next to me, then fell to the ground. It knocked the wind out of me and hurt like the dickens. I was helped up onto my horse. (Preclear laughs) Well that's a relief -- I mean the pain's gone -- that's all there was to it -- I scared my horse. Oh! and that's why I hurt so much when I was running in school -- it was like riding the horse that day -- pushing him faster and faster. And then the pain would start. It was the same pain. No wonder. Well, that's the end of that. (Preclear grinning) (14)
A successful Dianetics session always ends with a "cognition" on the part of the Preclear, as well as what are called in Dianetics "very good indicators," meaning that the Preclear is smiling and looking good.
In Hubbard's writings about Dianetics, he claims to be able to cure almost every illness imaginable. For example, in the inner front flap of the original Dianetics book jacket:
Psychosomatic ills such as arthritis, migraine, ulcers, allergies, asthma, coronary difficulties (psychosomatic -- about one third of all heart trouble cases), tendonitis, bursitis, paralysis (hysterical), eye trouble (non-pathological), have all responded as intended by the therapist, without failure in any case.
The claims made for the "clear" in the Dianetics book are spectacular.
A clear can be tested for any and all psychoses, neuroses, compulsions and repressions (all aberrations) and can be examined for any autogenic (self-generated) diseases referred to as psychosomatic ills. These tests confirm the clear to be entirely without such ills or aberrations. Additional tests of his intelligence indicate it to be high above the current norm. Observation of his activity demonstrates that he pursues existence with vigor and satisfaction. (15)
Hubbard harbored a special grudge against psychiatrists. In a policy letter on psychiatry, he states:
A full psychoanalysis covering five years cost a decade ago 9000 pounds (British sterling). Yet we furnish far more lasting a result for $500.... It costs about $75,000 to educate a psychiatrist who can obtain no good result. For $500 or less we can train a Hubbard Dianetic auditor who can run rings around any commie psychiatrist on the planet.... Any HAS (the lowest level Scientologist) knows more and can do more about the mind than any psychiatrist. (16)
Hubbard claimed that Dianetics could cure leukemia:
Leukemia is evidently psychosomatic in origin and at least eight cases of leukemia have been treated successfully by Dianetics after medicine had traditionally given up. The source of leukemia has been reported to be an engram containing the phrase "It turns my blood to water." (17)
In A History of Man, Hubbard claims the ability to cure the ultimate disease -- cancer.
Mitosis is an incident. Cellular division, once or many times, is on common record. Mitosis answers the conditions for the other type of cancer -- malignant cell.
Cancer has been eradicated by auditing out conception and mitosis. (18)
The sad fact is that there have been many cases of people in Scientology seeking cures for cancer and other terminal conditions through Dianetic auditing, and sadly, ignoring more traditional medical help that might have prolonged their lives.
Hubbard claimed many times to have the answer to every type of psychosis and neurosis, announcing at one time that these cases could be handled in between eight to thirty-five hours of auditing.
Some of the most interesting Hubbard curiosa occur when he attempts to expound upon medical topics. One such example is outlined in a policy he wrote concerning arthritis:
Arthritis, then, is structurally a deposit of calcium, or other mineral, in an area which has been restricted by an old injury. The injury is held in suspension and in place in the area by restimulation of the environment which contains some of the factors present when that area was injured. It is a condition of such an injury, in order to be in suspension sufficiently to cause arthritis, that the sufferer himself must have administered a like injury to another person. (19)
And in another curious bulletin on eyesight and eyeglasses, Hubbard writes:
It is interesting to know that a thetan doesn't look through his eyeballs. He has two little gold discs, one in front of each eye lens. These are not the lenses of the eyes, but, as you might say, mocked-up energy. They are little gold discs that are superimposed over the eye and he looks through these. The eyeballs merely serve to locate these discs. (20)
By auditing the person on these discs, Hubbard claims to produce fantastic changes in eyesight. In the same bulletin, Hubbard explains astigmatism:
Astigmatism, a distortion of image, is only an anxiety to alter the image. You get an astigmatic condition when a person is trying to work it over into a substitute, if he possibly can. Here again it is a case of not enough -- he didn't have enough.
Is that clear?
Hubbard claimed that auditing could eliminate a person's vulnerability to radiation, and he claimed that Scientologists would, as a result, be the only persons to live through World War III. He first wrote:
As cosmic rays, gamma, x-rays, et al, apparently move through solids without encountering resistance, they then invalidate solids. This is a direct invalidation of the solidity of anything including a mock-up. Thus it tends to say a thing is not there -- thus that a creation has not been made....
Radiation, then, is the proof that a thing solid is not solid. This is an invalidation that one has created. Thus Radiation is seen to hit at all creativeness. Its irresponsibility factor is also this -- one cannot be responsible for things which are proven not to exist....
This also tells us that time began on an invalidation of solids....
In actual proof Procedure CCH [a Scientology auditing procedure] ... resolves Radiation. (21)
A year later he wrote:
I have been conducting a series of experiments, one of them almost fatal to myself, on the auditing of radiation burns. I have found that we can make an enormous effect upon radiation burns and can cure them in a milder form. That means we are the only agency, the only people on the face of the Earth who can cure the effect of atomic radiation. I expect to make further progress in this direction and the whole answer is not yet gained, for the whole answer would be to actually proof a body against radiation itself. (22)
Hubbard later "solved" this problem, claiming that a body could be "proofed against radiation" by taking megadoses of the vitamin niacin.
Hubbard's insights into the illnesses of human beings were also aided by his innovative work with plants. An example of this follows:
Recently I have been studying life sources and reactions in plants. I have gained data now which, on preliminary look, indicates that a plant becomes ill only pursuant to a series of shocks which make "it decide" it cannot survive. Only after that does it "cooperate" with a disease. Up to that time it cannot seem to get ill....
This bears itself out in human beings more obviously than in plants. Illness follows postulates to die. (23)
These are just a few examples of the writings of Hubbard re: the "science" of Dianetics, the "milestone for Man comparable to his discovery of fire and superior to his inventions of the wheel and the arch...."
Other than being an adventure in fantasy for those so inclined, is there any harm to Dianetics? Yes, say two researchers who have looked into Scientology in some depth: Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman believe that "prolonged auditing can cause people to experience `increasingly realistic hallucinations' so that eventually the individual can no longer `distinguish between what he is experiencing and what he is only imagining'." (24) This, indeed, is the true danger of Dianetics.
Hubbard poses a final question for his followers:
Up there are the stars. Down in the arsenal is an atom bomb.
Which one is it going to be? (25)
The book Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health can still be found on the shelves of most bookstores today, its yellow cover beckoning yet another person to pick it up and discover the "Road to Total Freedom."
Or could it be the road to nowhere?