Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief (11 page)

In his letters, Hubbard continually speculates about the book he hopes to finish soon. “It ain’t
agin
religion
,” he boasts to Heinlein. “It just abolishes it.… It’s science, boy, science.” He makes a vague reference to the research he’s performing on children. “This hellbroth I cooked up works remarkably well on kids,” he remarks. “Took a scared little kid that was supposed to be stupid and was failing everything and worked on him about thirty-five hours just to make sure. That was last month. So now he turns up this afternoon with all A’s and all of a sudden reading Shakespeare.” He was also noting improvement in himself, both in his work and in his recovered sexual powers. “I am cruising on four hours sleep a night. But the most interesting thing is, I’m up to eight comes. In an evening, that is.”

Heinlein was eager for details. Hubbard responded by outlining what he would later call the
Tone Scale. It describes the range of human emotional states, from one to four. At bottom, there is Apathy, then Anger. These lower tones were governed by the unconscious, which Hubbard says should be called the “
reactive mind.” The third level, which was as yet untitled, is the normal state for most of humanity; and the fourth is a condition of happiness and industriousness. Hubbard’s experimental technique aimed at raising an individual out of the lower tones and into the superior state of the fourth tone. His method, as he described it to Heinlein, was to drain off the painful experiences and associations that an individual has accumulated in his lifetime. Once that’s done, “astonishing results take place.” Asthma, headaches, arthritis, menstrual cramps, astigmatism, and ulcers simply disappear. There is a huge boost in competence. The reactive mind is eliminated, and the rational mind takes over.

At the end of April 1949, Hubbard sent a note to Heinlein that he was moving to Washington, DC, for an indefinite stay. There was no word about
Sara. Three weeks later, the thirty-eight-year-old Hubbard applied for a license in Washington to marry twenty-six-year-old
Ann Jensen. The application was canceled the next day at the request of the bride. Perhaps she had learned that Hubbard was already married to his second wife and had previously committed bigamy. In any case, Ann Jensen’s name disappears from Hubbard’s life story.

He and Sara moved to
Elizabeth, New Jersey, where
John Campbell, Hubbard’s editor at
Astounding Science-Fiction
before the war, resided. Campbell visited Hubbard often and became one of his first and most important converts. “Dammit, the man’s got
something—and something big,” he wrote excitedly to Heinlein.

Campbell underwent the treatment, which employed “deep hypnosis
.” In that entranced state, Campbell was able to retrieve traumatic memories of his birth. “I was born
with a cord wrapped around my neck, strangling me,” he recounted to Heinlein. The doctor who delivered him, whom Campbell now remembered had a German accent, had barked at Campbell’s mother, saying, “You must stop fighting—you are killing him. Relax!” Later, the doctor put some corrosive medication in the baby’s eyes, and said, “You’ll forget all about this in a little while.” Campbell characterized these instructions as “unshakeable post-hypnotic commands of tremendous force,” which governed much of his subsequent behavior. “The neighbor bratlings could tease me
unmercifully—and did—because I couldn’t fight,” he told Heinlein; his mother would often attempt to console him by telling him that he would forget the painful experiences of his childhood soon enough, with the result that many of the most important moments of his life were lost to him. “Ron’s technique consists of bringing these old memories into view, and then
erasing
the
memory,” Campbell explained. He writes that although he now doesn’t remember his actual birth, he does remember retrieving it and relating it to
Hubbard, who then erased the real memory, with its painful associations, leaving Campbell with the experience of knowing what happened to him without actually having the memory continue its sinister influence. Obviously, the line between a real memory and an implanted one, or a
confabulation, was very difficult to draw.

This was the most potent medicine ever discovered, Campbell continued, but also the most dangerous weapon imaginable if not properly handled. “With the knowledge I now have, I could turn most ordinary people into homicidal maniacs within one hour.” And yet, as an editor, Campbell recognized the commercial possibilities: “This is the greatest story in the world—far bigger than the atomic bomb.” He added in a postscript that he had also lost twenty pounds
in twenty-five days—another commercial bonanza. Campbell was beside himself because Hubbard had yet to actually start writing the book. “The key to world sanity
is in Ron Hubbard’s head, and there isn’t even an adequate written record!”

In December, Ron and Sara moved into what Hubbard termed “a little old shack
” in Bayhead, New Jersey, with eight bedrooms, near the beach. In March 1950, he sent the Heinleins a handmade miniature book catalogue from “Hubbard House” publishers, proclaiming the spring collection:

Announcing
A New Hubbard Edition
Completely New Material
Not
a revision
Co-Authors—Ron & Sara Hubbard
Release Date March 8, ’50—11:50 A.M.
Weight—9 lbs. 2 oz. — Height—21 in.
Alexis Valerie
Has received rave notices from all reviewers!

Alexis was the image of her father, who delighted in her precociousness. “Ron is going at
a little less than the speed of light all day and every day,” Sara wrote to the Heinleins, “then, in the middle of the night he goes in and tells Alexis all about it.”

Ron promised to send Heinlein a galley of
Dianetics
as soon as it was available. He reported that it was 180,000 words, “begun Jan. 12, ’50
, finished Feb. 10, off the press by April 25.” When one of his followers asked Hubbard how he had been able to dash it off so quickly, Hubbard said that his
guardian spirit, the Empress, had dictated
it to him.

Like several other prominent sci-fi writers of the Golden Age, including Heinlein and
A. E. van Vogt, Hubbard had been strongly influenced by the writings of
Alfred Korzybski, a Polish American philosopher who created the
theory of general semantics. In New Jersey, Sara read Korzybski
and quoted several passages aloud to Ron, who immediately grasped the ideas as the basis for a system of psychology, if not for a whole religion.

Korzybski pointed out that words are not the things they describe, in the same way that a map is not the territory it represents. Language shapes thinking, creating mental habits, which can stand in the way of sanity by preserving delusions. Korzybski argued that emotional disturbances, learning disorders, and many psychosomatic illnesses—including heart problems, skin diseases, sexual disorders, migraines, alcoholism, arthritis, even dental cavities—could be remedied by semantic training, much as Hubbard would claim for his own work. He cited Korzybski frequently, although he admitted that he could never get through the texts themselves. “Bob Heinlein sat down
one time and talked for ten whole minutes on the subject of Korzybski to me and it was very clever,” he later related. “I know quite a bit about Korzybski’s works.”

From this secondhand knowledge, Hubbard saw the need for creating a
special vocabulary, which would allow him to define old thoughts in new ways (the soul becomes a
thetan, for instance); or invent new words, such as “enturbulate” (confuse) and “hatting” (training); or use words and phrases in a novel manner, such as turning adjectives or verbs into nouns, or vice versa (“an overt,” “a static,” “alter-isness”); plus a Pentagon-level glut of acronyms—all of which would entrap his followers in a self-referential semantic labyrinth.

Hubbard granted his friend and acolyte John Campbell a scoop by letting him buy a lengthy excerpt of his forthcoming book. Thus
the world got its first look at
Dianetics
in the pages of
Astounding Science-Fiction
. “This article is
not
a hoax
, joke, or anything but a direct, clear statement of a totally new scientific thesis,” Campbell warns his readers, who might be confused by finding a work of scholarship in a pulp magazine. “I know dianetics is
one of, if not the greatest, discovery of all Man’s written and unwritten history,” he wrote to a puzzled contributor. “It produces the sort of stability and sanity men have dreamed about for centuries.” He assured a young writer that Hubbard would win the Nobel Peace Prize
for his work.

The book itself,
Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health
, appeared in May. It was completely unexpected, given Hubbard’s history as a writer. He intended it to stand as a capstone to the “fifty thousand years
of thinking men without whose speculations and observations the creation and construction of Dianetics would not have been possible.” In
Scientology,
Dianetics
is known as Book One. “With 18 million copies sold
, it is indisputably the most widely read and influential book on the human mind ever published,” the church maintains. Scientology dates its own calendar from 1950, the year
Dianetics
was published.

Hubbard’s theory is that the mind has two parts. The analytical, or conscious, mind is the center of awareness, the storehouse of all past perceptions. Nothing is lost from its data banks. Every smell or pattern or sound attached to one’s previous experiences is present and capable of being completely recaptured. This is the mind that observes and thinks and solves problems. It is rational and aware of itself.

The other form of mentality is the
reactive mind. It is the single source of nightmares, insecurity, and unreasonable fears. It doesn’t think. It is a repository of painful and destructive emotions, which are recorded even while an individual is sleeping, or unconscious, or still in the womb. The recording is not the same as a
memory, in the sense of being a mental construct; it is physically a part of the cellular structure and capable of reproducing itself in generations of new
cells. “Cells are evidently sentient
in some currently inexplicable way,” Hubbard speculates. When awakened by some stimulus, the recording—Hubbard calls it an “
engram”—turns off the
conscious mind and seizes control of an individual’s actions or behavior.

Hubbard compares the engram to a
posthypnotic suggestion. He describes a man in a trance who has been told that every time the operator touches his tie, the subject will remove his coat. When the subject
is awakened, he is not consciously aware of the command. “The operator then touches
his tie,” Hubbard writes. “The subject may make some remark about its being too warm and so take his coat off.” This can be done repeatedly. “At last the subject may become aware, from the expressions on people’s faces, that something is wrong. He will not know what is wrong. He will not even know that the touching of the tie is the signal which makes him take off his coat.” The hypnotic command in his unconscious continues to govern his behavior, even when the subject recognizes that it is irrational and perhaps harmful. In the same way, Hubbard suggests, engrams work their sinister influence on everyday actions, undermining one’s self-confidence and subverting rational behavior. The individual feels helpless as he engages in behavior he would never consciously consent to. He is “handled like a marionette
by his engrams.”

Although there were no recorded case histories to prove his claim that hundreds of patients had been cured through his methods, through “many years of exact research
and careful testing,” Hubbard offered appealing examples of hypothetical behavior. For instance, a woman is beaten and kicked. “She is rendered
‘unconscious.’ ” In that state, she is told she is no good, a faker, and that she is always changing her mind. Meantime, a chair has been knocked over; a faucet is running in the kitchen; a car passes outside. All of these perceptions are parts of the engram. The woman is not aware of it, but whenever she hears running water or a car passing by, the engram is partly restimulated. She feels discomfort if she hears them together. If a chair happens to fall as well, she experiences a shock. She begins to feel like the person she was accused of being while she was unconscious—a fickle, no-good faker. “This is not theory
,” Hubbard repeatedly asserts. It is an “exact science
” that represents “an evolutionary step in the development of Man.”

Hubbard proposed that the influence engrams have over one’s current behavior can be eliminated by reciting the details of the original incident until it no longer possesses an emotional charge.
⁴
“Dianetics
deletes
all the pain from a lifetime,” Hubbard writes. “When this pain is erased in the engram bank and refiled as memory and experience in the memory banks, all aberrations and psychosomatic illnesses vanish.” The object of
Dianetics therapy is to drain the engrams of their painful, damaging qualities and eliminate the reactive mind entirely, leaving a person “
Clear.”

WRITTEN IN
a bluff, quirky style, and overrun with patronizing footnotes that do little to substantiate its bold findings,
Dianetics
nonetheless became a sensation, lodging itself for twenty-eight weeks on the
New York Times
best-seller list and laying the groundwork for the category of postwar self-help books that would seek to emulate its success. Hundreds of Dianetics groups sprang up around the United States and in other countries in order for its adherents to apply the therapeutic principles Hubbard prescribed. One only needed a partner, called an
auditor, who could guide the subject to locate his engrams and bring them into consciousness, where they would be released and rendered harmless. “You will find many
reasons why you ‘cannot get well,’ ” Hubbard warns, but he promises, “Dianetics is no solemn adventure. For all that it has to do with suffering and loss, its end is always laughter, so foolish, so misinterpreted were the things which caused the woe.”

The book arrived at a moment when the aftershocks of the world war were still being felt. Behind the exhilaration of victory, there was immense trauma. Religious certainties were shaken by the development of bombs so powerful that civilization, if not life itself, became a wager in the Cold War contest. Loss, grief, and despair were cloaked by the stoicism of the age, but patients being treated in mental hospitals were already on the verge of outnumbering those being treated
for any other
cause.
Psychoanalysis was suspiciously viewed in much of America as a European—mainly Jewish—import, which was time-consuming and fantastically expensive. Hubbard promised results “in less than twenty hours
of work” that would be “superior to any produced by several years of psycho-analysis.”