2. Scientology: Knowing How to Know

It would be difficult to assign an exact historical date on which Scientology was born and Dianetics receded into the background of Hubbard's continuing research.

In a footnote to his book, Scientology 8-8008 first published in 1953, Hubbard wrote:

"Dianetics- was an evolutionary step, a tool which had use in arriving at a higher level of knowledge; its use, however, produced slower results and much lower goals. Further, Dianetic processes were limited in that they could not be applied more than a few hundred hours without the reactive mind assuming a very high command level over the analytical mind due to the fact that the reactive mind was being validated continually in the process, whereas the better process was to validate the analytical mind."

All this makes good sense; but there were also other compelling reasons for withdrawing from what might be called organized Dianetics and, after a brief interval of thought and study, making a fresh start, incorporating

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Dianetics into the more advanced theories and techniques embodied in Scientology.

In the first place, during the Dianetics "boom" which followed publication of the original textbook, centres for the study and practice of the new mental therapy proliferated across the country so rapidly Hubbard was not able to staff all of them with competent and trustworthy personnel.

Furthermore, a campaign to destroy both Dianetics and its founder was in full swing, directed by certain hidden interests (to be given close scrutiny in later chapters), and aided by hostile or irresponsible members of the mass media.

Even those nearest Hubbard Foundation executives who had been active in the organizational phase of Dianetics from the first were a source of difficulty. They were inclined to view the techniques of Dianetics as a finalized system. Data or results that did not fit neatly into the established pattern they wanted simply to ignore - at least publicly.

For example, there was the question of former lives. Time after time during Dianetic auditing, when preclears had been guided along their time track, they had not stopped at the arbitrary barriers of birth or conception, but had spontaneously returned to incidents which had occurred in prior existences.

To Hubbard, whose ultimate aim was eventually "to contact the often-postulated, but never thoroughly sensed, measured, and experienced human soul", such experiences could not be shrugged off. References to the strange phenomena popped up frequently in his public lectures, and he discussed them at length with associates.

His Foundation's board of trustees felt that reincarnation was a controversial subject which would do great harm to both the reputation and the financial prospects of Dianetics if it were made part of the approved auditing procedure.

"I have been-many times requested to omit any reference to these [past deaths and past lives] in the present work or in public," wrote Hubbard, "for fear that a general impression would get out that Dianetics had something to do with

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Spiritualism. Further, the view has been many times expressed that in view of the fact that prenatals are so controversial', the introduction of past lives and past deaths into Dianetics, even as an experimental investigation, would permit old schools of therapy to persist in their delusion that all is delusion.

"This would hardly be a scientific way of handling a science. A true scientist boldly and fearlessly reports that which he finds." 1 (p. 61)

Trustees of the Hubbard Dianetics Research Foundation did not agree with Hubbard's tell the truth and shame the Devil attitude. In July 1950, the board tried to pass a resolution banning the entire subject of past lives from the official Dianetics publications and public lectures.

As a matter of fact, aside from the medical monopolists of AMA and the closed-shop dogmatists of organized psychology (who would have continued to attack Dianetics no matter what course its experimentation might take), reincarnation as a valid subject for further investigation had a wider acceptance among reputable thinkers than the foundation trustees realized.

Certainly, it was not a startlingly new theory. The doctrine of rebirth appeared in India at a very early date and is referred to in such ancient sacred writings as the, Yrtharva Veda, the Laws of Manu, the Bhagavat Gita and the various Upanishads.

It became a fundamental tenet of Buddhism in the sixth century B.C., and with that faith spread to China, Tibet, Ceylon, Burma, Indo-China and Japan.

It was also taught by the mystery schools of ancient Greece, which no doubt received it from Indian sources. In the area of philosophy, it was an essential element in the works of such eminent thinkers as Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, Empedocles and Heraclitus.

Among Roman men of learning who gave serious attention to the concept of multiple earthly lives were Cicero, Seneca, Ovid, Virgil and Sallust.

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Nor did the belief end with these celebrated names of the remote past. To the impressive roster just cited can be added illustrious personages of modern times, who have embraced the doctrine. They include such diverse figures as philosophers Giordano Bruno, Leibnitz, Hume, Lessing, Schlegel, Fichte, Herder, Schopenhauer and Emerson; poets Shelley, Tennyson, Browning and. Whitman; composers Wagner and Mahler; Salvador Dali, Henry Ford, Benjamin Franklin, General George Patton and others.

In one of his greatest poems, Intimations of Immortality, Wordsworth - a firm believer in reincarnation, wrote:

"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star
Hath had elsewhere its setting, ,Ind cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come..."

(According to both Scientology and Eastern beliefs, the Soul returns to earthly embodiment trailing not only clouds of glory, but also the residual import of actions in former lives. These result-potentials, derived from past causes, are called Karma by Hindu and Buddhists and facsimiles by Scientologists.)

In his own treatment of the subject, Hubbard proceeded with the caution of a chemist. He expressed the view that some supposed experiences of past lives were in fact fantasies based upon reading and imagination (in which case, there would be no somatics - physical pain and discomfort associated with re-experiencing an event).

At the same time, he said, there were other cases which seemed to be real and valid experiences.

Hubbard classified the theory of rebirth under the heading of Para-Scientology, "that large bin which includes all greater or lesser uncertainties ... the things of which the

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common normal observer cannot be sure without a little study".

"However," wrote Hubbard in Scientology: The Fundamentals of Thought, "as studies have gone forward, it has become more and more apparent that the senior activity of life is that of the thetan [spirit], and that in the absence of the spirit no further life exists. In the insect kingdom it is not established whether or not each insect is ordered by a spirit or whether one spirit orders enormous numbers of insects."

As regards man, however, Scientology studies found that the individual himself is a spirit controlling a body by means of a mind. This spirit, or thetan can separate from the body without incurring death, and can control a body while thus separated from it.

According to the postulates of Scientology, when the thetan takes leave of his body at death, he does not care to remember the life just lived, hence the veil of forgetfulness that normally conceals from us our former existences. The thetan "cannot actually experience death and counterfeits it by forgetting".

At the same time, "he is very anxious to put something on the 'time track' (something for the future) in order to have something to come back to; thus we have the anxieties of sex. There must be additional bodies for the next life. It is obvious that what we create in our societies during this life-time affects us during our next life-time."

just as ancient philosophies and religions posited the law of return, that is, of an immortal soul which lives successive lifetimes in different bodies, so they also had as their ultimate goal spiritual liberation. This state of ultimate freedom meant freedom from all material bondage and was called moksha by the Hindu schools and Nirvana by the Buddhists.

What, then, was new about Scientology, whose stated

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goal was also Total Freedom for the deathless being or thetan, who passed from life, through life to life?

According to Hubbard, it was methodology. He freely acknowledged his indebtedness to Eastern thought (especially Buddhism), but noted that while the Oriental systems of self-culture contain truths of the highest order, the ascetic demands made upon their aspirants to freedom are such as to render them impractical for most people. Indeed, you could count on one hand the number of truly illumined yogis and boddhisatvas who have appeared on the human scene during the past two or three millennia.

Scientology, on the other hand, claims to have developed techniques for accomplishing in months the kind of spiritual advancement the Buddhist may spend one or many lifetimes to achieve.

"The essence of Scientology is its practicality: its application is broad and its results are uniformly predictable." 2 (p. 1'2)

Hubbard thus bases the practice of Scientology squarely upon scientific procedure, even though the results claimed for it go well beyond any objective currently envisioned by the physical sciences.

A key concept in Scientology is that known as Cycle of Action, which is defined as a span of time set up within the timeless universe - during which an action takes place.

For example, we are born, we grow up, mature, age, and die. In abstract terms, this means creation, growth, conservation, decay and death or destruction. It would be the cycle of any object.

But such a cycle of action, according to the precepts of Scientology, is only an apparency, something which appears to us as real, but which may be quite different from what we consider or postulate it to be. "In Scientology," wrote Hubbard, "it can be seen that none of these steps are necessary. One considers them so and they are 'true'. A man can grow old quickly or slowly. He grows old to the

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degree that he believes he is growing old. Because everyone agrees that this is the way things are, they go that way. The cycle is not true ... The woman, growing old, wishing to appear younger, is protesting this Cycle of Action. She feels there is something wrong with it. There is. We have to find out what the actual cycle is before we can make people better."

The most important difference between the apparent cycle and the actual cycle is that instead of destruction, or death, as in the apparent cycle, in actuality, there is only "creation against creation".

Hubbard illustrates this difference with an example of a standing wall. To be apparent, the wall must be in a constant state of creation. To destroy the wall means to exert against it a counter-creativeness in the action of knocking it down. Both the wall standing and the motion of knocking it down are creative actions. "Because we may object to (argue against, dislike) a wall being knocked down, we vilify (swear at, scorn) the creativeness involved in knocking it down with the word 'destructive'."

In addition to counter-creation, there is another kind of "destruction" which is simply the absence of creation. Continuing with the wall illustration, this means that by no longer being a party to the wall's creation, "the wall, in theory, can cease to exist for one".

Fundamentally, then, the actual cycle of action contains nothing but creation.

According to Scientology, there are three conditions of existence or component parts of experience. In order of their importance, they are: be, do, have.

To be is to assume some kind of identity. For example, one's name, physical characteristics, titles, ranks, and so on. Yet, "the only true identity is 'myself'. It is not a name, it is not a designation."

The preclear, on the other hand, often assumes, to a greater or lesser extent, the identity of others - that of his

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father or mother, marital partner, private hero, "or any or all of thousands of possible people".

Hubbard speaks of this living other people's lives as being in their valence. Scientology defines valence (a term used by Gestalt psychology in quite a different connotation) as a false identity, with all of its peculiarities and characteristics, assumed unwittingly.

As a mechanism of survival, valence "is used by the mind to escape pain or defeat. In an accident, if the preclear suffered unconsciousness from pain or emotion, he may pick up the valence, or personality, of any of the dramatic personnel involved, whether there was only one other or a dozen."

Another reason that we are inclined to live in the valence of others is that we are "attention-hungry". We look at things outside ourselves and, to balance the flow of our attention, we feel we must also be looked at. We want to get attention.

Since an individual assumes the identity of the person who gets attention, in Scientology processing, the auditor is alert to attempts by the preclear to identify with one or other of his parents. "He got into his father's valence when he found he could get no attention from mother. Observing that the father got some of her attention, he took father's identity. However, let us say he didn't like father. The auditor finds him hating himself. 'Himself' is really father."

Hubbard avowed: "There is a basic personality, a person's own identity. He colours or drowns it with valences as he loses or wins in life. He can be dug up."

The task of the auditor, then, is to help the preclear reclaim his own beingness.

To do, according to Hubbard, is to create an effect. Another way of stating the same proposition would be that doing is engaged in goal-directed action. Unless one can produce some effect in his world-around, he feels that he

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cannot command the attention he desires. If an individual is unable to create an effect, he may become aberrated, ill, lazy or careless.

"Criminals or maniacs are people who are frantically attempting to create an effect long after they know they cannot. They cannot then create decent effects, only violent effects. Neither can they work (do) ... An artist stops his work when he believes he can no longer create an effect."

It is axiomatic in Scientology that creation of an effect is the paramount purpose in this universe. There are times, however, when one's security may depend upon being able to create no effect. For example, if you have taken cover and are hiding from a homicidal pursuer bent on killing you, you try desperately to create no effect in order that a fatal effect will not be created upon you.

In order to create an effect, the action must be upon or against something. Hence, the necessity of having something to act upon or against. Hubbard conceives havingness or ownership as the individual's ability to see, touch or occupy objects.

In that sense, we can possess many things of which we are not the legal owners. For example, one can have a valuable painting, even though it is in the physical possession of someone else, merely by seeing it and deriving aesthetic pleasure from contemplating its beauty or technical excellence.

In such an instance, one may even have a greater part of the painting than the owner in whose house it hangs. "Rich and successful men," wrote Hubbard, "have carried ownership to such an extent that they are themselves thoroughly encased in energy which is solidifying into mest itself. [Mest is an acronym, from matter, energy, space and time - the ingredients of the physical universe.] Instead of having things, they themselves are had by things." In other words, instead of creating an effect, as was their intention, they have in fact, become an effect.

The question of ownership is a crucial one in Scientology

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because aberrations to be found in the processing of a preclear were created by a "reversal of havingness", that is, the individual did not want something, but had to have it; or he wanted something and found it impossible to have it; or he wanted one thing and got something else.

"The entire problem of the future," wrote Hubbard, "is the problem of goals. The entire problem of goals is the problem of possession. The entire problem of possession is the problem of time."

Scientology views life as a game - or games - which people play.

This idea in its bare essentials is not new -Hinduism posits the cosmic "play" of the Shakti or Divine Mother. But again, Hubbard develops the concept along new and distinct lines.

First of all, he describes a game as a contest between individuals or teams, consisting of three elements, namely, freedom, barriers and purposes. Purpose, of course, is another word for goal, and the ultimate goal of any game is to outplay the opponent and win.

The warring of inimical purpose between opposing players produces problems. "A problem consists of two or more purposes opposed. It does not matter what problem you face or have faced, the basic anatomy of that problem is purpose-counter-purpose."

Hubbard's concept of freedom balanced by barriers or rules of the game is obviously relevant to such human concerns as ideologies, government, and social mores. He observes that the reason great revolutionary movements always fail is that "they promise unlimited freedom. That is the road to failure. Only stupid visionaries chant of endless freedom. Only the afraid and the ignorant speak of and insist upon unlimited barriers."

In considering freedom, it is necessary to ask: freedom from what) freedom to do what? "Freedom from" is all right only so long as there is a place to be free to. Total freedom

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would be a freedom without purpose and would end in some kind of dictatorship.

Total barriers also create a no-game condition and must end in failure. A dictator or a self-appointed elite in government, who seek to impose upon the population absolute rule in which there no longer exists any freedom of choice are self-destructive. Sooner or later they will be overthrown. The only justifiable legal barriers a government can set up are laws limiting actions to be injurious or fatal to other members of society.

Hubbard cites three ways in which government can bring about chaos: (1) by seeming to give endless freedom; (2) by seeming to impose endless restraints or barriers; (3) by making neither freedom nor barriers certain.

As this is written, the U.S. government, controlled by pressure groups and vested interests, appears to be practicing all three of these modalities at the same time. In the first instance, official tolerance has spawned chaos and disorder by militants and subversives in American Society, while in the second, an autocratic bureaucracy has intervened in the life of all citizens, to impose restraints upon virtually everything they do. Finally, both the courts and the quasilegal administrative hearings before federal commissions have made so many discriminatory and contradictory rulings that there is no certainty about either one's freedom nor the laws governing necessary acts.

At this point, it is necessary to recall the dynamics or basic impulses in life, postulated by Scientology. Four of them were cited in the chapter on Dianetics; they were: (1) the urge towards survival as self; (2) the urge towards survival through the sexual act or through the begetting and rearing of children; (3) the urge towards survival through a group of individuals, or as a group; and (4) the urge towards survival through all mankind.

During the development of Scientology, four additional dynamics were discovered, making a total of eight. The final four were: (5) the urge towards survival through all

44 / The Hidden Story of Scientology

living things, whether animal or vegetable; (6) the urge towards survival as the physical universe or mest; (7) the urge towards survival as or of spirits; and (8) the urge towards survival as Infinity, or through a Supreme Being.

One has only to review the scheme of these eight dynamics to see the combination of "teams" possible in playing the various games of existence. "The self dynamic can ally itself with the animal dynamic against, let us say, the universe dynamic and so have a game. In other words, the dynamics are an outline of possible teams and interplays. As everyone is engaged in several games, an examination of the dynamics will plot and clarify for him the various teams he is playing on and those he is playing against. If an individual can discover that he is only playing on the self dynamic and that he belongs to no other team, it is certain that this individual will lose, for he has before him seven remaining dynamics. And the self is seldom capable of bestowing by itself all the remaining dynamics."

Scientology designates this type of game, that is, playing on the first dynamic alone, self-determination.

There is also the situation in which an individual plays or controls both sides of a game in much the same way as a chess player may set up the board and alternately play both sides in order to develop a new strategy. Scientologists call this kind of play pan-determinism. "By creating problems, one tends to view both sides in opposition and so becomes pan-determined." For this reason, during Scientology processing, the preclear is sometimes called upon to invent problems which will widen his field of vision and thus exteriorize him from self complication.

There remains one other aspect of Scientology's games of life concept which should be mentioned here. That is the question of the player's volition. If he is forced into a game in which he has no interest or which is repugnant to him, such as the game of fighting a war as an unwilling conscript or of being obliged to become a political partisan in order to

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find employment, he may eventually fall into a state of apathy or a no-game condition.

Scientology lays great emphasis upon the importance of communication, or interchange of ideas between people. "The ability to communicate is the key to success in life."

In its widest sense, communication embraces the transmitting of data not only from person to person, but from part of the universe to the individual', or from one's own memory recordings to himself. "Communication uses all the physical senses - sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste - as well as the fifty or more perceptics in any and all possible combinations, to relay data to the 'I' or to other organisms."

In human relationships, communication forms one angle of a triangle symbolizing all of life's activities. Hubbard called it the A-R-C triangle, the A standing for Affinity, the R for Reality and the C for Communication.

Affinity is used here to mean any emotional attitude such as loving or liking - the degree of attraction felt by one individual in relation to another. There are many levels of affinity, ranging from love, strong and outgoing at the top of the "tone scale", down through enthusiasm, conservatism, boredom, antagonism, anger, covert hostility, fear, grief and finally to outright apathy. Below apathy, the scale descends deeper and deeper into "solidities such as matter".

Reality, the remaining factor of the A-R-C triad is, in the present context, that upon which people agree as real.

While Communication is the most important angle of the A-R-C, it can readily be seen that without the other two - Affinity and Reality - satisfactory communication is not possible.

The philosopher, George Santayana, once observed that all men readily receive that for which they are prepared, but

46 / The Hidden Story of Scientology

all else they ignore; or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong; or deny to be possible. "A communication, to be received," wrote Hubbard, "must approximate the affinity level of the person to whom it is directed."

There must be some degree of mutual liking between the person imparting data and the person receiving it. That is why it is difficult if not impossible to communicate with someone who is very angry with you. There must also be some common ground of agreement about so-called facts that which both parties take for granted. "Without affinity there can be no agreement; without agreement, no communication; and without communication, reality drops to an inoperable low."

Scientology thus seeks to raise an individual from a lower to a higher position on the tone scale, where communication is improved and he experiences love, friendliness and easy discourse with others.

The alternative is not very appealing. As we go lower on the scale, communication between men (and hence between nations) becomes poorer until we reach hatred. Hubbard warns: "Where the affinity level is hate) the agreement is solid matter, and the communications ... bullets."

According to Scientology, man is a trinity; consisting of spirit, mind and body.

Hubbard once said that the greatest contribution Scientology has made to human knowledge is the isolation, description and handling of the spirit of man. He writes that in 1951, "I established along scientific rather than religious or humanitarian lines, that thing which is the person, the personality; is separable from the body and the mind at will and without causing bodily death or mental derangement."

In order that his own concept of spirit would not be confused with traditional interpretations of that word, Hubbard assigned to it the name thetan, from the Greek letter q, theta-used in mathematical equations. He

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declared that the thetan is immortal; it possesses no mass, no wave-length, no energy, no time, and no location in space except by broadly agreed-upon considerations.

The thetan is not a thing nor an effect, but the creator of both, as a free and efficient cause. It can exist, as a construct in one of four conditions, viz. wholly separate from a body or even from this universe; near a body, which it consciously controls; within a body, which it animates; or in coerced separation from a body, which he is not permitted to approach or to control (i.e., the inverted state called death).

Of the four situations cited above, Scientology regards the second - that is, being near a body and controlling it -as optimal. "One of the many goals of processing in Scientology is to 'exteriorize' the individual and place him in the second condition above, since it has been discovered that he is happier and more capable when so situated."

According to Hubbard, the thetan, when thus separated from the body, can correct anything that may be wrong with his own body or that of another.

Hubbard makes it quite clear that exteriorization of the spirit or thetan by techniques of Scientology is not the same thing as so-called projection of the astral body, practiced by occultists ."Astral bodies," he wrote, "are usually mock-ups which the mystic then tries to believe real. He sees the astral body as something else and then seeks to inhabit it in the most common practices of 'astral walking'." The projected thetan, on the other hand, does not possess a body (astral or otherwise). The description given by Scientology, in fact, recalls Dr. Andrija Puharich's definition of the "I" or real person as a "nuclear mobile centre of consciousness".

The human mind is the mechanism which the thetan uses to control the body and to communicate with his physical environment. "The thetan receives, by the communication system called the mind, various impressions, including direct views of the physical universe."

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In addition to the analytical, reactive and somatic minds mentioned earlier in our discussion of Dianetics, the thetan has access to other sources of knowledge and, Hubbard asserts, is himself close to a total knowingness. Existing outside of time, he knows not only things of the past, but also those of the future that are unrelated to present stimuli or to data stored in the analytical and reactive memory banks.

The third part of man - the physical body - Hubbard once described in engineering terms as a carbon-oxygen engine which operates at a temperature of 98.6 degrees Farenheit on low-combustion fuel, generally derived from other life forms.

Later, various experiments led to the discovery of more subtle functions in and around the physical body. One of the most important of these was a fixed electrical field surrounding the body. Although wholly independent of the mind, this field could be influenced by mind, that is, by the thetan acting through the mind.

Recent experiments by Dr. Robert O. Becker, an orthopaedic surgeon at Syracuse Veterans Administration Hospital (and others) have confirmed Hubbard's postulate that a bioelectric field envelops the body.

According to Hubbard, this electric field monitors the physical structure of the body and can alter its physical characteristics or modify its inter-related functions.

Obviously referring to treatments still employed by orthodox psychiatry, he warns that "the use of electrical shocks upon a body for any purpose is therefore very dangerous and is not condoned by sensible men. Of course, the use of electric shock was never intended to be therapeutic but was intended only to bring about obedience by duress, and, as far as it can be discovered, to make the entirety of insanity a horror."

Hubbard asserts that electrical shock is always followed by bad health and only shortens the life of the patient forced to undergo such brutal interventions. He accuses

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psychiatrists who use such therapies of practicing "partial euthanasia".

Intimately associated with the tripartite make-up of man is the question of control. In the course of his discussion of the human trinity, Hubbard notes that in Scientology, control is defined as start, change and stop, which "can be graphed alongside the apparent cycle of action - create, survive, destroy".

Mental abnormalities of various kinds all stem from the individual's inability to start, to change or to stop. States of apathy or of hysterical paralysis occur when a person is unable to start anything; a fixation neurosis is the result of being unable to change something; and compulsive behaviour in which an action, habit, belief, etc. is carried beyond the limits of common sense, arises from the inability to stop.

"An individual who has a free heart and mind about life is bent upon creating [i.e., starting] things."

In "playing the game" of existence, according to Scientology, the thetan himself creates the physical universe (MEST) and initiates activity within that world. However, the thetan can lose effective control of the activities he has started by becoming too self-involved with his own creation, thereby losing pandeterminism.

"If a thetan can suffer from anything, it is being outcreated (created against too thoroughly). The manifestations of being out-created would be destruction of his own creations and the overpowering presence of other creations. Thus, a thetan can be brought to believe that he is trapped if he is out-created."

This loss of control by the thetan is passed on to the mind, which then suffers the same inability to start, change or stop; and from the mind it is passed on to the body, which suffers similar inabilities.

In a strict sense, of course, these problems are only apparent (the Buddhist likens them to "a tiger in a dream")

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since they are difficulties of consideration, or as Hubbard put it: "as the thetan considers, so he is".

A major goal of Scientology is to restore to the thetan the control he has lost. Freed of aberrations and with improved capability, he can then "play the game" with a better chance of wins.

Central to this effective application of Scientology are procedures which, while similar in many respects to the earlier practice of Dianetic auditing, are broader in scan and more varied in their ultimate purposes.

For example, the role of the Dianetic auditor was to listen and to compute. In addition to these two functions, the auditor in Scientology also guides the preclear. This means, essentially, that he conducts the preclear through certain routines, some verbal and others requiring the use of common objects in the auditing room, all aimed at what Hubbard terms "establishing game conditions".

It lies outside the scope of this book to present detailed descriptions of the various drills and techniques involved in Scientology processing. Suffice it to say that, generally speaking, where Dianetic auditing sought to "clear" the individual by locating and running specific engrams one by one, beginning with the basic engram, Scientology's modus operandi is addressed directly to the thetan or soul and, by assisting him to raise his level of awareness, erases the engrams without dealing with them directly and singly.

Among other benefits claimed for Scientology's processing are a higher IQ; increased ability to communicate; greater domestic harmony; improvement in health, social attitudes and artistic creativity.

(An over-all picture of the various factors dealt with may be gained by examining the Hubbard Chart of Human Evaluation. Processing seeks to raise the preclear's level in each and all of the categories represented on the chart).

To sum up:

Scientology is an applied religious philosophy which

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conceives man as a triad - body, mind and soul (or thetan). Although he is by nature basically good, man indulges in aberrative or evil behaviour because of painful past experiences stored in the memory bank of his reactive mind (once called the subconscious) and in the thetan's own record of experiences in former lives.

The basic urge of man and indeed of all organic life, is that of survival. In the case of the human, that urge expresses itself in one or more of eight dynamics: self, sex and family, groups, mankind, life forms, the physical universe, the spiritual universe and the Supreme Being.

According to Hubbard, all life is an interplay between statics and kinetics. The static of Scientology is not quite the same as the theory in physics known by the same term. In physics, static is represented by bodies or forces at rest or in equilibrium. But, Hubbard points out, a material body at rest is itself in motion, if only on the level of molecular motion.

On the other hand, Scientology posits a static, designated by the mathematical symbol q that is wholly motionless. It has no mass, no motion, no wavelength and no location in space or in time.

The thetan, while existing as true static, is an "awareness of awareness unit", capable of formulating considerations, and possessing the ability to postulate and to perceive.

The opposite of motionless theta or static, is all-motion kinetics, called MEST, that word being formed from the first letters of the elements constituting kinetics: matter, energy, space and time.

The cycle of action through which the material universe moves is: create, survive and destroy.

"The interplay between theta and MEST results in activities known as life, and causes the animation of living life forms." This means that each thetan creates his world and that reality is the broadly agreed upon considerations of the community of soul or thetans, who play the game of life.

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In reply to my question, what is the relation of God to the community of souls, the Rev. Robert H. Thomas, leading authority on Scientology in the U.S., said:

"This is left up to the intuition of each individual. He finds it out for himself. I can give you my personal viewpoint. God, I think, is to be considered infinite potential. But the infinite potential is a senior concept to any individual manifestation of it. The individual manifestation contains and in some ways expresses and manifests that infinite potentiality. If you view yourself as the total, then you are the total. If you view yourself as the individual, you are the individual. The conditions of limitation and temporality are imposed by the viewpoint. But inherent in the viewpoint is the potentiality.

"Essentially, what we consider is that the static - or Theta defined as Static - is senior to any particularity of data. Therefore, the qualitative essence of the Creator cannot be described or qualified in terms of the created objects. That's one of the basic sources of a paradox.

"The multiplicity of viewpoints among the community of Souls is an artificial division which is just junior to integration. It isn't either integration or division. Each individual, discreet being steps into and out of the game.

"At the apex of this gradient scale of universal forms, you have the coexistence of static viewpoints. Then gradually the viewpoints break apart -more and more apart - and you have the creation of the physical universe and its energy manifestations, with the separateness of each viewpoint more and more solidified and enforced by the unwillingness to take responsibility for creating.

"We know, of course, that matter and energy are interchangeable; but in gross apparency, they are distinct. If you think of matter as mental-image pictures, as a basically more refined state of MEST, dreams become just a finer degree of, but at the same time, quantitatively, as the practical, external structure of the universe.

"To rehabilitate the individual thetan to his full om-

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niscient and omnipotent capability of creating universes, it is necessary only to follow the line of rehabilitating his ability to create mental-image pictures. Because, we're postulating that these mental-image pictures and the seeming solidity of the physical universe are one and the same."

This concept of the universe as the embodiment of psycho-mental energy patterns produced by the thetan, closely parallels one held by Tibetan Tantrism. I summarized the Eastern viewpoint in a work on the subject, written several years ago: "As the Tantrik conceives it, mind is the noumenal source of all phenomena. All aspects of creation, regardless of how tangible and objective they may seem to be in the physical world, are only thought images projected by God or by other entities."

Another fundamental idea in Scientology is that of the A-R-C triangle representing the three interdependent components of understanding: affinity, reality and communication. There, affinity means love or degree of liking; reality is that which is agreed upon between thetans; and communication is the interchange of ideas between two or more individuals. Most important of these three is communication. Only by recovering his ability to communicate can the thetan resolve the problems of his life and move towards the ultimate goal of total knowingness, which "would consist of total A-R-C".

Scientology has developed various drills and exercises used in auditing processes, all aimed at helping the thetan solve the problems of the thetan as MEST. "To solve any problem, it is only necessary to become theta the solver, rather than theta the problem." He is then "at cause", and his objective is to be totally at cause, which means being totally free.

Such, in greatly abridged form, are the fundamental principles of Scientology. As a generalized summary, it is open to criticism on a number of accounts. However, as stated in the preface, the present work is not meant to be a complete and authoritative exposition of Scientology. Those

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who wish a more extensive knowledge of the subject will find it in the writings of L. Ron Hubbard himself, available at Scientology centres throughout the world.

Many seminal ideas derived from Hubbard's work have now obtained broad acceptance without being acknowledged as originating with him.

First and foremost of these is the Scientology postulate that man possesses a sub-mind which remains always alert and retains accurate memories of a traumatic experience such as an operation, even though the conscious (or analytical) mind has temporarily ceased to function (for example, owing to anaesthesia in the case of surgery).

When Hubbard first published his work on Dianetics in 1950, in which he presented this concept in considerable detail, the media were derisive and hostile. Twelve years later, when a San Francisco surgeon announced his "discovery" of the same thing, the press treated his statements with great respect, even though some of them closely paralleled the earlier assertions made by Hubbard.

"One surgeon," said the news account, "believes there no longer can be the slightest doubt that the fully anaesthetized surgical patient can both hear and remember what he hears even though he is unconscious.

"For that reason, the surgeon warned his fellow surgeons and their nurses that they had better start being careful about what they say to one another while working in the operating room.

"Dr. David B. Cheek, San Francisco, a fellow of the American College of Surgeons, relied largely on evidence produced by hypnosis and psychoanalysis. The evidence is now voluminous enough to be conclusive," he said.

Dr. Cheek noted in the interview that technical conversations overheard by the patient while he was in an "unconscious" state could cause surgical shock and changes in body functions, endangering the surgical outcome.

"Anaesthetized persons," he said, "are in a state resembl-

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ing that of persons in deep hypnotic trance. They're highly suggestible," he went on, "but unhappily the subconscious mind operates on an infantile level and what it hears and deals with while the conscious mind is knocked out by the anaesthesia can be highly disturbing.

"Statements which would otherwise be innocuous may become powerfully dangerous. The remark, 'This thing isn't working', may apply to the suction apparatus, but may fill the anaesthetized patient with fears about his anatomy."

A Scientologist who read the story in his newspaper wrote to Dr. Cheek, directing his attention to the similarity of his statements to the studies reported by Hubbard more than a decade previously.

In reply, Dr. Cheek said; "I am well acquainted with the work of Mr. Hubbard, and agree that there is much in his teaching that has been excellent.

"I am not claiming that I am the first to have sensed that unconscious people pick up unconscious thoughts. I believe James Braid (1795-1860) tried unsuccessfully to see whether anaesthetized patients could hear. Dave Elman has told me in a personal communication that in 1948 he had the experience of being asked to work with a patient who was vomiting after a gall bladder operation. Accidentally, he said, he found that the patient reported verbatim a remark made by the surgeon that had been misunderstood. Correction of this misunderstanding enabled the patient to start eating and recover rapidly."

During one of my conversations with Bob Thomas at Scientology's Los Angeles headquarters, he mentioned that in the late 1950s, Scientologists developed a certain type of training routine, which became the precursor of what one school of psychologists have now popularized as "sensitivity training".

"It's actually an undisciplined distortion of what we originally experimented with. I know for a fact that Dr. William Schutz, who's one of the exemplars of this movement, used Scientology processes in special 

56 / The Hidden Story of Scientology

training. He wrote a book called Joy: Expanding Human Awareness.

"In a very early book on Dianetics by Dr. J. A. Winter, there's an introduction by the famous psychologist, Dr. Fritz Pearls, who says that he has used some of Hubbard's technology - namely, repeater technology, which is simply repeating phrases that the patient might come up with, repeating them and going back into the traumatic experience, using the repeated phrases as a lead-in. He found that quite workable."

Time magazine, a consistently biased critic of Hubbard and his work had to credit the founder of Dianetics (in a characteristic left-handed way) with being the first to publish data concerning prenatal memory, when the theory came to be accepted in orthodox professional circles. In the medical department of the magazine's June 8, 1953 issue, an article reported that "Up to now, most psychiatrists have been content to stop their dredging of the past at early childhood. They have left to Dianetician L. Ron Hubbard the primordial darkness extending back from birth to conception and still further back to such matters as 'memory' of life on other planets. Now a serious British phychiatrist, who conducts much analysis under hypnosis, seriously claims to have dredged his patients' memories back to the womb. And though Dr. Denys E. R. Kelsey's report and conclusions seem fantastic to the layman, London's reputable Journal of Mental Science prints them with a straight face."

After citing three of the case histories reported by Dr. Kelsey, Time quoted him as saying: "It is my belief that these so-called fantasies are in fact the reliving of events which were experienced and appreciated and promptly repressed."

Not long ago, an American psychologist elbowed his way on to the front pages of newspapers across the country with the announcement that "the minds of many individuals can

Scientology: Knowing How to Know / 57

leave their bodies and drift away, uninhibited by physical barriers or distance".

Dr. E. E. Barnard, the psychologist whose statements were released over the wires of Associated Press, described the phenomenon as "like lying on a sofa, getting up and seeing your body still lying on the couch". He insisted that such experiences were not hallucinations and emphasized that his research had known that such "mind projection" causes no harm to the individual.

"I believe," he said, "that man has the ability to perform this phenomenon. If he can be taught to project and control, the prospects are staggering."

Was Dr. Barnard indeed unaware that Scientology textbooks published long before his "discovery" contain step-by-step procedures for both projection and out-of-the-body control? It is hard to resist the suspicion that at some date in the not too distant future the Hubbard methodology will emerge (in suitably modified form) as a sequel to the announcement of Dr. Bernard's initial studies.

Even Hubbard's findings that effective processing of the thetan must deal with stored facsimiles of past lives seems destined to be re-discovered by the orthodox schools of psychology and medicine.

In its February 13, 1969 issue, the London Sketch reviewed a book entitled Many Lifetimes, co-authored by an English psychiatrist and his wife, that provides "earnest, unsensational evidence" that some of the author's patients not only recalled prior lives, but upon becoming aware of them and reliving some traumatic experiences suffered at that time, were relieved of various neuroses, alcoholism, homosexuality, and so on.

The psychiatrist concluded that many symptoms exhibited by patients, which psychiatry has not been able to treat successfully, have their roots in former lives of the patients. He suggests that such illnesses could well be handled by a look at earlier existences.

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Hubbard had thoroughly explored this area of psychiatry's terra incognita fully ten years before, and had published detailed reports of his research. One of his books, Have you Lived Before This Life? includes seventy case histories of persons who, during Scientology processing showed evidence of having lived before.

REFERENCE NOTES

1. George Bernard Shaw, Doctors' Delusions, London: 1950.
2. L. Ron Hubbard, Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health.