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March 11 - March 20, 2024
That winter, they moved into a lighthouse on a frozen lake in the Poconos near Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. It was an unsettling time for Sara; they were isolated, and Ron had a .45 pistol that he would fire randomly. Late one night, while she was in bed and Ron was typing, he hit her across the face with the pistol. He told her that she had been smiling in her sleep, so she must have been thinking about someone else. “I got up and left the house in the night and walked on the ice of the lake because I was terrified,” Sara said in 1997, in an account she dictated shortly before she died. She was
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Sara didn’t believe in divorce—it was a terrible stigma at the time—and she still thought she could save Ron. “I kept thinking that he must be suffering or he wouldn’t act that way.” And so, she went back to him.
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Sara had no idea why people treated her so strangely, until finally Hubbard’s son Nibs told her that his parents were still married.
A man who later worked in the church as Hubbard’s medical officer, Jim Dincalci, listed his traits: “Paranoid personality. Delusions of grandeur. Pathological lying.”
“My service record was none too glorious,” he admits. He also confesses his shame about his frequent affairs. But he is intent on succeeding in his relationship with Sara, whom he describes as “young, beautiful, desirable.” Unfortunately, he is handicapped by bouts of impotence. “I want her always. But I am 13 years older than she. She is heavily sexed. My libido is so low I hardly admire her naked.” Sex preoccupies him. He’s worried about his “very bad masturbatory history,” his sexual diseases, and his impotence, which he had been treating with testosterone supplements. “By eliminating
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He wants to have the libido of his 18-year-old self
In this lesson, Hubbard tells himself, he will learn several important things: You have no urge to talk about your navy life. You do not like to talk of it. You never illustrate your point with bogus stories. It is not necessary for you to lie to be amusing and witty.
Material things are yours for the asking. Men are your slaves.
Obviously the mantra of someone who is selfless and values all humanity
Testosterone blends easily with your own hormones.… You have no fear of what any woman may think of your bed conduct. You know you are a master. You know they will be thrilled. You can come many times without weariness.… Many women are not capable of pleasure in sex and anything adverse they say or do has no effect whatever upon your pleasure.
YEAH MELBA
If one looks behind the Affirmations to the conditions they are meant to correct, one sees a man who is ashamed of his tendency to fabricate personal stories, who is conflicted about his sexual needs, and who worries about his mortality. He has a predatory view of women but at the same time fears their power to humiliate him.
You did a fine job in the Navy. No one there is now “out to get you.” You are psychic. You do not masturbate. You do not know anger. Your patience is infinite.
He painted a far different picture in a letter to the Veterans Administration, which was demanding reimbursement for an overpayment: “I cannot imagine how to repay this $51.00 as I am nearly penniless and have but $28.50 to last me for nearly a month to come,” he writes. “My expenditures consist of $27 a month trailer rent and $80 a month food for my wife and self which includes gas, cigarettes and all incidentals. I am very much in debt and have not been able to get a job.” Instead of repaying the VA, he boldly asks for a loan.
He wrote his friend Robert Heinlein, “I will soon, I hope give you a book risen from the ashes of the old Excalibur which details in full the mathematics of the human mind, solves all the problems of the ages, and gives six recipes for aphrodisiacs and plays the mouth organ with the left foot.”
He 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.”
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!”
“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.
In December, Ron and Sara moved into what Hubbard termed “a little old shack” in Bayhead, New Jersey, with eight bedrooms, near the beach.
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
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“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.
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.2 “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.”
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.”
The scientific community, stupefied by the book’s popularity, reacted with hostility and ridicule. It seemed to them little more than psychological folk art. “This volume probably contains more promises and less evidence per page than has any publication since the invention of printing,” the Nobel physicist Isidor Isaac Rabi wrote in his review of Dianetics for Scientific American.
Erich Fromm, one of the predominant thinkers of the psychoanalytic movement, denounced the book as being “expressive of a spirit that is exactly the opposite of Freud’s teachings.” Hubbard’s method, he complains, “has no respect for and no understanding of the complexities of personality.”
S. I. Hayakawa. He not only dismissed the book, he also criticized what he saw as the spurious craft of writing science fiction. “The art consists in concealing from the reader, for novelistic purposes, the distinctions between established scientific facts, almost-established scientific hypotheses, scientific conjectures, and imaginative extrapolations far beyond what has even been conjectured,” he wrote.
Dianetics, Hayakawa noted, was neither science nor fiction, but something else: “fictional science.”
Sara watched the effect that Ron was having on his patients. “He would hold hands with them and try to talk them into these phony memories,” she recalled. “He would concentrate on them and they loved it. They were so excited about someone who would just pay this much attention to them.”
The idea that early memories—even prenatal ones—could be recaptured was central to Hubbard’s theory. Every engram rooted in the reactive mind has its predecessors; the object of Dianetics therapy is to hunt down the original insult, the “basic-basic,” which produced the engram in the first place.
For Hubbard, however, early or even prenatal traumas were literally true. He believed that the fetus not only recorded details of his parents copulating during his pregnancy, but also every word spoken during the act. Such recordings can be restimulated in adult life by hearing similar language, which would then awaken the anxiety that the fetus experienced—during a violent sexual episode, for instance. That could lead to “aberration,” which for Hubbard includes all psychoses, neuroses, compulsions, and any other deviation from rational behavior.
He goes on to make this amazing statement: “It is a scientific fact that abortion attempts are the most important factor in aberration. The child on whom the abortion is attempted is condemned to live with murderers whom he reactively knows to be murderers through all his weak and helpless youth!” In his opinion, it is very difficult to abort a child, which is why the process so often fails. “Twenty or thirty abortion attempts are not uncommon in the aberree and in every attempt the child could have been pierced through the body or brain,” Hubbard writes.
While he was writing Dianetics, and Sara was pregnant with Alexis, she says, Hubbard kicked her in the stomach several times to attempt to cause a miscarriage.
When scientists tested some of Hubbard’s claims and found that his techniques produced no measurable improvement, he blamed them for failing to understand his system. Hubbard’s rejection by the mental health establishment, even before Dianetics was published, was itself a kind of pre-birth trauma. After that, whenever Dianetics or Scientology was attacked in the press or by governments, Hubbard saw the hand of psychiatrists. “The psychiatrist and his front groups operate straight out of the terrorist textbooks,” he wrote bitterly years later.
One time he broke her eardrum. And yet, she stayed with him, a hostage to his needs. “I felt so guilty about the fact that he was so psychologically damaged,” Sara said. “I felt as though he had given so much to our country and I couldn’t even bring him peace of mind. I believed thoroughly that he was a man of great honor, had sacrificed his well being to the country.… It just never occurred to me he was a liar.”
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Meantime, in Havana, Hubbard hired a couple of women to take care of the baby. They kept her in a crib with wire over the top. To de Mille, it seemed that Alexis was being held like a monkey in a cage.
“Anyone below 2.0 level is a potential suicide.” Their bodies stink, as does their breath.
Clear registers 4.0 on the scale. A person who has attained this level is nearly accident-proof and immune to bacteria. He is exhilarated, eager, strong, able, curious, ethical, creative, courageous, responsible, and impossible to hypnotize. And yet this state is only one-tenth of what Hubbard forecasts in the realm of human potential. His scale goes all the way to 40.0, Serenity of Beingness, but the capabilities of the upper regions are largely unknown.
Then Hubbard arrives at a level that preoccupies him, 1.1 on the Tone Scale. “Here is the harlot, the pervert, the unfaithful wife, Free Love, easy marriage and quick divorce and general sexual disaster,” he writes.
When Sara discovered where her husband was, she sought to enjoin his assets. Hubbard retaliated by writing a letter to the US attorney general, explaining the peril he was in. “I am, basically, a scientist in the field of atomic and molecular phenomena,” he said by way of introduction. He said that his own investigation showed that Sara was tied to Communists who had infiltrated the Dianetics Foundation.
Hubbard was drinking and had a number of drugs along with him, and he pressed Hays to supply him with marijuana. Hays later dried some horseweed and mailed it to Hubbard, signing the letter, “I. M. Reefer.”
He had a new device, the E-Meter, developed by one of his followers, which Hubbard revealed in March 1952. The E-Meter would replace the Dianetic reverie with what appeared to be a more scientific approach, one that didn’t look so much like a hypnotic trance. “It sees all, knows all,” Hubbard declared. “It is never wrong.”
Given his biography, it would be easy to dismiss Hubbard as a fraud, but that would fail to explain his total absorption in his project. He would spend the rest of his life elaborating his theory and—even more obsessively—constructing the intricate bureaucracy designed to spread and enshrine his visionary understanding of human behavior. His life narrowed down to his singular mission.
By admitting the validity of prenatal memories, he was bound to confront a dilemma: What if the memories didn’t stop there? When patients began having “sperm dreams,” Hubbard had to accept the idea that prenatal engrams were recorded “as early as shortly before conception.”
Anyone who stands in the way of a thetan’s spiritual progress is a Suppressive Person (SP). This is a key concept in Scientology. Hubbard uses the term to describe a sociopath. The Suppressive instinctively fights against constructive forces and is driven berserk by those who try to help others. Hubbard estimates that Suppressives constitute about 20 percent of the population, but only about 2.5 percent are truly dangerous.
“To keep a person on the Scientology path,” Hubbard once told one of his associates, “feed him a mystery sandwich.”
Hubbard follows this with the observation, “We’re treating present time beingness, psychotherapy treats the past and the brain. And brother, that’s religion, not mental science.”
Religion is always an irrational enterprise, no matter how ennobling it may be to the human spirit.
Hmmmm. Judaism though
For both the shaman and the schizophrenic, the boundaries between reality and illusion are soft, and consciousness slips easily from one to the other. Hubbard, with his highly imaginative mind, certainly had immediate access to visionary worlds; his science-fiction stories are evidence of that. But it is a different matter to be able to cast the nets of one’s imagination into the unconscious and pull out best-selling books. The schizophrenic is rarely so productive in the material world.
Hubbard says there are actually two separate genetic lines that, in the history of evolution, first came together in the mollusk, but have been contending for dominance ever since, even in human beings. “In the bivalve state, one finds them at war with each other in an effort to attain sole command of the entire bivalve,” Hubbard writes. This primordial contest manifests itself in higher forms of life in such things as right- and left-handedness. “Your discussion of these incidents with the uninitiated in Scientology can produce havoc,” Hubbard warns. “Should you describe the ‘Clam’ to
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Identifying himself as a nuclear physicist, Hubbard published a book in 1957, All About Radiation, in which he promoted a formula he called Dianazene, a mixture of nicotinic acid and vitamins, that was supposed to cure cancer as well as sunburns. “It should be taken daily,” he recommended, “with milk and chocolate.”
Although the children had a nanny, they spent much of their time unsupervised. School was an afterthought; it wasn’t until Diana demanded to learn how to write her name that the children began their education.
“Dr.” Hubbard presented himself to the curious British press as an experimental horticultural scientist; to prove it, he allowed a photograph to be published of himself staring intently at a tomato that was attached to an E-Meter.
Ken Urquhart, who served as Hubbard’s butler and later as his secretary—or “Communicator”—recalls coaching a “little old English lady” on a Scientology training exercise. As he observed her, “I noticed her nice skin, her eyes, eyebrows. I noted that behind the skin on her forehead was the bone of her forehead, and I knew that behind that lay her brain. As I thought that thought, her forehead absolutely disappeared. I was looking directly at her brain. I was first astounded and then quickly horrified. Here I was exposing her brain to germs and the cold. At once her forehead was back in place.”
