Let's Sell These People a Piece of Blue Sky: Hubbard, Dianetics and Scientology (26 page)

When the fundraising efforts failed, Hubbard's chief
lieutenant, James Elliot, sent out an impassioned plea to Dianeticists:
“Dianetics and Mr. Hubbard have been dealt a blow from which they cannot recover
... Somehow Mr. Hubbard must get funds to keep Dianetics from being closed down
everywhere ... he is penniless.” Elliot went on to solicit funds for a “free
school in Phoenix for the rehabilitation of auditors” and for “free schools
across America,” saying that Hubbard would “no longer commercialize Dianetics
as organizations have made him do.” Elliot asked for $25.00 per reader. Donors
would be called the “Golds.”
²⁹
A month after the announcement of the
“free school,” Hubbard was advertising counseling at $800 per 25 hours.
³⁰

For six weeks after deserting the Wichita Foundation,
Hubbard tried to establish his rival Hubbard College. In this short time,
Hubbard gave a series of lectures that changed the whole complexion of
Dianetics. He demonstrated the “Electro-psychometer” (or “E-meter”), which
later became an integral part of auditing. He talked openly about matters which
in later years became the secret “OT” levels, and started to favor the word
Scientology.
³¹

1.
   
District Court for Kansas, Hubbard Dianetic Foundation Inc., in
Bankruptcy, no.379-B-2, 1 April 1952.

2.
   
Purcell open letter, 21 May 1952; Miller interview with de Mille.

3.
   
Hubbard telegram to Barbara Klowden April 1952.

4.
   
Los
Angeles Times
13 June 1951
.

5.
   
Sara Northrup interview with Bent Corydon.

6.
   
Hubbard, Technical Bulletins, vol.1, p.122.

7.
   
Hubbard open letter “Sequence of events preceding bankruptcy of HDF”, 20
February 1952.

8.
   
p.20.

9.
   
Book 1, p.51.

10.
 
Carol
Kanda interview with Jack Horner; also O'Brien; see also Hubbard, Research
& Discovery, vol.1, p.396.

11.
 
Book
1, p.5.

12.
 
O'Brien,
Dianetics in Limbo, p.40.

13.
 
Hubbard,
What is Scientology?,
p.290.

14.
 
O'Brien,
p.29.

15.
 
ibid
,
p.46.

16.
 
Hubbard,
Technical Bulletins,
vol.1, pp.122-3 &
What is Scientology?,
p.290.

17.
 
Hubbard,
What is Scientology?,
p.289.

18.
 
Hubbard,
Technical Bulletins, vol.1, p.165.

19.
 
Wallis,
pp.84-5; Chapdelaine letter to the author.

20.
 
John
Sanborn interview with the author; Purcell open letter of 21 May 1952.

21.
 
Wallis,
p.78.

22.
 
Maloney,
“A Factual Report of the Hubbard Dianetic Foundation”, 23 February 1952. See
also 1

23.
 
Purcell
open letter, 21 May 1952.

24.
 
Hubbard,
“Hubbard College Lectures”, tape 21.

25.
 
Maloney
open letter, 29 March 1952.

26.
 
see
1

27.
 
Hubbard
open letter, headed “A Statement”, 3 April 1952.

28.
 
Hubbard
College Reports, 13 March 1952, accompanied by undated Hubbard letter and
additional documents.

29.
 
Open
letters from James Elliot, 21 April & 25 April 1952 (including “The Office
of L. Ron Hubbard Manager's Report”).

30.
 
Promotional
piece from “The Office of L. Ron Hubbard”, Phoenix, Arizona, headed
“Processing”.

31.
 
The
Hubbard College Lectures.

Chapter fourteen

“Scientology is used to increase
spiritual freedom, intelligence, ability, and to produce immortality.”

—L.
Ron Hubbard,
Dianetics and Scientology Technical Dictionary

The word “scientology” was not original to Hubbard having
been it was coined by philologist Allen Upward in 1907.
¹
Upward used
it to characterize and ridicule pseudoscientific theories. In 1934, “Scientologie”
was used by a German advocate of Aryan racial theory, Dr A. Nordenholz, who
defined it as “The science of the constitution and usefulness of knowledge and
knowing.”
²

The “E-meter,” adopted by Hubbard by the time of the 1952
Wichita lectures, has become an indispensable tool of Scientology. Electro-psychometers
were not a new idea. Their origins trace back to the 19th century. Jung had
enthused about “psychogalvanometers” before the First World War, and they were
still in use in the 1940s. Some psychologists use them to this day, and they
are standardly incorporated in polygraph lie detectors. None of these devices
had the mystique created around the E-meter by Hubbard.

A Preclear is connected to the meter by two hand held
electrodes (soup cans), closing a circuit through which a small electric current
is passed. Fluctuations in the current are shown on the E-meter dial. The
E-meter used by Hubbard was designed and built by Dianeticists Volney
Mathieson. Its primary use was, and still is, to detect areas of emotional
upset, or “charge,” or in interrogation to squeeze out secrets. Hubbard once
said that his E-meter compared to similar devices “as the electron microscope
compares to looking through a quartz stone.”
³
He was not given to understatement.

The greatest innovation of the Hubbard College Lectures of
March 1952 was the introduction of a new cosmology, Hubbard's history of the
universe. Dianeticists had sometimes audited “past lives,” but Hubbard had
published next-to-nothing on the subject. Now the “time-track” of the
individual was extended long before the womb. The “Theta-MEST” theory (where
Theta is “life,” and MEST, “Matter, Energy, Space and Time”) was expanded to
include single “life-units” which Hubbard called “Theta-beings.” According to
Hubbard, the “Theta-being” is the individual himself, and is
trillions
of years old (he was later to increase even this, to “quadrillions”). In simple
terms the “Theta being” is the human spirit. Unfortunately, Theta beings have
to share human bodies with other lesser spirits, or entities, originally called
“Theta bodies.” The doctrine of the composite being emerged again in the
mid-1960s, becoming the basis of the secret “Operating Thetan,” or “OT,”
levels.

Hubbard claimed that “Theta beings” had been “implanted”
with ideas during the course of their incredibly long existence through the use
of electrical shock and pain, combined with hypnotic suggestion, aversion
therapy on a grand scale. Hubbard said it was necessary to recall these
implants, and to separate out the different entities in an individual, and put
them firmly under the command of the Theta being. This was the direction of
Hubbard's new auditing techniques.

Hubbard said he had been researching Theta beings for over a
year,
⁴
but had not considered it timely to release his findings. He
said he had originally called his subject “Scientology” as early as 1938, and
was now reviving the name. Hubbard later said his third wife, whom he met in
1951, helped coin the word.
⁵
During 1952, he produced the basic
substance from which Scientology was wrought. Hubbard also introduced the
franchising of his techniques. Satellite organizations would pay a 10 percent
tithe to him, as well as paying for training in new methods created by Hubbard.
⁶

In March 1952, Hubbard was married for the third and final
time. Mary Sue Whipp had arrived at the Wichita Foundation in mid-1951, and
worked on the staff there as an Auditor.
⁵
By April, Ron and Mary Sue
had left the short lived Hubbard College in Wichita, and moved to Phoenix,
Arizona, where they opened the new world headquarters of Hubbardian therapy.
⁷
So it was that Scientology, which Hubbard defined as “knowing how to know,”
(close to Nordenholz's definition), was born.
⁸

Despite Hubbard's assertions that Purcell was determined to
wreck Dianetics, the latter continued to run the Wichita Foundation after
buying it in bankruptcy court proceedings. Ron Howes' Humanics and other
derivatives were flourishing, beyond Hubbard's control, and drifting away from
his original ideas. Hubbard's former publicist, John Campbell, had accused him
of increasing authoritarianism and dogmatism in an independent Dianetic
newsletter, writing that “In a healthy and growing science, there are many men
who are recognized as being competent in the field, and no one man dominates
the work ... to the extent Dianetics is dependent on one man, it is a cult. To
the extent it is built on many minds and many workers it is a science.”
⁹

Hubbard had decided that psychology had forgotten that
“psyche” meant “spirit,” and with Scientology he was going to put this right.
Therapy would now center upon the Theta being, the spirit. By the final Wichita
lectures, his audience was down to around 30. According to Helen O'Brien, the
Hubbard College in Phoenix “languished with never more than a handful of
students.”
¹⁰
Hubbard's image as a popular psychological scientist
had deteriorated. To many he was a crank, with a few impassioned devotees, all
magnetized by his unflagging charisma. He set up the Hubbard Association of
Scientologists in Phoenix.

Hubbard announced a new state of Clear - the Theta Clear -
an individual “capable of dismissing illness and aberration from others at
will” and “able to produce marked results at a distance.”
¹¹

Hubbard's book
What to Audit
, was published in July,
claiming in the foreword to be a “cold-blooded and factual account of your last
sixty trillion years.”
¹²
As the book progresses, sixty million
becomes seventy, and then seventy-four trillion years.
¹³
With
Scientology, we are told, “the blind again see, the lame walk, the ill recover,
the insane become sane and the sane become saner.”
¹²

In the book
Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental
Health Hubbard
insisted “Dianetics cures, and cures without failure.”
¹⁴
In
What to Audit
, he said, “in auditing the whole track [i.e. “past
lives”], one can obtain excellent results ... in auditing the current lifetime,
one can obtain slow and mediocre results.”
¹⁵
In just two years, the
allegedly miraculous techniques of Dianetics had become “slow and mediocre.”
When he left the Wichita Foundation, Hubbard also left the rights to his
earlier books. He had to find something new and different if he was to retain
any of his dwindling following.

What to Audit
is the foundation of Scientology. It is
still in print, minus one chapter,
¹⁶
under the title
Scientology:
A History of Man
. The material in the book is hardly encountered in
contemporary auditing, but is still required reading for the second secret “OT”
level of Scientology. A slim pretense at scientific method is blended with a
strange amalgam of psychotherapy, mysticism and pure science-fiction; mainly
the latter.
What to Audit
is the most bizarre of Hubbard's works, and
deserves the cult status that some truly dreadful science-fiction movies have
achieved. The book leaves the strong suspicion that Hubbard had continued with
his experiments into phenobarbital, and into more powerful “mind-expanding”
drugs, as his son Nibs later asserted.

Hubbard claimed to have absolute proof of past lives, though
he provided no verifiable case histories. He wrote that “Gravestones, ancient
vital statistics, old diplomas and medals will verify in every detail the
validity of ‘many lifetimes’.”
¹⁷
He was in fact relying on the
E-meter, which if it works at all, can do no more than indicate the certainty
with which a conviction is held.

The book contains the usual series of representations for
the eradication of illnesses and physical disabilities, ranging from toothache
to cancer.
¹⁸
Scientologists' medical histories bear witness to the
inadequacy of these remedies.

Hubbard was already equivocating about his discovery of the
many “entities” compacted into the individual, and commented that these
entities were probably just “compartments of the mind.”
¹⁹
Otherwise,
his imagination ran on unchecked. The Theta being, or “Thetan” governs the
composite which we think of as the individual, but the body itself is governed
by the “genetic entity,” a sort of low grade soul, which passes to another body
after death.

Hubbard claimed he could remodel his physical form, lose
weight, enhance features, even add a little height and is readily capable of
telepathy, telekinesis and remote viewing.
²⁰

What to Audit
lists a series of incarnations or a
“time-track” from the beginnings of the universe to man, the evolution, or
“genetic line,” of the human body. According to Hubbard, the “time-track” runs
back to a point where the individual seemed to be “an atom, complete with
electronic rings.”
²¹
After which came the “cosmic impact,” then the
“photon converter,”
²²
and then the first single-cell creature to
reproduce by dividing, the “helper.” Passing quickly through “seaweed,” the
evolutionary line moved on to “jellyfish” and then the “clam.”
²³