I read this book in conjunction with interviews I am
conducting for Awakenings: Felt Benefit
In Personal Values (www.awakeningsproject.wix.com/awakenings).
In addition to reading Original Thesis, I
have met with staff at a Scientology church, have undergone an Oxford Capacity
Assessment (“Free Personality Test”) at their site, and I look forward to
interviewing a few Scientologists for my research soon.
First, let me establish something. There is no denying that Hubbard
was a genius. I know he’s derided by many who don’t take his religion or
methodology seriously, and vilified by those who consider his ideas a grave
threat against humankind or a specific belief system, but that doesn’t discount
the fact that his prodigious literary output and complex ideology are
tremendously orchestrated and deeply ramified into a very well thought-out system.
I have no doubt he was an extremely informed person, and he wrote intelligently
and assiduously in order for people to take him seriously as a religious Czar.
He desperately wanted people to think of his work as scientific, though it
mostly strikes one as innovative, and I believe that it was his innovation that
brought him his enormous success. He clearly created more than he relayed, and
if his Scientology is scientific—in
the sense of being verified by other leading scientists or presenting
hypotheses that are testable for definite verification—then science is in some
serious trouble.
But as it stands, I think Hubbard did the right thing in
declaring his Scientology—a label probably intended to evoke respect for
dispassionate research and reportage, which it is not—a ‘religion.’ Religions
require faith, and Scientology most certainly requires a LOT of faith, but
religion does something very specific that science doesn’t do: it speaks to
what a person wants, and provides a
sense of direction and meaning for one’s life that is based on an emotional
connection with the content of that faith. Science more closely deals with
impersonal data, calculation, and ‘detached’ intellection; religion more
closely deals with passion, instinct, and volition. I personally think that
both science and religion are pursuits of every human being in varying degrees,
though many systems of behavior or thought often represent more one function
than the other; therefore both are legit. So, Scientology as a religion is not
a bad thing in all cases, although the idea of a ‘new religion’ is humorous in
most people’s mind as an absurdity or an anachronism.
I can’t really speak to the type of person Hubbard was
because I haven’t done enough research—even though he might strike one as a
slime-ball in his interviews, and I haven’t interacted enough with his
metaphysics which account for the origin and destination of life, though I
generally distrust its extremes; but I do think the practical results of his Dianetics seems to have done a lot of
good for many, and has been reported to have transformed individuals and
communities for the better (http://www.scientology.org/how-we-help/volunteer-ministers.html).
For all its oddities and possible snares for authority-seeking types of
individuals, its results are still impressive, considering alone the massive
amount of followers it has attained over the years.
Hubbard cooked up something novel, expansive, and fully
planned to last. It’s clearly a knock-off of psychoanalysis with a few new
tricks and a religion’s-worth of cleverly minted and repurposed terms, but it
looks like something different on the surface, and for those who don’t know yet
what they believe in, it certainly offers something substantial. You’ll sooner
reach the bottom of most world religions combined, with regard to their central
texts, than you will the total, staggering volume of Hubbard’s works alone
which include written and audio recordings on a wide range of topics including
literacy, mental health, personality assessment, metaphysics, business
administration, and addiction. Reading through his works would truly amount to
a lifetime reading plan for most people, which introduces a fairly serious risk
to the naïve in commencing the perpetual chain of obligatory reading material
which is sure to end in an extremely provincial understanding of the world
through the exclusivity of reading habits that is required to commit to finish Hubbard’s
nearly interminable opus. In other words, if someone starts down that road and
later decides it’s not the right path, they may find it’s a long way back; so I imagine most would
rather just keep their head down and keep reading, whether it still seems cogent
or not—it’s better than starting over.
Dianetics [Dia—“through”,
nous—“soul”]: The Original Thesis
begins with the primary axioms on which Hubbard founded his practices. The
first axiom, which is the primary drive of humanity, is: “Survive!” This he
calls the “Dynamic” which is divided into multiple expressions, or “dynamics”,
which include self, one’s life-partner and family, one’s social groups, the extended
community/nation/world; and in later books he further includes non-human
categories of animal, the physical world, the spiritual world, and finally,
infinity. Hubbard teaches that for each person these drives to survive and
expand the support network for one’s survival derail when attempting to
navigate traumatic experiences which create an unhealthy dependence on the
‘reactive mind’, and so the original Dynamic must be reinstated by a rigorous
and guided process of placing the more highly evolved and sophisticated analytical
mind back in charge through a psycho-therapeutic operation called auditing.
Auditing is the cooperative effort of an auditor and a
participant to go back (‘return’) to birth (‘the basic’) and prenatal memories
to neutralize the harmful and unconscious reactions to negative memories (‘engrams’)
in the ‘reactive mind’. These engrams are memories of dangers which continue to
influence an individual, but which no longer represent real threats. The
primary goal of auditing is to prompt the ‘pre-clear’ (the participant who
cannot access clear analytical reasoning) to
remember trauma in the womb and to bring them to desensitize themselves to
those experiences through overexposure. “What,” might you ask, “could be a
prenatal memory that is traumatic?” Well, that would be the attempted abortions
that nearly every baby boomer has experienced, according to Hubbard. To be
fair, he does state that there may be other postpartum trauma that impairs an
adult and causes ‘dramatizations’ or outbursts which hamstring their functions,
health, and happiness in later life; but he is very adamant on the point that
the primary engrams to be disarmed are those caused by prenatal abortion
attempts and birth itself. The auditing process is an intense and closely
guided therapy session of reactivating those fetal memories in order to
neutralize them.
He defends the possibility of being able to consciously
return to fetal memories by reasoning that the human brain is recording events
and storing experiential data at all stages of its development, even during its
unconscious moments. It seems logical that everything sensed by the brain is at
least partially recorded in life, but the few objections I have to his ideology
would be, 1) a baby’s brain is still developing and continues to do so into
adulthood along with its sensory, mnemonic, and interpretive functioning which
serves and constructs a sense of what we call ‘consciousness’ and can’t be
expected to construct meaning and record data to fit into discrete categories
that can be sequentially accessed later for clear interpretation by an
individual or an auditor, 2) a baby’s brain is as selective about what it
records and how it records as is the adult’s, so it seems nonsense to suppose
it indiscriminately records everything that happens to it in anything but
shorthand or extremely fragmented hieroglyphics suitable to early stage of
growth, 3) if conscious returns to unconscious impressions were always possible,
it would imply that all sensory recordings on the physical plane during an
adult’s sleep could be later reconstructed just as easily, like air currents or
sounds during REM cycles, and 4) if conscious returns to birth and pre-birth
could be reached, why wouldn’t reaching them be an experience far more common
than it seems to be now? If Hubbard is right, then everyone who existed before 1950
should be categorized as a pre-clear, which is roughly a billion-billion people
(give or take a few billion Neolithic homo
sapiens) who were intellectually impaired and lost in the non-Hubbardian
darkness.
I do tend to give some credence to what I consider to be
scientifically conducted experiments and peer-reviewed research in recreating
alleged birth trauma and helping individuals to cope through exposure to what
is believed to be perinatal memory of sorts (see the work of Stanislav Grof and
Christopher Bache). Probably this amounts to more of a sympathy and admiration
for the courage to both develop beta therapeutic techniques which might be
helpful to people, and to stand with their new ideas against the tsunami of
scientific evidence that might seem at times to fly in their face. However,
though the concepts of Dianetics intrigue me, I think it is at bottom mostly
neologistic craftiness and shifty formalism. But still, I don’t think
Scientology is all bad, or better yet, I don’t believe it is all bad for all
people. It is my belief that Hubbard to some extent probably had the good of
others in mind. Reading over his principles and methods I get the feeling he
may have been working miracles among the disturbed, and who knows, his most
faithful adherents may have been the breeding grounds for psychopathy, and I
don’t mean that in a hateful way. Even his subtle reminders throughout his
works that those who have been ‘cleared’ of mental ‘aberration’ would no longer
be obsessively introverted (“introversion is not natural nor is it necessary to
the creation of anything”) might be a signal that his focus was on the compulsive
type whom he probably even had to ward off from an over-interest in even his
own ideas (“so long as he is interested in his own reactive mind [one of the
fundamental principles of Dianetics and auditing], he has engrams [corrupted
thought]”).
All decriers of what is widely considered eccentric
religious belief like Scientology have to ask themselves if they are sincerely ready
to know what the world would be like without religion. If all religions of the
world were turned upside-down and shaken, what neuroses/psychoses would fall
back into general society without the guardrails and/or systematic suppression of
superstition, shaming dogma, unquestioned authority, and congregational
pressure to conform? Speaking for myself, I’d be afraid of what would shake
out. Especially out of the Scientology domain. And yet, I truly hope that those
who are ready to become “prey to a freedom that is no longer chained-up” would
find the courage they need to break out.
So, it seems to me that there is some value in Dianetics as
a self-help tool. Even coming to terms with shock of the ‘exile’ of existence
in general—through the emotional bath of a phantasmagoric and semi-hypnotic,
free-associative exploration of the themes of pain, birth, thought, memory,
dreams, and primal reflexes through the contrived rigors of auditing—appears to
be beneficial to some degree, and quite possibly the whole success of Dianetics
hangs on this the catharsis and relational support of auditing. Considering for
a moment the sole impact of the first axiom of Dianetics which lays out one’s
primal and primary function of “Survive!”, Dianetics initially appears valid;
and moving a few steps further it continues to ring true in explanations about
how the survival of self grows more ‘dynamic’, healthy, and happy when it
includes the welfare and survival of others and one’s environment. This
survival of self and others is the basic message of Scientologists’
oft-distributed book, The Way To
Happiness by Hubbard, which is an extremely simplistic, bordering-on-banal,
code of ethics that monotonously pecks into one’s head the message: “Your
survival and wellbeing must include the survival and wellbeing of others or
you’re not going to thrive.” Who can argue that these seem positive and
sensible messages for our world? Of course, good ideas often are the Trojan
Horses for incubating bad ideas, but that’s sort-of-but-maybe-not-really beside
the point.
I realize I am attempting to sum up a religion, and it must
be remembered that I only read Dianetics:
The Original Thesis containing Hubbard’s tiny germ of original thought which
I understand was greatly revised, expanded, complicated, tangled,
transmogrified, and ruptured into Dianetics:
The Modern Science Of Mental Health. Well anyway, for what it’s worth, Dianetics
at its rudimentary core, distinct from its later expressions and Scientology
framework, gets my vote to stay around as long as it can. Until it ruins some
poor bastard. In which case, thumbs down.
And also (this is probably as good a time as any to say
this) the film The Master, which
intentionally parallels the life of L. Ron Hubbard, is brilliant. R.I.P. Philip Seymour Hoffman. Oh, and Hubbard too.
