This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 4, Issue 6, from 1990.
Scientology – then known as Dianetics – hit a world still partly in shock from World War II, in the columns of an early 1950 issue of the quite respectable US pulp magazine, Astounding Science Fiction. John W Campbell Jnr, its normally level-headed editor, went overboard for L Ron Hubbard’s ideas and proclaimed that the source of all human ills had been discovered, as well as processes for eliminating them.
Needless to say, California went wild with delight, and the prime source-book, Dianetics – the Modern Science of Mental Health, quickly sold its first 50,000 copies and went into reprints. Citizens worldwide began practising Dianetic ‘processes’ on relatives and friends, and at first it was looked on by outsiders and media alike as a relatively harmless occupation with (then) no religious overtones.
Briefly, Dianetics stated that you have two minds: a Reactive Mind, from the early days of evolution, which is an emergency survival system and which is what makes you unthinkingly duck when you observe an airborne rock heading your way; and an Analytical Mind, with which you read Skeptic magazine and even write articles for it, tot up your income tax and laugh at Blackadder. Further, when survival is threatened, the Reactive Mind can kick the slower Analytical Mind instantly out of circuit and take unthinkingly remedial action. It is also what makes you pull your parachute ripcord after baling unconscious out of your Spitfire; and because your Analytical Mind has been bypassed, is why you can’t remember doing it.
So far, so relatively sane. But Hubbard said that Dianetics also explains one of life’s great mysteries – that animals get on quite well without nervous breakdowns, PMT, psychopathic behaviour and even politicians, whereas we humans, by comparison, tend to be quite potty. The answer? The Reactive Mind (even in the womb, where it develops first) understands language just as soon as the Analytical Mind learns language, and as the Reactive Mind has an excellent memory (‘total recall’, says Hubbard), even anything the embryo hears, gets stored away and later understood.
(Extreme example: your Mum, when carrying you, bumps her tummy into a hard object, whereupon your embryo’s Reactive Mind perceives this as a threat and starts recording Mum’s loud remark: ‘Oh, I am a stupid bugger’. Ever afterwards, you carry a ‘time bomb’ within you, which if keyed-in with a similar bump in post-natal life, convinces you you’re an SB.)
This recording, which can be non-verbal as well, is called an engram – although Hubbard originally called them ‘Norns’, after mythical Norse mischief-makers. ‘Engram’ is in the dictionary, as ‘a permanent trace recorded on biological tissue’. Hubbard said we all have lots of them, and they explain mental illness, irrational behaviour, self-destructive urges and much else. Get rid of them, and you have a well-balanced, relaxed, enthusiastic, calm, intelligent, largely carefree personality. (Now you know why Hubbard was so popular.)
You get rid of them by a form of ‘psychotherapy’ called Processing, in which the practitioner (the Auditor – meaning one who listens and figures out your answers) pinpoints your troublesome engrams and by going through them with you over and over, clears them out. You are thus a Pre-clear until you’ve got rid of them, whereupon you become a Clear: a whole and superbly functioning human being, in command of your environment and the people in it; or in Hubbard-language, functioning on all four Dynamics. (Meaning optimum behaviour towards Self, Family, Group or Nation, and All Humankind; Scientology later added another four, but these will do).
After about three years, Hubbard introduced the E-meter, which he claimed was a kind of emotion-detector which helped track down engrams by their emotional charge. When you’re closing in on an engram, the needle of the milliammeter drops and starts rising again as you come to grips with the engram’s hidden memories, until it’s erased. Put someone on an E-meter (they grasp metal cans in each hand) and mention death or even your mum, and the needle tends to nosedive (mums often restimulate painful engrams as a means of controlling you – ‘I’ll tell your father to get the strap!’).
Unfortunately, given that what they’re actually reacting to is electrodermal activity in the skin, E-meters also ‘respond’ to imaginary incidents. In 1953 – when, as a Scientologist, I thought I was hotly pursuing an engram – I suddenly had a vivid image of being on the flight-deck of a spaceship which was zig-zagging through jagged scenery on Betelguese IV or something, when we hit some of the scenery. ‘What the hell was that?’ asked my auditor, unscrewing the milliammeter glass and unbending its needle. I explained. ‘Oh’ he said calmly, and carried on engram-chasing.
Well, it seems that these imaginary incidents which register just as violently on E-meters as real ones, led Hubbard on to Scientology – we are actually all immortal ‘Thetans’, who arose from an eternal Consciousness which got bored, split into trillions of ‘souls’ and found it was still bored. So all these Thetan-souls began to play games with each other (hence our obsession with World Cups and things). But they found that, being omniscient, you already know how things will turn out. So you deliberately forget things. Then you forget you’ve forgotten. Then you forget even that it’s a game, and it gets quite grim. And lo and behold, even your Thetan gets engrams.
Phew. Anyway, Scientology processes claim to clear Thetans, too – and you become once more a super-being, able to zap planets and abolish universes, but of course much too nice to do so. But therapy can get so rough – unless you implicitly obey the Scientology ‘Org’ – that you might end up in a Dwindling Spiral and go paranoid… which, although I don’t wish to be rude, seems to be what happened to old L Ron himself, judging from how he ended up. I mean, as early as about 1960 he was saying that the planet Venus was actually a hospital for injured Thetans engaged in an interplanetary war. If he’d gone there he’d have found the temperature is 800°C. And that’s in the cool ward.
Back then, Hubbard invented the Church of Scientology, which was openly intended to be a defence from irate state governments; as in the USA, at any rate, you can’t ban a religion. But when it got to the stage of pre-clears singing hymns to Ron, it reminded me so much of the Temple Colombs (bimbos in diaphanous gowns) of the Rosicrucians, that I baled out.
All this is only a bare sketch of the formative years of Dianetics and Scientology, attempting to encompass what Hubbard filled half a dozen books and hundreds of tapes with. I have heard that it has not greatly changed since, although its practitioners seem to have developed a prime case of paranoia. But some things make sense, in Hubbard’s ideas. I admit I approve of Scientology’s standard end-of-session commands: ‘Think of a pleasant memory’ – then, when the E-meter needle is rising nicely: ‘Come up to present time’. Which doesn’t leave the pre-clear half-stuck in the time he fell into a Black Hole. Or cheated at poker in Wigan and was found out. On the other hand, just as I’ve never met anyone who went to Lourdes with one leg and came back with two, ditto with Scientology. Zapping whole universes seems to stop short at creating two new legs.
