[With Scientology in the news, I thought it would be a good time to post another chapter from my "book". The whole truth and nuthin' but the truth.]

THE SCRIBE FLIES SOLO – The Life and Legacy of L. Ron Hubbard

L. Ron Hubbard, obviously, did not drop from sight either. As we all know, he went on to found Dianetics in 1950 and, when that scheme went bankrupt, turned it into Scientology two years later by adding really bad science-fiction and pseudo-Crowleyan occultism to the Dianetic mix. Although a shameless shyster and thief, we should not dismiss Hubbard as merely a huckster who used occultism strictly to further his own ends. According to Hubbard's son, Ron DeWolf, his father had been a black magic devotee for many years prior to his connection with Jack Parsons. Hubbard had also been a Rosicrucian, joining AMORC in 1940 and completing two of the neophyte degrees before apparently losing interest and leaving. Hubbard was also a devotee of Crowley's Book of the Law, which seemed to be what got him started in the first place. Hubbard himself spoke of Crowley in a 1952 lecture (referring to him as "my very good friend" even though they never met and Crowley hated him for interfering with operations at the Pasadena OTO) and spoke of his fascination with the Book of the Law. DeWolf claimed his father had an intense interest in creating a moon child. "It was basically an attempt to create an immaculate conception, except by Satan rather than by God," DeWolf told Penthouse magazine in their June 1983 issue. DeWolf also stated that after Crowley's death, Hubbard considered himself his legitimate successor and fancied himself both the Antichrist and the Beast 666. Crowley, for whatever faults he may have had, was surely spinning in his grave.

Hubbard was, in fact, obsessed with the Great Goddess as was Parsons and Crowley. In the late forties, after his split with Parsons (whom he was always careful to write respectfully of), Hubbard and Betty were attempting to invoke the Egyptian goddess Hathor by mingling their blood in a rite appropriately titled The Blood Ritual. DeWolf stated that Hathor was the name his father privately called the Great Goddess, the same one that Crowley referred to as Babalon (taken from Babylon the Great in Revelation). Both Hubbard and Crowley regarded the tarot card "The Empress" as the Great Goddess and Hubbard firmly believed her to be his HGA or Holy Guardian Angel. He even claimed to have seen her once standing on the wing of a glider he was flying. The difference between the beliefs of Hubbard and Parsons and those of Crowley was that Crowley could not buy into the notion that Babalon could be incarnated as a moon child or that she could function as one person's HGA. She was above and beyond any of that.
Hubbard claimed his 1950 book, Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, which he wrote in three weeks, was a "channeled writing" dictated by the Great Goddess. He often publicly referred to her as Diana or Diane and is the basis of the word "Dianetics." "Di" means "two" and so the two-faced god Janus was also called Dianus and two-faced would certainly describe L. Ron Hubbard. He gained prestige with the book because the foreword was written by a bona fide doctor, J. A. Winter. Hubbard named him as Director of the Dianetic Institute.

Dianetics is a mish-mash of half-baked psychoanalysis based loosely on the work of Freud, Korzybski, William Sargent, Nandor Fodor and Grinker & Spiegel. Hubbard initially attributed Dianetics to these people before deciding to take all the credit as the channeler of his Great Goddess. The claim of Dianetics is the assertion that it has located "a single source of all insanities, psychoses, neuroses, compulsions, repressions and social derangements." This single source is called the "engram." The engram is the source of virtually all illnesses. So, virtually all sickness and disease is psychosomatic.

Before we go into engrams, let us review a bit of Hubbard's observations concerning the structure of the mind: There is, according to Hubbard, an analytical mind "which perceives and retains experience data to compose and resolve problems and direct the organism along the four dynamics. It thinks in differences and similarities." There is also a reactive mind which is "that portion of the mind which files and retains physical pain and painful emotion and seeks to direct the organism solely on a stimulus-response basis. It thinks only in identities." The third part of the mind is the somatic mind "which, directed by the analytical mind or reactive mind, places solutions into effect on the physical level."

The engram is "a definite and permanent trace left by a stimulus on the protoplasm of a tissue. It is considered as a unit group of stimuli impinged solely on the cellular being." Engrams are retained in the reactive mind, which Hubbard also calls "the engram bank." Since the reactive mind only retains pain and suffering, engrams can only be caused by painful experiences. Engrams give rise to just about every type of mental and physical ailment known to man. During a painful experience, says Hubbard, the analytical mind shuts off and the reactive mind is activated. Unlike the analytical mind, which records everything it experiences perfectly and totally without distortion or error, the reactive mind doesn't really think but only reacts to various stimuli that, in turn, activate the painful impressions of the engram. The engram then manifests with the right triggers and the subject will develop any number of ailments in a subconscious response. Hubbard classifies the engrams but that is not important here. Hubbard's book also discusses what he calls "demon circuits" but we shall skip this as well (I mention it just in case a Scientologist should read this and accuse me of deliberately excluding important parts of the book—they are not important).

One example that Hubbard gives of engram formation is one of a husband beating his wife and telling her that she is a faker, no good, and is always changing her mind. He strikes her, knocking over a chair. The faucet is running, a car is passing by outside. Her mind also logs the various other sensations at the time such as smells and tastes. "The engram this woman has received contains a neurotic positive suggestion….She has been told that she is a faker, that she is no good, and that she is always changing her mind. Then the engram is restimulated in one of the great many ways possible [such as hearing a car passing by while the faucet is running and a chair falls over], she has a feeling that she is no good, a faker, and that she will change her mind." Hubbard insists that all this is scientifically verifiable and that large amounts of data have already been gathered to verify it. Nothing of the sort. There is no way to test his assertions scientifically.
Why doesn't science just look for evidence of engrams? According to Hubbard, this "definite and permanent trace left by a stimulus on the protoplasm of a tissue" is too small to be detected. This is problematic because the issue must now be raised as to how Hubbard could know that engrams exist if they can't be detected. If engrams can't be detected scientifically, how could he claim dianetics to be a science? The engram appears to have been lifted from another pseudo-science called homeopathy which got its start in the first decade of the 19th century.

Homeopathic remedies are solutions where the medicine is diluted in water. This was originally done to cut down on side effects. The results were favorable and dilution itself became more important than the medicine. The more the medicine is diluted, they say, the more beneficial it is. If this wasn't ridiculous enough, some homeopathic solutions are composed of one part medicine dissolved into 100 parts water and then shook and, again, one part of this is then dissolved into another 100 parts water and shook again and so on until this operation has been repeated 200 times! This is notated on the label as 200C. For someone to drink a 200C solution would require that they swallow more molecules of water than there are molecules in the entire known universe just to swallow one molecule of the medicine!

How do defenders of homeopathy say its dilution principle works? They freely admit that 200C solutions contain no medicine but that doesn't matter! The very act of diluting and shaking the water/alcohol solution somehow charges it with a kind of "memory." That is, the medicine or antibody leaves an "imprint" in the water. This imprint, they maintain, is an electromagnetic wave. Furthermore, a coil surrounding the water can pick up this imprint, store it on computer and send it via the internet or email to some other part of the world to activate water there with that very imprint! Yet, needless to say, there is no scientific test that can prove this! There is, in fact, no way to tell a homeopathic solution from ordinary tap water!

Homeopathic remedies work supposedly because the water is imprinted in some undetectable way. Likewise, we find that Hubbard's engram is just homeopathy applied to protoplasm of cellular tissue rather than water. Protoplasm of a cell is somehow imprinted by a stimulus in some permanent, magical way. The only real difference is that the homeopathic imprint is said to be beneficial while the Hubbardian engram is said to be detrimental.

Having foisted this off on the reader, Hubbard now informs us that the most damaging engrams of all are "prenatal engrams" which occur in the womb. Some engrams are received while the developing infant is still a zygote and some are received while in the embryo stage and these engrams are terrible enough but the engrams "received as a foetus are enough to send people to institutions all by themselves." As an example, Hubbard gives us another hypothetical situation of his own invention. Suppose a pregnant mother is on the toilet straining to have bowel movement but has terrible constipation (many of Hubbard's examples center on women having extramarital affairs, attempting to give themselves abortions, being beaten by husbands or being in a great deal of discomfort due to their own defective bodily functions). She says to herself, "Oh, this is hell. I am all jammed up inside. I feel so stuffy I can't think. This is too terrible to be borne." According to Hubbard, the developing infant in her womb will hear this (he doesn't explain exactly how infants in the womb can hear things in the outside world or how zygotes can get engrams in minds they don't as yet possess and yet discounts the possibilities that fetuses have extra-sensory perceptions or minds!) and an engram will form in the fetus that will make it believe later in life that it causes pain and that the mother didn't want to have him or her. So we must be careful with words because they have entirely different meanings engrammatically. Incredibly, Hubbard recommends complete silence when treating accident victims so as not to induce engrams. Even the parents having sex while the mother is pregnant can cause the child to be born with a false memory of being raped by the father. Again, Hubbard claims that there is scientific data that supports all this but he doesn't bother to give us any.

What to do about these terrible engrams? Enter dianetics. Dianetics, states Hubbard, can "erase" engrams by transferring them from the world of the reactive mind's half-baked impressions to the analytical mind's clear light which exposes all the memories that caused the engram so that the engram can then be understood and dealt with. How a permanent trace left on the protoplasm of a tissue is transferred from one mind to the next is not explained. Since the analytical mind is supposedly shut off during painful experiences, how is one to suddenly recall all the details of an experience that caused an engram? Hubbard doesn't say.