How does Hubbard propose we transfer our engrams? That's where auditors come in. The auditor talks to you, questions you, about your feelings and fears and hang-ups, helping you move your engrams into the analytical mind so that the incident that caused the engram is remembered with perfect clarity. This is called "dianetic reverie" where one obtains "release"—the erasing of a particular engram, or becomes a "Clear"—one who has cleared out the entire contents of the engram bank. Achieving Clear status is as close as a person gets to perfection.

The device an auditor uses to aid in releasing a person from his engrammatical prison is called an e-meter, that is, an electroencephaloneuromentimograph. The e-meter is a 10" x 6" x 2" box that looks something like a volt-ohmmeter and a megohmeter. Hubbard stated, "The e-meter is never wrong. It sees all; it knows all. It tells everything." It has little metal canisters which function as electrodes that one holds in the hands to measure skin resistance in order to document how the resistance changes in response to various questions. It is a type of galvanometer that served as the forerunner for the polygraph—that notoriously unreliable device the police put too much faith in but which fortunately the courts do not. Yet auditors and Hubbard himself claim that an e-meter can pinpoint any incident in one's life down to the second and any incident in a past life as well!

The e-meter is erroneously believed to have been Hubbard's invention. It is not. Nor did Hubbard claim to be the inventor of the e-meter. The inventor was a chiropractor named Volney Mathison (not Olin Mathison, as dianetic literature calls him). Why an e-meter is necessary to perform simple psychoanalysis is not known but anyone qualifying as an auditor must purchase one to the tune of about $162—about three-and-a-half times more than what they are worth wholesale. In addition, qualifying as an auditor required a $1000 fee in courses and this was in 1950! And an auditor also had to pledge ten percent of his or her income to Hubbard.

The e-meter has come under a great deal of fire because of both its unreliability coupled with the Hubbard's claim that it is infallible. The National Bureau of Standards has charged that the e-meter cannot regulate the amount of current it puts out simply because it has no regulator of any kind. In addition, the e-meter is subject to polarization making its readings highly unreliable. Nor does there appear to be a calibration standard. Simply holding the canisters in the hands is inadequate to obtain an accurate reading of skin resistance because the amount of sweaty tissue in contact with the canisters will vary greatly. By squeezing the canisters, the skin resistance will drop and by holding the canisters loosely, the skin resistance increases. Moreover there is no device to monitor the correct amount of contact between the skin tissue and the canisters. Simple tests performed by people showed the e-meter to be completely unreliable. One man had argued with his wife on a Saturday but the e-meter, operated by an auditor who said that the machine would pinpoint the date of the argument precisely, told him the fight took place on a Tuesday which the man knew was wrong. He dropped out of the organization.

Hubbard claimed that garden variety tomatoes can be "processed" and give various responses to blight and pain. There is a famous photo of Hubbard auditing a tomato with a somber, serious look on his face to offset the utter comical stupidity of the procedure itself. According to Hubbard, tomatoes "scream" when sliced. What constitutes a tomato scream is certainly debatable. Such assertions destroy his claims! Is a tomato with blight suffering from a psychosomatic illness caused by an engram? Incredibly, Hubbard's supporters give an unequivocal yes.

In 1951, Sara "Betty" Northrup, perhaps reaping the reward of her infidelity, divorced Hubbard claiming he was a "hopelessly insane" paranoid schizophrenic who tortured her while she was pregnant with their daughter. If true, and there is no reason not to believe her, Hubbard apparently disregarded his own advice on how not to cause babies to form the all-important prenatal engrams. In fact, he seemed to have been acting out scenarios from his own book.

That same year, the New Jersey Board of Medical Examiners charged that Hubbard was essentially practicing medicine without a license. Further, Hubbard pulled a deliberate sleight-of-hand when, after completing expensive courses in Dianetics, graduates were allowed to add M.D. after their names. The M.D. stood for "Master of Dianetics" but of course fooled the casual observer into believing the individual to be a qualified medical doctor. Dianetics was not a science despite Hubbard's insistence on the opposite. No verifiable and repeatable experiments could be conducted to test the claims of dianetics. Hubbard even said science would not be able to find proof of engrams even though they were supposed to be permanent impressions on body tissue. Unable to support his claims, the main Dianetic facility in Wichita declared bankruptcy.

In 1952, Hubbard married for the third time. This time, the lucky woman was Mary Sue Whipp. She was nineteen, he was forty-one. She would, more or less, come to run Hubbard's intelligence service—a clandestine group of spies, thieves and snitches whose job was to keep an eye on and gather intelligence about its enemies and former-members and even the government!

In 1952, Hubbard, never to be counted out, turned the "science" of dianetics into a religion that he called the Founding Church of Scientology. As its symbol, Hubbard more or less stole the Rosicrucian cross (and they were none too happy about it). "Scientology" is not a word coined by Hubbard although many think it is. Not so surprisingly, the word was used at the turn of the century as a synonym for what we call "pseudo-science."

Hubbard's move to make dianetics a religion was not met with unanimous acceptance by his followers. Many avid dianeticists were also avid agnostics and atheists. They were highly unthrilled (not to mention suspicious) at the idea of suddenly being part of a church. Many jumped ship. One of the first to go was Dr. J. A. Winter himself, Hubbard's self-appointed dianetics director. Winter penned a scathing indictment of Hubbard called A Doctor's Report on Dianetics where he lambasted Hubbard's questionable methods and claimed that dianetics, far from curing people's mental ailments, actually drove them psychotic citing case histories that he himself dealt with at the Dianetics Institute. Needless to say, current editions of Dianetics no longer contain Dr. Winters's foreword.

What did Hubbard add to dianetics to turn it into Scientology? He basically attached his own mediocre science-fiction plots to dianetics. According to Hubbard, every human being is a theta—his word for a spirit or soul or self. He claimed the ancients represented the spirit with the Greek letter theta although no one has been able to verify this. Crowley, however, used the theta to represent the Thelema or Will. Every human being is a "thetan." Scientology even refers to God as the "Big Thetan." But, like Crowley, Hubbard was fascinated by Set whom both considered the same as Satan, the male counterpart of Babalon. Former-Scientologist Jon Atack thinks that Hubbard was making an inside joke, that when Satan is pronounced with a lisp, it sounds like "thetan." This is probable. Hubbard, then, meant that by all of us being thetans as part of god, the god he was referring to was Satan. This is not a new idea, I pointed it out in the beginning chapter. But we may observe from this how much Hubbard took from Crowley and that Ron DeWolf is correct when he described Scientology as a disguised form of Satanism.

Hubbard put forth that every human being was inhabited by seven "foreign spirits" and called the leader of these seven the "crew chief." Clearing out the engrams and becoming a Clear earned one the privilege of being an Operating Thetan which meant one could operate outside the body and do things at a distance because the theta, the self, is projected from the body. This is basically Crowley's dream for the Thelema—altering one's environment strictly with the Will.

Hubbard didn't make mention of this again until 1966 when he really dressed it up in style. He spoke of a grade called "Operating Thetan—level three" or OT3 which he claimed was so secret that learning it could kill a person not properly prepared. Apparently, it generates devastating engrams or something. What is the secret of Operating Thetan—level three? Here it is: About 75 million years ago, an "overlord" named Xenu controlled seventy-six planets of 178 billion people each. Xenu rounded them up and dropped them onto planet earth where he shut them up in volcanoes and then detonated hydrogen bombs inside the volcanoes which released the thetans inside the bodies of these hapless people. Xenu captured the thetans on "electronic ribbons" (the cover of Dianetics depicts an erupting volcano). The captured thetans were hypnotized for thirty-six straight days and implanted with all sorts of blueprints for future civilizations (such as the formation of the Christian religion). The thetans were then gathered into clusters of seven and now each human body houses a cluster. There it is—the devastating OT3 secret. Hubbard himself wrote his "OT3" scenario down as a plot for a sci-fi screenplay called Revolt in the Stars so one can only wonder why few if any died from it.

A Clear lives in the present moment always—a doctrine found in many Eastern religions concerning living in the present moment rather than the past or future. Scientology calls it the "now." A Theta Clear lives in the now and has perfect recall of all sense-perceptions. In his early days as a religious charlatan, Hubbard made the mistake of introducing an audience of 6000 in Los Angeles to a young woman named Sonya Bianca whom Hubbard claimed was a Clear. Ms. Bianca was a physics major in college but, when put to the test, could not remember a certain physics formula that even most non-Clear physics majors would know. She even failed to remember the color of Hubbard's tie when his back was to her. Most of the audience immediate rose and left. Hubbard later defended his failure by stating that he had inadvertently created an engram in Ms. Bianca by requesting that she "come out onstage now." He should not have used the word "now" because of its special meaning in Scientology which caused her to get stuck in present time, he said. Since we only exist in present time, I don't see why that should be a problem. Be that as it may, Hubbard never again introduced a Clear to the world and, indeed, all disillusioned Scientologists claim to have never met one.

Hubbard was smart enough to deny that he himself was a Clear. However, he declared one of his sons, Quentin, as a "cleared theta clear" but that didn't cure Quentin of his homosexuality. Hubbard adopted a rather mean homophobic stance publicly (e.g. homosexuals are "backstabbers"). This may have contributed to Quentin's eventual suicide. When told of his son's demise, Hubbard was infuriated but showed no sign of grief. Apparently, a Clear committing suicide—the founder's son no less—made Scientology look bad.

In 1959, Hubbard moved the Church of Scientology out of the United States and over to Saint Hill Manor in East Grinstead, Sussex, London, England. The British government, however, did not welcome Hubbard and his church with open arms. Scientology faired worse in Australia where it was banned outright. Legislation banning Scientology from Germany is also being hotly debated. South Africa also wants to ban Scientology. Scientology relies on the celebrities in its ranks for its public relations. These include jazz musicians Stanley Clarke and Chick Corea of the band Return to Forever (their release, Romantic Warrior, was written about Hubbard) and actors Kirstie Allie, John Travolta, Tom Cruise and Juliet Lewis. Even so, many nations remained unconvinced that Scientology is anything more than a destructive cult that hurts more people than it helps.