It may come as something of a surprise that, about half a century ago, your friendly local song-writer was once a member of the sinister ‘mindbending’ cult of Scientology. I have ‘fessed up to this in various interviews, but I thought I would write something about the movement as seen from a slightly different viewpoint, than its usual ‘shock-horror’ aspect. It is a 15 min read.
Let us get this out of the way to start with…..
Is Scientology a scam?
Yes!
Was L. Ron Hubbard a rogue and a charlatan?
Yes!
Should we all go off and become Scientologists?
Definitely not!
I was a Scientologist for several years in the 1970s, and spent two or three years working for the London Organisation in Tottenham Court Road. I never reached any dizzy heights in the cult, but I did end up, for a few months, on Hubbard’s ocean liner ‘Apollo’, the flagship of the ‘Sea Org’, his caste of maritime ‘warrior monks’. I never joined the Sea Org, and remained a ‘civilian’ staff member, thus escaping most of the coercive control that fills the horror stories of many ex-Scientologist cultists.
This is not the place to give even a rough outline of the theory and practice of Scientology; this is easily available elsewhere. Hubbard produced a colossal amount of written material and recorded lectures. Apart from his numerous books, which still constitute the sacred texts of the movement, a daily stream of ‘Technical Bulletins’ and ‘Policy Letters’ bombarded the crazily overworked and virtually unpaid staff who serviced the worldwide network of ‘Orgs’ or Scientology organisations. Their task, ruthlessly enforced, was to sell and deliver ‘Auditing’, the actual one-to-one Scientology therapy, and Scientology training courses to the membership, and above all to bring in money for Hubbard, who was, by his own admission, completely obsessive in his need for wealth and power.
The majority of his ideas would appear to be completely bonkers to the average person. In one book he advocates taking lethal doses of nicotinic acid washed down with chocolate, as a cure for radiation poisoning, while his ‘origin story’ for the human race was revealed only to high-ranking Scientologists because, he said, less enlightened beings would be likely to drop dead or go insane on hearing it. (Spoiler alert: Billions of years ago, a galactic dictator freezes the living souls of his more rebellious subjects into blocks of ice, then stuffs them into volcanoes on Planet Earth before pelting them with atom bombs, thus creating the neurotic and unreliable mindset of all inhabitants of planet Earth thereafter.)
Hubbard was a remarkable individual and a man of extraordinary charisma who was able to charm, persuade or bully people into becoming his devotees with effortless ease. He was a megalomaniac who saw himself as a great world leader, the saviour of the planet. Scientology, he said, was the only solution to the world’s problems and could transform people into super-beings. All his writings and diktats were infallible, and were not to be questioned, or argued about, but were simply to be obeyed and put into immediate action.
I would also classify him, perhaps controversially, as being a seer, by which I mean one whose ideas come to him or her while in a state of altered consciousness, in which there is some form of supernatural connection with a transcendent source of information.
I have an interest in mediumship in its various forms, in which a sensitive individual, in a state of altered consciousness, receives or ‘brings through’ information from a paranormal source which is passed on verbally or in the form of ‘automatic writing’. Unless the medium in question is highly developed and disciplined, the information, messages, prophesies or teachings, can be very varied. Some of the information will be truthful; some visions of the future will prove to be accurate, and some of the teachings will be wise, while other transmissions will be completely false, nonsensical, and even harmful. Often the good stuff and the bad stuff are mixed seamlessly together, and in these cases, I believe that the medium is simultaneously picking up transmissions from multiple sources, like a radio being randomly tuned between different stations. However, more often than not, this randomness is not recognised by the medium or by their ‘audience’ who prefer to think of a single communicator or ‘Spiritual Guide’ as being the source of all the messages.
Mystically transmitted teachings and prophesies received by ‘seers’ of various kinds have been the foundation of most of the religions of the world, and many of these faiths definitely show the signs of the prophet-in-question’s mixed-up ‘good stuff’ and ‘bad stuff’ being indiscriminately accepted as being the Word of God by the faithful.
I think that Hubbard falls into this category. As a young man, he was actively involved with the occult, and was for a time a follower of Aleister Crowley. Later he spent much time in the extreme forms of meditation and internal mental exercises that still constitute the upper levels of Scientology. In the earlier (and in the last) part of his working life Hubbard was a successful writer of pulp science fiction, and was able to type at phenomenal speed. There are reports of him typing Scientology doctrine furiously, in some sort of trance state, with eyes glazed and unfocussed and drooling slightly, and there is also evidence that some of the early Scientology books were written under the influence of drugs.
It is my belief that Hubbard was a seer because, buried amid the reams of Scientology’s fantasy and nonsense, there are some ideas which I believe are worth serious examination.
Please understand that I am not saying that these ideas and techniques are all true or worthwhile. I do not know. I am merely suggesting that they might be worth examining and testing by qualified authorities, rather than being dismissed out-of-hand, as being just more of conman Hubbard’s pernicious gobbledygook.
DIANETICS
These ideas range from the large to the relatively small; I will start with the basic theory of Dianetics, as presented to the world in Hubbard’s book ‘The Modern Science of Mental Health’ in 1950. This attracted a great deal of interest at the time, and Dianetics became a popular ‘alternative’ mental therapy. Hubbard’s claims for it were grandiose, promising the creation of nothing less than a new species of mankind, who would enjoy vastly enhanced mental abilities. Dianetics was later subsumed and absorbed into Scientology, but its basic premises could well be worth re-examining as possibly being, in some respects, true and useful.
Hubbard claimed that the human organism records everything that happens to it, in minute and photographic detail, from before birth to death. Importantly, this automatic recording memory mechanism also continues to function during periods of unconsciousness. Naturally, in the normal run of events, periods of unconsciousness are not available to the memory. However, according to Dianetic theory, when someone experiences incidents containing both unconsciousness and pain (accidents or surgical operations for example) hidden memories of these incidents can be triggered by some similarity between the present day experience and the hidden incident with its pain and unconsciousness. This restimulation can then go on to produce psychosomatic illness, neurosis and every variety of human misery. Dianetic therapy involves recovering these hidden memories, and ‘discharging’ their destructive energies.
In Hubbard’s defence, the Dianetic techniques used to achieve this, which I experienced personally on numerous occasions, would seem to be harmless and do not involve drugs or hypnosis. However, whether any of this is true, or whether the therapy actually works, I cannot say. However, the theory and practise (which seem to be a logical development of Freud’s ideas) would appear to be quite reasonable and not obviously absurd. Perhaps the idea could be looked at again, ignoring its connection with Hubbard and Scientology.
TOUCH ASSISTS
Unlike the Dianetic Theory, these are relatively minor examples of Hubbard’s ‘revealed wisdom’. I believe that they date from the Dianetic period of Hubbard’s movement, but they are generally known as Scientology Assists, or ‘Scientology First Aid’. I am only familiar with a couple of these, but both seem to be surprisingly effective, and I think, worth evaluating seriously.
The first ‘Assist’ works on the principle that whenever the body is hurt or injured, the mind (the individual themselves, the soul) withdraws from the place that is hurting, and does not want to be connected with it. Healing is speeded-up by restoring that communication. The person doing the healing instructs the patient to ‘feel my finger’ and then touches them gently at a point further away from the injury. For instance, if the patient has hurt their left knee, the healer would touch them somewhere on the lower left leg. This is repeated many times, the healer choosing a different spot to touch each time. The patient is concentrating on feeling the touch of the finger and is therefore thinking through the injury. The patient’s attention is directed from their brain area to different points of their body past and through the bit that is hurting and the person is thus brought back into communication with the afflicted area. The result is claimed to be accelerated healing and reduction in pain.
When this is carried out by Scientologists, it is done using the formal communication cycle decreed by Hubbard. The healer says ‘Feel my finger’, the patient says ‘Yes’, and the healer says ‘Thank you’ or ‘Fine’ or ‘Okay’. This has to be done for every touch of the finger, and after a minute or so the effect becomes decidedly weird and ritualistic. In my own view, as long as the patient acknowledges that he can feel the finger each time, the thing will work just as well, without the order-to-feel and the ‘thank you’. And work, it certainly seems to. Not much use for an injured toe or fingertip, perhaps (you can’t get further ‘away from’ the injury) but otherwise I believe this is well worth experimenting with.
The second Assist (there may be others, but I am not familiar with them) is more suitable for self-administration. It works like this: if, for example, you crack your elbow on the corner of the cooker, you are advised to go back to the cooker and gently touch that exact point on your elbow to the exact point on the cooker that hurt you. If done right, the result will be an initial twinge of pain in the elbow followed by a rapid improvement, and this strange sounding fix, which is based in Dianetic theory, certainly does seem to work, in my own experience.
STUDY TECH
A good Scientologist spends much of their time, and large amounts of money, taking Scientology Study Courses. Hubbard insisted that, as well as undergoing Scientology ‘auditing’, the series of one-to-one therapeutic processes supposedly leading the subject to ‘Total Freedom’, his followers also had to learn how to deliver the therapy themselves, so that eventually Scientology would spread and expand exponentially. Staff members, on the other hand, also had to be trained in the Byzantine complexities of Hubbard’s theories of Management (a subject which he claimed to have mastered due to his detailed memories of systems used in the Galactic Confederacy of Planets, trillions of years before).
What I would like to draw attention to, however, is not the content of these training courses, but Hubbard’s radical ‘Study Technology’ used to deliver them. How much of this was the result of his extraordinary flashes of psychic revelation and how much borrowed from various experimental educationalists, I cannot say, but the resulting techniques are certainly extremely interesting and possibly of great value. (I assume they are still current in Scientology, but my own experience dates from the early 1970s and the organisation’s practices may have changed since then).
Courses are conducted in a room with a Supervisor, but students study individually. Different courses might be held simultaneously in the same space if the Supervisor is suitably qualified. The material to be studied (invariably Hubbard’s own writings) is divided into bite-sized pieces, typically one or two A4 typed pages. The student studies this section, and when they feel they understand it, they team-up with another student who has already covered that bit of the material, and the second student, while referring to the written material, acts as an examiner and questions the first student on the content. If the student has understood the material, they are said to have ‘checked-out’ on that fragment of the course and can go on to the next.
All important points in the material are examined and checked-out in another, and more radical, fashion. Hubbard believed that abstract concepts have to be understood in the physical universe, and so students have to construct small Plasticine models to illustrate the particular concept or idea. Paper labels are attached to little figures that might represent people or abstract entities, with strings running between them to illustrate connections. These ‘clay tables’ are presented to the course Supervisor who judges whether the concept has been fully understood and illustrated by the student.
The combination of ‘student check-outs’ and ‘clay tables’ does seem to enable a large amount of study material to be assimilated in a very short time. I can vouch for this in my own experience. Hubbard boasted that a University degree course could be completed in a few weeks using these methods. Whether or not that is true, I feel that Hubbard’s ‘Study Tech’ might be worth proper examination by educationalists.
THE E-METER
This notorious and often discredited device is used throughout Scientology as an indispensable piece of equipment for Auditing, the application of Scientology therapy and self-improvement. A development of the simple Wheatstone Bridge resistance meter, the ‘E-Meter’ is a battery-powered device which measures minute changes in the electrical resistance of the human body. These moment-to-moment alterations in the body’s electrical resistance seem, very remarkably, to reflect the thought processes of the individual being monitored.
It was invented by an electronics engineer, Volney Mathison, in 1954, and was quickly taken up by Hubbard to assist Dianetic auditing. A few years later Hubbard had the device re-designed to use transistors and battery power rather than vacuum tubes and mains electricity, and patented it himself, thereafter claiming it as his own invention.
In Scientology, the person being audited (the ‘pre-clear’ in Scientology-speak) holds one terminal of the E-Meter in each hand (in my day empty baked-bean tins were used, as they provided good conductivity) while the auditor reads the E-Meter and records the pre-clear’s responses to the auditing instructions.
I have one of these devices, dating from the early ‘70s, though it is not in working order (the early type of rechargeable batteries now having decayed beyond recall) but I can state without reservation that the thing does actually register thoughts with definite and predictable movements of the meter needle. One of the easy slurs of debunkers is that the E-Meter is ’a crude lie-detector’, whereas it is in fact a highly sophisticated truth-detector. For example, I would be able to put you on the meter, read you a list of colours, or foods, or means of transport and be able tell you with perfect accuracy which was your favourite by movements of the needle, without you saying a word.
Another lazy critique of the machine is that it merely registers changes in the degree of perspiration on the hands of the subject. Naturally this makes a huge difference in electrical resistance, as does the size of the subject’s body. However the E-Meter has two significant controls. One is a ‘coarse’ adjustment that deals with the widest range of natural body resistances and large-scale changes like hands getting sweaty, or changes in the subject’s grip on the terminals. It is used to get the highly magnified short-term changes visibly ‘on the scale’, at which point the fine adjustment control comes into play.
The device really has to be seen in action, but different motions of the needle do seem to be positively linked with specific types of momentary mental activity, including a ‘floating’ action that indicates a relaxed clearness of mind. It seems to react to things just below the level of consciousness and, if what I believe is true, this phenomenon suggests that thoughts actually have mass, thus supporting the old mystical concept that thoughts are things.
My belief that the E-Meter does actually work, does not imply that I believe in the validity of Scientology auditing. However, I feel sure that the device could have important applications in numerous aspects of psychology. It should be re-evaluated. After all, it did not emerge from Hubbard’s imagination; he pinched it from someone else.
THE A-R-C TRIANGLE
This is an important concept in Scientology, and the triangle symbol appears in their various badges and crests. The A-R-C Triangle illustrates human relationships of all kinds. The three corners being Affinity, Reality, and Communication. The word ‘Affinity’ is used in the sense of ‘liking’ or ‘affection’, while ‘Reality’ refers to ‘agreement’, ‘like-mindedness’ or ‘consensus’, in other words, a shared reality. ‘Communication’ means what it says.
Hubbard’s thesis is that the relationship between these factors is fixed, this equilateral triangle cannot be distorted. Increasing communication between two people or groups will automatically increase agreement and affinity between those parties. An increase in affection between two people will result in increased communication and agreement between them. If two people or groups agree on something, they will both communicate more and also draw closer to each other.
In the same way, if communication is severed or decreased between parties, then they will have less to agree on, less shared reality, and will feel less close to each other. People who start to disagree about something will feel less close to each other and will communicate less.
The equilateral A-R-C Triangle simply gets bigger or smaller when one of its corners is magnified or diminished.
This may all seem obvious, but on observing relationships of all kinds, the doctrine does seem to act with the inevitability of a natural law. In my view this scores one for Hubbard. However, before we re-classify him as an eccentric but rational innovator, it may be worth considering why sizable numbers of educated people are willing to continue to be exploited and bled dry by the Church of Scientology, whose current leaders, by all accounts, make Hubbard seem mild and benevolent in comparison.
New people coming in, and established Scientologists up to a certain level, are generally motivated, as I was, by a desire for enhanced abilities and the wish to achieve freedom from the usual crop of neuroses. In my experience, these abilities and freedoms are not actually achieved; and always it is the next level of processing, you are told, that will ‘handle your case’. However for those who achieve the higher levels of ‘O.T.’ the status of being an Operating Thetan (or empowered soul) other motivating factors come into play.
According to high Scientology doctrine, when you and I die our spirits will be instantly whisked off to an alien colony on Venus where we will have our memories wiped and fundamental human neuroses re-implanted by electronic rays, before being returned to Earth to be randomly reincarnated as new babies.
Only by achieving a sufficiently lofty level of Scientology enlightenment, can individuals avoid this fate. The souls of these lucky people, by virtue of their hundreds of hours of Scientology auditing, will be able to avoid the Venusian implant centre, retain the memories of their previous life and be able to choose genetically and financially advantageous parents for their next incarnation. (Dying Members of the Sea Org, who have all signed a billion-year contract of employment, are given a few years ‘leave’ to be re-born and grow-up before they are expected to report for Scientology duties again).
However, I think that it would be a shame if all of Hubbard’s ideas were damned or ignored because most of his ideas are crazy nonsense, but I suspect that this will continue to be their fate, a fate shared by fine works of art made by wicked artists and worthwhile scientific discoveries made by scientists who colluded with evil dictators.
JUDGE SMITH – NOVEMBER 2024
