All that has gone before is but a prelude for what is to follow, and much of what we have learned must now be modified. The question might well arise as to why, if this is true, we did not start off in the beginning and (as the younger generation has it) "Tell it like it is." The answer is that the material already covered is important to the understanding of Scientology, and it is the path by which all who come to the study now are asked to travel. The first book by Dr. L. Ron Hubbard, Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, is still the primary text for the Scientologist, and what was first put forward in 1950 is no less true today. Scientology is the logical outgrowth of Dianetics, an advance on its forerunner in both theory and practice.
Historically, not too much is available in the way of documented facts about the years of 1951 through 1953. What is known is that, insofar as the public was concerned, the first great stir created by Hubbard's book
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and his lectures seemed to die down, as so many popular rages are wont to do. Dianetics had simply grown too fast for its own or Hubbard's good, there not having been time in which to build an organization capable of handling the rush. Added to that was an almost unbelievable hostility on the part of the American press toward the subject and its founder. Columns of type were made available to any psychologist or psychiatrist who felt an urge to destroy Hubbard and all his works, even though no Great Authority on psychology, from Wundt and Breuer to Freud and Jung, had ever been more successful in treating mental illnesses than any shaman or voodoo priest.
But all of this pejorative material produced the effect for which it had been intended, that of casting a pall of doubt over the teaching and practice of Dianetics, and it began to appear that the whole thing had been little more than a passing fancy. Ugly rumors, none of which were backed by any evidence, were circulated about Hubbard personally, as well as about his therapy, but in the light of later developments they could hardly have been less factual. However, trouble was brewing in the centers at Elizabeth, New Jersey, and Los Angeles, and he attributed it to Communists and other troublemakers.
From the available evidence, admittedly scanty, Hubbard apparently retired from all organizational activity for something like two years, 1951 through 1953. The evidence is scanty because the Church of Scientology does not care to make it public, and any outside information, such as newspaper reports and rumors, are sus-
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pert because of their open bias. He gathered up his materials and techniques and took himself off to Wichita, Kansas, for a short stay, moving on to Phoenix, Arizona, where he began to develop the theories which culminated in Scientology.
During what we may refer to as his retirement, he did a great deal of thinking of the sort involved in the birth of Dianetics, the sort of thinking natural to an engineer. Toward the end of his first book, he had said that the techniques he had described would possibly be obsolete in another twenty years, and he expressed himself as having sufficient faith in the abilities of his fellow man to be able to predict that this would come to pass.
Hubbard's faith in his fellow man was fully justified, only in this case, his fellow man turned out to be himself. His retirement proved to be of very short duration, for by 1952, he was in London, delivering a series of lectures before the newly formed Dianetics Association. In 1954, this group adopted a new name, the Hubbard Association of Scientologists, International. Churches of Scientology began to spring up, first in Washington, D.C., then Los Angeles, followed by three in South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. Soon others had opened their doors, and Scientology was off to a running start. Today, there are organizations in not fewer than twenty-four cities throughout the world.
However, the detractors are still hard at work. Within the last six months, I have heard a woman, a guest on a widely syndicated television "talk show," relate the sad story of how her son was being held prisoner at the College of Scientology, Saint Hill
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Manor, Sussex, England, the present world headquarters. I had visions of a poor little ragged boy, chained to an iron ring set into the oozing ancient masonry of a dank dungeon wall, until the lady revealed that he was twenty-eight years old, and that her fears were based on the fact that had not written her for several months. A neglectful son? Perhaps. But possibly also a son who had escaped from Mother's apron strings for the first time in his life and would never be tied to those strings again.
Today, what used to be called the state of clear in Dianetics is now a comparatively lowly condition known as a "Senior Dianetic Release." Of course, it is lowly only in comparison with the many higher levels of Scientology, although about as far above other types of mental therapy as space travel is the ox cart. Beyond the Senior Dianetic Release are three higher levels of primary training or processing in Scientology; seven grades, numbered 0 through VI, of Scientology release; Clear; and one even higher than that, the Operating Thetan, to be explained later.
In 1950, Hubbard had thought he was creating clears when he was not. The difficulty lay in the lack of sufficiently sophisticated methods of testing, the available evidence indicating that engram banks had been erased and all the material in them had been refiled in the standard memory banks. The so-called "clears" of 1950 had been as carefully tested as possible under the existing conditions, their time tracks run back and forth in a painstaking search for an engram of any description. After a lapse of six months, they had been brought
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back and tested again. Any reasonable person would have finally had to bow to the weight of evidence and agree that the patient had been cleared. The only trouble with that conclusion was that they had not been. There was still a long way to go, as we shall see.
Thus, the brief transition period between Dianetics and Scientology was accomplished, and a new religious technology began to flourish. Hubbard states over and over again that it is the only force capable of saving man from the hydrogen bomb; that an aberrant world is more than likely to get around to blowing itself up, but a world whose leaders are low in engram content may yet be viable. It is just possible that he is right.
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