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Article: On the Rediscovery of the Human Soul (n.d.)

I have been engaged in the investigation of the fundamentals of life, the material universe and human behavior,” wrote L. Ron Hubbard of his larger philosophic journey towards Dianetics and Scientology, and proceeded to reference a search “down many highways, through many byroads, into many back alleys of uncertainty.” In a further explanation of that search is the introduction and first chapter to a retrospective, “The Rediscovery of the Human Soul.”

Begun in 1956, but never completed, the manuscript effectively tells of all that preceded what appears in this publication. As a word of general background, let us add a few salient points: Although events recounted here mark the commencement of Ron’s philosophic search, he had previously spent several years, as he elsewhere put it, “poking an inquisitive mind” into related fields. Of special note, were his early psychoanalytic studies with United States Naval Commander Joseph Cheeseman Thompson, who, incidentally, had been the first United States military officer to study under Freud in Vienna, and among the first to enter Freudian theory into the field of ethnology. Also bearing mention was Ron’s very early friendship with the deeply spiritual Blackfeet tribesmen in and around his home in Montana, and what amounted to folkloric studies with a locally famous medicine man. The point, in both cases: well before his arrival at George Washington University, Ron had pondered much. Finally, and as referenced here, Ron had also spent nearly two years in a prerevolutionary China and, in fact, had been among the first Westerners after Marco Polo to gain entrance into forbidden Tibetan lamaseries scattered through the southern hills of Manchuria.

Regarding “The Rediscovery of the Human Soul,” let us add that in referencing the “formidable and slightly mad” chief of George Washington University’s Psychology Department, he is actually speaking of Dr. Fred August Moss, infamous among students for trick questions and the running of rats through gruesome electrical mazes. Meanwhile the “very famous psychiatrist” who reviews Ron’s calculations on human memory capacity was none other than William Alanson White, then superintendent of Washington, DC’s St. Elizabeth’s Hospital and still celebrated for his outspoken opposition to psychosurgery. Most importantly, however, let us simply understand this: In recalling his work through these years, and particularly his efforts to isolate the repository of human memory, he was factually raising a crucial philosophic question. That is, when we attempt to explain all human memory in terms of purely physical phenomena, we will ultimately find ourselves staring at the singular flaw in the whole of the Western scientific creed. Namely, no diagram of the human brain can account for all we are capable of remembering (much less imagining). It was not for nothing, then, that William Alanson White remarked, in response to Ron’s memory calculations, “You have just laid to waste the entire foundation of psychiatric and neurological theory.”

Today, of course, psychologists, psychiatrists, neurologists et al., continue to turn themselves inside out in an effort to propose theories broad enough to explain human memory in purely physical terms. (One of the latest involves a model of nonlocalized, or scattered memory traces along synaptic contacts so that memories are superimposed upon one another, while another holds that memory is recreated through dynamic neural interplay.) But in either case, questions Ron posed in 1932 are still not answerable within a wholly material context. Hence the increasingly frequent admissions from the scientific community that perhaps, after all, as Ron puts it, “man, as a learned whole, knew damned little about the subject.”1

Notes

  1. CSI. (n.d.) On the Rediscovery of the Human Soul. Retrieved from http://web.archive.org/web/20130603223102/http://www.ronthephilosopher.org/phlspher/page26.htm ↩

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Article: A Word On Rediscovering The Human Soul (n.d.)

As a word of general background, let us add a few salient points: Although events recounted here mark the commencement of Ron’s philosophic search, he had previously spent several years, as he elsewhere put it, “poking an inquisitive mind” into related fields. Of special note, were his early psychoanalytic studies with United States Naval Commander Joseph Cheeseman Thompson, who, incidentally, had been the first United States military officer to study under Freud in Vienna, and among the first to enter Freudian theory into the field of ethnology. Also bearing mention was Ron’s very early friendship with the deeply spiritual Blackfeet tribesmen in and around his home in Montana, and what amounted to folkloric studies with a locally famous medicine man. The point, in both cases: well before his arrival at George Washington University, Ron had pondered much. Finally, and as referenced here, Ron had also spent nearly two years in a prerevolutionary China and, in fact, had been among the first Westerners after Marco Polo to gain entrance into forbidden Tibetan lamaseries scattered through the southern hills of Manchuria.

Regarding “The Rediscovery of the Human Soul,” let us add that in referencing the “formidable and slightly mad” chief of George Washington University’s Psychology Department, he is actually speaking of Dr. Fred August Moss, infamous among students for trick questions and the running of rats through gruesome electrical mazes. Meanwhile the “very famous psychiatrist” who reviews Ron’s calculations on human memory capacity was none other than William Alanson White, then superintendent of Washington, DC’s St. Elizabeth’s Hospital and still celebrated for his outspoken opposition to psychosurgery. Most importantly, however, let us simply understand this: In recalling his work through these years, and particularly his efforts to isolate the repository of human memory, he was factually raising a crucial philosophic question. That is, when we attempt to explain all human memory in terms of purely physical phenomena, we will ultimately find ourselves staring at the singular flaw in the whole of the Western scientific creed. Namely, no diagram of the human brain can account for all we are capable of remembering (much less imagining). It was not for nothing, then, that William Alanson White remarked, in response to Ron’s memory calculations, “You have just laid to waste the entire foundation of psychiatric and neurological theory.”1

Notes

  1. A Word On Rediscovering The Human Soul, (n.d.). ronthephilosopher.org. Retrieved on 26 April 2010 from http://www.ronthephilosopher.org/phlspher/page26.htm ↩

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Article: The first Steps to Discovery (continued) (n.d.)

Returning to the United States to further his education, Ron enrolled in the engineering school of George Washington University where he joined the first classes on nuclear physics — then called Atomic and Molecular Phenomena. It was very much a pioneering field at this time and involved the study of the smallest energy units known to man. But while other students in this class were intrigued with the physical possibilities of atomic fission, Ron looked at this subject and saw very different possibilities.

“Is it possible,” Ron asked, “that with this new branch of nuclear physics we might be able to locate the energy of life?” He had been engaged in a search to find out how memory could be stored and was convinced that it was not retained in the brain’s energy units as then “modern” theory held. After extensive calculations, he proved conclusively to leading psychologists and psychiatrists associated with the university that the brain was incapable of housing more than three months of perceptics and memory — and left the authorities dumbfounded. No one, he discovered, had uncovered the secret to memory storage.

Ron was convinced that the answers lay in the field of energy. He knew man stored thought in pictures, but where and how? Existing texts on the subjects and professors had no answers.

Ron knew that the answer lay in man himself. There was something common to all mankind that had not been identified. Man was more than just a body that had emerged from a primordial sea of ammonia. He began to experiment with his fellow students to see if he could find a common denominator.

One day, experimenting with a device to measure sound vibrations, known as a Koenig photometer Ron stumbled upon a discovery of major philosophic significance.

Essentially he found that when a student read a section of poetry on the photometer the device identified the speech as poetry regardless of language. Thus when haiku was read in the original Japanese, for example, the wavelengths produced by the Koenig photometer were precisely the same as those it produced when English verse was read.

“I was suddenly struck by the fact that a japanese poem and a poem in English both gave the same rhythm patterns and obviously seemed to be striking the same chords in the mind, so that what the Japanese recognize as poetry in Japanese registered the same way in English when deprived of the significances.”

Ron had made a significant discovery common to all men. But he found that his findings were falling on deaf ears.

“Here were two races which were worlds apart which yet responded identically to the same stimuli even though they were in different languages. I took this to the Psychology Department of the University and they didn’t know what I was talking about, and on interrogation I found out that they did not have any inkling of Eastern know-how in the field of the mind, that they were not interested in research, that they did not think mental responses had any application to their field and a lot of other amazing things which brought me to the immediate conclusion that there was a hole in our culture which it would be very worthwhile to fill.”1

Notes

  1. The first steps to discovery (continued). (n.d.).lronhubbard.org. Retrieved on 10 March 2010 from http://www.lronhubbard.org/philo1/disc5.htm ↩

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Article: Rediscovery of the Human Soul (n.d.)

The story starts in the physics laboratories of George Washington University in 1930. Quite coincidentally at almost this same time Professor Thomas Brown in charge of that department, was launching experiments which within fifteen years would bring forth an atomic bomb upon earth largely through Dr. George Gamow an assistant in this same laboratory.

Unwitting of the ferocity being planned within a few yards of me, I was engaged upon an experiment about poetry. Now usually poetry has little to do with a physics lab but this time it did. Majoring in engineering a trifle under duress and studying nuclear physics with a skeptical eye, my tedium had found a relief in conceiving that one might find why poetry in any language sounded like poetry whether one spoke the language or not.

[Drawing of a Koenig photometer. Image caption: 1928 college physics textbook rendering of a Koenig photometer. ]

Using an aged Koenig photometer to measure voice vibrations I was reading a line of Browning and then a line of prose alternately and studying any difference between the symmetry of vibrations in the poetry as contrasted to the prose. I discovered after a little, that there was a definite symmetry and was about to concoct a more complex test when it struck me that the mind was NOT a Koenig photometer. I drew back and looked studiously at the ugly machine with its four mirrors and glass frame and commented to myself that it would be a frighteningly uncomfortable thing to have kicking about between one’s ears. BUT if one did not have one between one’s ears, one DID or at least MUST have some kind of mechanism which would translate and measure not only the impulse of sound but also the symmetry of that sound. And, having measured it, that something did the additional trick not only of storing that symmetry but of recalling and viewing it at will.

Thus was born a search, a search which went on for a quarter of a century. Thus was born the train of intuition, observation and experiment which finally rediscovered, as a scientific fact, the soul, and gained methods of doing things to it, for it and with it with scientific certainty.

But here in 1930, serving out my time in “the salt mines of F Street” no such serious end was in real view. My interest, I must confess, went more to soaring planes at Congressional Airport, upsetting the faculty by my articles in the university paper and always making sure that the most demanded girl on the campus was the sweetheart of the professional engineering fraternity and mine to dance with, of course.

Probably nothing would have come of my search at all if I had not tried to solve something of the problem by calling on the formidable and slightly mad chief of the psychology department. He, in the secrecy of his opinions of his fellows, mainly wanted to know what I was doing out of the Engineering School and why I didn’t leave such things properly to psychologists. This challenged me a trifle. As a sensitive youth, soiled by the courtesy of the Orient in which I had spent much pre college time, I objected to people being so thoroughly Occidental, and after I had laughed at him a few columns in the university paper, I wheedled all the psychology textbooks out of a psychology major whose themes in English class I used to write and heavied my eyelids but not my understanding by studying them hard during my German and surveying lectures which bored me intensely anyway. But though I studied and comprehended what I read, the comprehension I began to believe was a trifle one-sided. These texts, like the courtesy of the psychology dean, were somewhat wanting.

[Picture]

Like the picture of the picture of the picture on the cereal box, psychology simply assigned all this first to the brain and then to the cell. Going no further, it still failed to describe any sound-recording-recalling devices. With youthful scorn I consigned psychology to that moldy heap of pretenses which so often pass their polysyllabic nonsense off as learning and decided to think some more about thinking–a trick to say the least.

About this time a biology major and I were accustomed to meeting after classes at (bygone days) a speak-easy up 21st Street for a round of blackjack and a couple shots after classes and whilst trying to detour my eyes from his nimble fingers he regaled me with bits and things about what went on in the world of biology. One day he actually did manage to slip me the card I didn’t want by remarking to me that the brain contained an exorbitant number of molecules of protein and that each molecule “had been discovered” to have holes in it. Fascinated, I bled him of data and a few days later made the time to calculate memory.

It seemed to me that if molecules had holes in them to a certain number, then memory, perchance, might be stored in these holes in the molecules. At least it was more reasonable than the texts I had read. But the calculation, done with considerably higher math than psychologists or biologists use, yet yielded a blank result. I calculated that memory was “made” at a certain rate and was stored in the holes in these punched protein molecules in the form of the most minute energy of which we had any record in physics. But despite the enormous number of molecular holes and the adequate amount of memory, the entire project yielded only this result: I was forced to conclude, no matter how liberal I became, that even with this system, certainly below cellular level, the brain did not have enough storage for more than three months of memory. And in that I could recall things quite vividly, at least before the beginning of the semester, I was persuaded that either the mind could not remember anything or that much smaller energy particles existed than we knew about in nuclear physics.

Amusing, a decade later, this theory, which I had imparted to a very famous psychiatrist complete with the figures, came back as an Austrian “discovery” and was widely accepted as the truth. I always wondered at the psychiatrist’s carelessness in losing that last page which declared by the same calculations that the mind could not remember.

Laying it all aside for a long time I was yet recalled to my calculations by physics itself. There are some odd movements noticeable in atomic and molecular phenomena which aren’t entirely accounted for and supposing that a “smaller” energy might make these movements amongst the larger particles, I came face to face with the grossness of the measuring equipment with which we have always worked in physics. We have only streams of electrons even today to “see small.” And I was so struck with the enormity of the Terra Incognita which physics had yet to invade that it seemed far simpler to do what I eventually did–went off and became a science fiction writer. […] 1

Notes

  1. CSI. (n.d.) Rediscovery of the Human Soul. http://www.ronthephilosopher.org/phlspher/page32.htm ↩

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Article: The First Steps to Discovery (continued) (n.d.)

“Is it possible,” Ron asked, “that with this new branch of nuclear physics we might be able to locate the energy of life?”

Returning to the United States to further his education, Ron enrolled in the engineering school of George Washington University where he joined the first classes on nuclear physics — then called Atomic and Molecular Phenomena. It was very much a pioneering field at this time and involved the study of the smallest energy units known to man. But while other students in this class were intrigued with the physical possibilities of atomic fission, Ron looked at this subject and saw very different possibilities.

“Is it possible,” Ron asked, “that with this new branch of nuclear physics we might be able to locate the energy of life?” He had been engaged in a search to find out how memory could be stored and was convinced that it was not retained in the brain’s energy units as then “modern” theory held. After extensive calculations, he proved conclusively to leading psychologists and psychiatrists associated with the university that the brain was incapable of housing more than three months of perceptics and memory — and left the authorities dumbfounded. No one, he discovered, had uncovered the secret to memory storage.

Ron was convinced that the answers lay in the field of energy. He knew man stored thought in pictures, but where and how? Existing texts on the subjects and professors had no answers.

Ron knew that the answer lay in man himself. There was something common to all mankind that had not been identified. Man was more than just a body that had emerged from a primordial sea of ammonia. He began to experiment with his fellow students to see if he could find a common denominator.1

Notes

  1. Hubbard, L. R. (n.d.) The First Steps to Discovery (continued) Retrieved from http://www.lronhubbard.org/philo1/disc4.htm ↩

by

Article: A Word on Rediscovering the Human Soul (n.d.)

I have been engaged in the investigation of the fundamentals of life, the material universe and human behavior,” wrote L. Ron Hubbard of his larger philosophic journey towards Dianetics and Scientology, and proceeded to reference a search “down many highways, through many byroads, into many back alleys of uncertainty.” In a further explanation of that search is the introduction and first chapter to a retrospective, “The Rediscovery of the Human Soul.”

Begun in 1956, but never completed, the manuscript effectively tells of all that preceded what appears in this publication. As a word of general background, let us add a few salient points: Although events recounted here mark the commencement of Ron’s philosophic search, he had previously spent several years, as he elsewhere put it, “poking an inquisitive mind” into related fields. Of special note, were his early psychoanalytic studies with United States Naval Commander Joseph Cheeseman Thompson, who, incidentally, had been the first United States military officer to study under Freud in Vienna, and among the first to enter Freudian theory into the field of ethnology. Also bearing mention was Ron’s very early friendship with the deeply spiritual Blackfeet tribesmen in and around his home in Montana, and what amounted to folkloric studies with a locally famous medicine man. The point, in both cases: well before his arrival at George Washington University, Ron had pondered much. Finally, and as referenced here, Ron had also spent nearly two years in a prerevolutionary China and, in fact, had been among the first Westerners after Marco Polo to gain entrance into forbidden Tibetan lamaseries scattered through the southern hills of Manchuria.

Regarding “The Rediscovery of the Human Soul,” let us add that in referencing the “formidable and slightly mad” chief of George Washington University’s Psychology Department, he is actually speaking of Dr. Fred August Moss, infamous among students for trick questions and the running of rats through gruesome electrical mazes. Meanwhile the “very famous psychiatrist” who reviews Ron’s calculations on human memory capacity was none other than William Alanson White, then superintendent of Washington, DC’s St. Elizabeth’s Hospital and still celebrated for his outspoken opposition to psychosurgery. Most importantly, however, let us simply understand this: In recalling his work through these years, and particularly his efforts to isolate the repository of human memory, he was factually raising a crucial philosophic question. That is, when we attempt to explain all human memory in terms of purely physical phenomena, we will ultimately find ourselves staring at the singular flaw in the whole of the Western scientific creed. Namely, no diagram of the human brain can account for all we are capable of remembering (much less imagining). It was not for nothing, then, that William Alanson White remarked, in response to Ron’s memory calculations, “You have just laid to waste the entire foundation of psychiatric and neurological theory.”

Today, of course, psychologists, psychiatrists, neurologists et al., continue to turn themselves inside out in an effort to propose theories broad enough to explain human memory in purely physical terms. (One of the latest involves a model of nonlocalized, or scattered memory traces along synaptic contacts so that memories are superimposed upon one another, while another holds that memory is recreated through dynamic neural interplay.) But in either case, questions Ron posed in 1932 are still not answerable within a wholly material context. Hence the increasingly frequent admissions from the scientific community that perhaps, after all, as Ron puts it, “man, as a learned whole, knew damned little about the subject.”1

Notes

  1. CSI. (n.d.)  A Word on Rediscovering the Human Soul. Retrieved from http://www.ronthephilosopher.org/phlspher/page26.htm ↩