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Web 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 ↩

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Hubbard Autobiography: Commander Thompson (1972)

COMMANDER THOMPSON1
I travelled with Commander Thompson from Seattle, Washington through the Panama Canal to Washington, D. C. when I was about twelve and knew him during all that time that I was in Washington and later. Commander Thompson was the first man to study with Sigmund Freud from the U. S. Government and had just returned from his studies, bringing psychoanalysis back to the United States Navy. He was a tall, rangy, eccentric individual. His friends called him “Snake” and his enemies called him “Crazy”. He had lots of both. He lived a life to very much please himself in spite of being a Naval officer and would read until he fell asleep, falling sideways over onto his bunk and get up and go about his duties when it pleased him, regardless of Navy schedules. Through his friendship I attended many lectures given at Naval hospitals and generally became conversant with psychoanalysis as it had been exported from Austria by Freud. All the various schools which sprung up later, such as Horney, seem a far cry from Freud’s original work and it has seemed to me that there are no psychoanalysts who practice Freudian Psychoanalysis. Commander Thompson wrote innumerable monographs on all manner of observations in various parts of the world which he had visited, and all of them dealing with ethnology. He was a very fine man and I was very fortunate to have known him.

Notes

  1. From the second part of L. Ron Hubbard’s unpublished autobiography, originally dictated in 1972. Retrieved from solitarytrees.net/cowen/misc/auto2.htm ↩

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Lecture: Handling the PTS (1965)

Remember, we’ve already seen a psychotherapy go by the boards. I’ve gotten results with that psychotherapy; it’s called psychoanalysis. Why didn’t it ever take the world? I think they were so busy trying to handle PTSes and SPs on an individual-practitioner basis, with absolutely no rundown, that they could never complete their research. Now, they might have found some of our sub-zero material, if they’d continued to research. But psychoanalysis had a certain degree of workability. We shouldn’t snarl at Papa Freud, because he is a very bright man. But it was the world that kicked Papa Freud’s head in, and Papa Freud was not quite strong enough or able enough to take it.

But he, nevertheless, got across to the world the idea that psychosomatic illness could stem from the mind. He got across several other points, all of which are very interesting. His technology is sufficiently workable that I wrecked a Navy project, which wouldn’t have amounted to anything at all, by sitting under a tree and psychoanalyzing their research patients. See, I wanted their data for myself. And they weren’t going to do anything with their data anyhow, except file it, so I threw the book.

You say, how’d you do this? Well, I was sitting up in the middle of Oak Knoll Naval Hospital. I didn’t have anything to do. And they had a project running by which they were testing people with endocrine hormones and so forth. And they kept book on it, of course, and I was a very good friend of the doctor who was running this project. And they would take these people one after the other and they’d run them through this lineup. And the doctor would tell me enough about this–we’d sit around and chin-chin–and he’d tell me enough about this that I finally got interested. And I started studying up on what he was studying up, and studied up on a few things off my own kick and found out what his project was all about–and had been interested in it before that anyhow. And I thought, “What a beautiful tailor-made experimental line.”

So I merely looked at those patients that he wasn’t getting any result on to see if I could change it by a mental shift. And boy, I sure fixed it up! I didn’t put his–I didn’t put his project out of action because I told him–after a while. But I found out a datum which is absolutely invaluable to us: That the mind has dominance over structure. Structure does not dominate the mind. And that differentiates us from the medico.

The medico believes that structure monitors the mind. And it doesn’t. It’s the mind that monitors structure. Because the endocrine, which is the midway point, you might say–the switchboard of regulation and so forth–won’t monitor structure as long as the mind is unaffected. That is to say, if the mind is left alone, in a large number of cases the endocrine treatment will not monitor structure, including the glands or anything else. There it is.

But when you remove a few psychic blocks–traumas if you please–Freudian style, all of a sudden, zingo, it bites and monitors structure. Now, you could change the man’s diet; you could change his exercise; you could do anything you pleased with him; you could change his operating environment; and you did not change the environmental factor enough to make the endocrine dosages work.

In other words, with the changed mind conditions, why, hormones would work; but with changed physical like conditions, the aspect of the hormones did not change. That was a very, very fundamental thing, because it laid in my lap something very interesting.

Well, it was Freudian analysis did that, because I didn’t use anything on these boys. Sitting under a tree out in the hospital grounds: “Oh, I think your name is Jones, isn’t it? Hiya, hiya, Jones. Understand you’re part of that project up there. Hmm? That so? What are they doing up there? Mm–hm. Have much to do with what you used to think about life and so forth? You ever been worried about yourself? You ever thought about this sort of thing? Oh, is that so? Well, that’s very interesting. What sort of a childhood did you have? Did you ever have any unfortunate sexual experiences in your childhood? Oh, is that so?” You know, light Straightwire.

All of a sudden he’d say, “You know, I’d never remembered that, you know?” You’d get this bug-eyed-blowdown type of look. Mark it down in your little book. “Jones. November 1945, 5th.” Next time you’re in seeing the doctor, and so forth, a week or so later, and so forth; let’s look at Jones’s weight and physical record. “Same, same, same, same, same. November 5th–haaa!” And I’d say, “Thank you very much.”

This doctor, by the way, he was–he was a young fellow. And he didn’t take–he didn’t take mental treatment seriously. He didn’t think it worked. He’d never been educated in it in any way. But he was a nice young bloke, and he didn’t blow his stack very much. He was very pleased after a while to find out what had been going on. It didn’t draw any conclusion from him and he didn’t owe anybody the record but the medical department in the navy, so the devil with it.

But he had wondered why these sudden shifts and changes, don’t you see? Well, those sudden shifts and changes on that dozen or so patients and so forth was strictly and entirely doing–to what we would call, today, Straightwire, and–but it was run on entirely Freudian basis. So you see, there was some workability to that technology.1

Notes

  1. Hubbard, L. R. (1965, 8 June). Handling The PTS. Saint Hill Special Briefing Course, (SHSBC-426). Lecture conducted from East Grinstead, Sussex. ↩

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Lecture: Case Analysis – Rock Hunting – Q & A Period (1) (1958)

Male voice: I’d like to hear your explanation of how you started on all this in the first place.

Started on what?

Male voice: Scientology. Dianetics. How you sort of independent – became independent again now, or – how did all this really come about?

Oh! Nothing-very, very simple.

Male voice: I mean, maybe a lot of people have heard it but I haven’t heard it.

I just died about three times in this lifetime and got used to being outside.1 Really, that’s factual, and because I was already moved out of the groove, don’t you see, in teachings. My family, many members of my family that I was raised with were devout Christians, and my grandfather was a devout atheist.

And there were conflicts involved in the subject, and like a kid normally will, where there’s an area of argument, he just moves out of it and he says, “Well, I don’t know anything about it,” you know?

And I got over to Asia and India and I found out there were a terrific number of things that were – evidently people knew, and then I found out to my horror that they didn’t know what they knew about! I eventually realized that – that they didn’t know what they knew about. And they didn’t know how they were doing, what they were doing, and in the midst of all of this knowledge, I found the direst of poverty and a totally caved-in civilization. So that knowledge couldn’t have been any good for anybody but it still was a route, you know? They didn’t have it.

And I came over and took science over here at GW2down at 22nd and G Street. After I’d been there for a little while, I found out they sure didn’t have much of a route in science – they were gibbering! Yeah. They didn’t explain very much of anything.

I got so I could pass a 100 percent examination on physics any day – I just – snap of the fingers, run it all off just like a machine, you know? Nothing to it. But didn’t get us anywhere. Didn’t explain matter. Didn’t explain the universe – why it was here.

Used to listen to biologists gibbering around about how we were all mud, and so forth, and I already knew that they were quoting a heathen religion over in India. And I tried to tell them this and they’d say, “Oh! No, no, no. This is the latest biological founding,” and so forth. Bah! And they were dramatizing Adam and the rib and so forth and so I figured these guys were kind of dead-ended. And then, I got interested in the arts and I said, “Well, the devil with all of it.” I got interested in the arts and was fooling around in the arts and all of a sudden wondered why all poetry in all languages sounded like poetry! And decided there must be some missing branch of aesthetics called rhythm or something. And I couldn’t – found out nobody had adequately described the stuff, so I set up some scientific apparatus to test some Japanese poetry.

And then I wondered why various syllables – why should various syllables mean sadness? I eventually got the picture of sad syllables, you see? I spoke two or three languages without too much difficulty, you know, heathen languages, and so forth. And I’d take poems from these languages and I’d read them and I’d get a picture on a little tape on a Koenig photometer. And I’d look at this and they looked the same, but these syllables were a common denominator of sadness, you see, or a common denominator of joy. And you’d get a certain wave picture that’s joy, and a certain wave picture that’s sadness, you know? And yet, each race seemed to agree on this, and I’d found the first thing that man could agree on, of being sad and being happy and that that had something to do with certain syllables.

And boy! This was quite a revelation to me, but I said, “Well, if people know all about this…” and I went over to the psychology department. You wonder why I’m bitter about psychology. And I found a fellow over there named Dr. Fred Moss and he was a fine guy. He’d been called in by President Hoover many times for consultations. He was one of the better psychologists in the country – he wrote a book or two on the subject – and not a bad old joe himself at all.

But I found out they couldn’t answer a single question I asked them about behavior or the mind. And I found out psychology was a study of a thing called a brain and it had no relationship to the thing called a mind. And the more I stressed this fact and the more I asked questions concerning it, the more I found that the mind was a totally neglected subject in modern times.

So I busted out James and an encyclopedia and Locke and Hume and Descartes and all the rest of it and, boy, I read those guys down to the bone – and they all disagreed to some degree or another.

But the odd part of it is that the older editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica – I realize now at this line – does carry a list of terms that we use right now in Scientology. It’s by accident, see?

Our concentration on these terms and subjects was once concentrated on back in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth century, see? Man was thinking fairly straight along this line and then he went nuts, went crazy, you see?

And I found these fellows were simply being pompous. And you only find me getting real cross about one thing. This is a common denominator of what I get cross about, I get real mad about. It’s not any individual penchant, I don’t think, because I’ve looked for it in vain. But when something is pretending to be something else than it is, when it is knowingly pretending and when it is knowingly a fraud, I cannot restrain my teeth from meeting. That one drives me nuts, see? Why? Here are a bunch of people who want to know – civilization which is dying for the lack of a knowledge – and here and there in the society we find some men who know positively that they don’t know and who are saying to everybody else that they know.

Now, these men are the principal third dynamic engrams; and those are the engrams of the third dynamic. Here we have Dull Foster, see? Dull Foster himself knows and states to his friends that he knows nothing about international relations and the only reason he wants to be secretary of state was because his grandfather’s great-grandfather was. He knows that he has no business opening his fat mouth! And here he’s got this country so involved it doesn’t know whether it’s coming or going. The man is not honest, and when a man is knowingly dishonest I like to break out my quiver of arrows, even if they are only verbal.

Now, as far as knowledge of the subject concerned, I proceeded from the fact the psychology department didn’t know what I was talking about. I said “Man, whatever his race, apparently has something in common emotionally. Now, what is emotion?” Duhh. Anytime we talked about something besides a part of the brain they weren’t with us.

Well, the Christian Scientist had already talked about mind. You look in Christian Science and, although there’s some pretty wild ones in there, they must have been on the groove somehow or another; they at least admitted there is something called “mind.” And to find oneself existing in a society, with the knowledge that there was a hole in that society, needed for the enhancement of its culture, which wasn’t filled, plugged or cared for, and so on, was challenge enough. That was challenge enough and I fooled along with that for some time, just monkeying around, trying to find a few common denominators.

I applied mathematics and what I knew of the physical sciences and what I knew of spiritualism, hypnotism and the rest of it. I was not without some background on the subject. But here you had a broad span, and I wasn’t dedicated to any of these any more than I am dedicated to a symbol today. It’s just the truth and what is it all about; that’s the dedication.

And I found that there was some advance – one could make an advance along these lines and one could understand more about it and I was quite pleased to go ahead with it.

And then one day I kicked the bucket and that upset everything. And I found myself about a hundred and fifty yards outside the head, with the heart stopped, and I said, “Wait a minute! What am I doing here?” You know? “What’s this all about?” You know? I kind of dimly remember that this was the way it was supposed to be anyhow, and then it was kind of, “What was I doing in there?” See? And found out vaguely that I had a full command of my faculties.

And people that have been exteriorized by auditors very often can’t see the environment or see a false environment. I never had that difficulty – the environment that was there. The cars were cars, the body was the body, the operating table was the operating table and all the rest of it, see? I saw the body was going to kick the bucket and suddenly realized that was going to do me out of things.

Now, here I’d been working for years trying to build a name and I’d been – had a few MEST possessions and I had things wheeling. And I just reached over and grabbed the body by the head and smacked it back to life again, see? Bang! And it gave me pause for thought.

Oddly enough, I reverted from a spiritual explanation and explained everything electronically, or tried to. But I was merely interested in what was making the body function because I was trying to hook it up again.

Well, a couple of times in the war – various things – 1938 I wrote the first book on this subject: common denominator of existence is survival, and that is for true. It still is. We’re still solving things on the basis of survive: the first command. It took – ’38 to ’58 – it took nineteenth years, that is, 1957 I found “help.” It took nineteen years to find a word that exactly ran and described survival so that it would run on cases, and it was the via that was the acceptable via that took apart the conglomeration of this and that, see?

But during the war, why, I already knew enough about my subject. I had run into people who were interested in the mind, Freudian analysis, other things, when I was a kid. I used to be able to take Freudian analysis and things like that and patch up guys who were going off their rockers.

Last year of the war I spent getting patched up in a naval hospital. And I used to drift over and bother the psychiatrists and I didn’t belong in that ward, and so they got upset with me. And I found out I could do things with troops that were in Jap camps and so forth, nobody else could do.

And thought of myself as – the first time as somebody who actually had some business in the field of practice as well as research. First time – because it didn’t matter how many hours they saw psychiatrists or psychoanalysts, you see, they didn’t get well. And I could patch them up sometimes fairly adequately.

And then, 1947, I received all of my back pay from the war in one lump sum and although I was going along pretty good as a writer, I had to write the whole thing into solvency, which left very little time for research. I set up a practice in Hollywood with this lump sum and all of a sudden had a singing, humming practice. Every once in a while somebody writes me from 1947. I didn’t charge people anything unless it was part of their case that I had to, and started making Clears.

I heard from one of those Clears the other day, by the way. A girl wrote me – and she had no word for anything, you know – thanking me for all the confidence I had given her, and she’d been very successful since. These people evidently were still pretty stable up the line.

And then by 1950, wrote a book on the subject but I, meantime, had tried to teach some people how to do it; and the book was devoted to teaching them how to do it. It came close in some places but it didn’t give, oddly enough, the first clearing method. I myself didn’t understand it and I carried on since that time merely developing a surer lineup.

And what drove me from 1947 on was this one fact: I realized that a subject of the mind in the world had no slightest business existing unless it cured itself; and that acted as a terrific catalyst. You could release things into the world, then, which were unsolvable and which merely became new evils, and anybody who has done that in the field of the mind, you see, has gummed the race up something fierce.

So, not wanting to gum the race up just one more time – as one more guy gumming the race up – I have been surging forward towards a subject which also solved itself. And you have processes today, old processes, which run out auditors, pcs, run me out, run all the books out, you know? And I wouldn’t be proceeding with any aplomb unless – unless that were the case, you know? We don’t want a new cult – as the newspapers insist on calling us – which is going forward, unable to cure itself, which in another century would become one of the greatest ills the race has, like Christianity did.

Christianity to me is the great example of this. For a while it was terribly successful and then it just caved in on itself and it became – oh, whole nations have been slaughtered in the name of peace and Christ, for heaven’s sakes. And I never wanted to get into this category, that’s for sure. That’s what’s been keeping us going.

But a bomb landed in front of me one time and blew me appetite over tin cup, and so forth, and I found myself out of my head again, only I was used to it by this time – pick the mock-up up and keep it going – pretty weird, pretty weird.

Any one of you might have started on the same route – any one of you. It’s just a cross-up of training more than anything else, and a stick-to-ivity on the subject, which was actually taught to me in several fields. But nothing very odd about it except that it…

The oddest thing about it to me is why man never made a breakthrough on this! That I have never been able to get through my head, you know? And I read these wise men, these men with facilities of language and thought and so forth which I never on earth possessed, and these guys were walking around in circles? Schopenhauer, for instance. This man’s ability to write and to think, and so forth, and he got right on down to the death engram – Will and the Idea – he got right on down. And then he simply dramatized: he didn’t do anything more than dramatize.

And that man has been staggered by this for some time has made me suspicious! Maybe it wasn’t supposed to be solved, you know? And I had that suspicion with me right up till 1950 and I then began to realize that that was not the case! That it couldn’t be solved – that was factual from the standard reference points he uses. That it was not meant to be solved was a dramatization.

One of the biggest dramatizations you’ll find in a case is the case mustn’t know anything about its own case. As a matter of fact, that dramatization, I’ll confess to you, carries on to this moment in Scientology – that you mustn’t know much about your own case; you must audit somebody else and understand his case.

Now, with this ACC we have made a breakthrough in that, all by itself, and I can conceive the possibility now of a man being able to confront his own bank well enough to solve his own case. I can confront this. Self-auditing, as long as you stay on “Mock up somebody who would like your own condition,” something like that (don’t go off into a figure-figure and so on) is productive of results. I’ve been keeping two cases on self-audit and taking tests on them, and they are gaining – they are gaining about – with half the speed they would have gotten from an auditor, see? But of course they do have an auditor sort of on an oblique angle. But this we’re solving; we’re getting it even on down past the universal “There must be two,” don’t you see? And that’s passing to some degree.

But that doesn’t invalidate your training because as I look at the people who are around in this world at this time and imagine them being able to confront their own minds, when they don’t even know such a thing exists, there’s lots of room for you.

Well, that’s the long and arduous story of it, stripped of all of its romantic elements.3

Notes

  1. being outside: exterior. Definition: exterior ↩
  2. GW: George Washington University ↩
  3. Hubbard, L. R. (1958, 4 August). Case Analysis — Rock Hunting — Q & A Period. Twentieth American Advanced Clinical Course,   (20ACC-28). Lecture conducted from Washington, DC. ↩

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Lecture: Universes (1) (1954)

All right. And yet where are we today in the field of reason? – you might say the healing of reason. Where would you go to in the society? Let’s take conditions as they existed in 1945. Where would John Doe have gone in the society to have had something happen to his reason to better it? Let’s say he’d been through a long and arduous war.

Let’s say he’d been many – two years, maybe, a prisoner of the enemy. He’d been starved; he was upset. He found out that every time he heard something drop in the middle of the night, or he heard an automobile horn at some far distance, he would be shattered, he’d lie there and shake. He’d find out that halfway through the night he might awaken in a terribly nervous state, sweating, be unable to do anything but walk around the block several times, something like this and so on. And having to… that would be all right if he didn’t have anything else to do but sort of look at these symptoms. But he had to go on living too.

Now, what would that man do? Who would he turn to in the society? Who would he turn to? Would he turn to the medical doctor? The medical doctor, turned to, would say, “Well, I don’t know. These B1 shots that we’re giving you are not too bad, you…”

The fellow say, “Yes, I feel fine for an hour,” he says, “but what about the rest of the twenty-three hours?”

“Well, have you ever been to church?” I’m not being funny now. This was the reply of medical doctors in the services and outside the services to service men.

Hm! This is funny isn’t it? That man’s asking what can we do about this. Therefore, he must know inherently that the condition is something that can have something done for it. Just by the fact that he would seek help tells you that he is postulating that there is a remedy. And where would he go for this remedy? I say, the medical doctor – “B1. Go to church. Why don’t you go see somebody or other?”

The psychologists, the clinical psychologists, who were on duty with the service or outside the service when approached were only evasive, very evasive. They were men full of great security which they never produced. They would say to the individual, “Well… well, if we work for several years at this we probably can do…” This is psychoanalysts, also. “If we work at this for a year I’ll tell you whether or not you can do something about it.”

The serviceman would say, ‘All right. We’ll work at it for a year.” He’s willing.

Well, all right. Now… now we spend the first hour with the psychoanalyst or clinical psychologist – we’re trying to find out where he’s going to get the money to pay for four one-hour periods per week at fifteen to twenty-five dollars a period. That’s sixty dollars a week minimum, to go on for a year just to discover if something can be done for him. Sixty a week? Well, I tell you, a fellow in that condition can’t earn sixty a week. He’s doing darn well if he can earn thirty.

You say the government will do something for these boys. Ha-ha! The government didn’t do anything for them. The government couldn’t and told them it couldn’t. Well, in the society or in the service, they received a dead-end answer from psychology. In the field of analysis many doctors had taken up what they called narcosynthesis. If you knock them out deep enough and make them relive an experience, why, sometime something happens. They neglect to tell you that 85 or 90 percent of the time they drive a guy completely off his rockers with narcosynthesis.

One doctor told me… had the nerve to tell me in a meeting one time, “You’ve said that something occurs which is not for the best in the field of narcosynthesis. Well, let me inform you that I’ve now been using it on servicemen for two years, and I have yet to know the derogatory or bad result.”

And I said, “Why, doctor, you need glasses.” And his colleagues laughed a little bit. And I said, “Where are your clinical records? I’ll be down tomorrow to see them,” as though I were a police force or something.

“Oh, well,” he said, “these … uh, hmm.” he said, “these have all been shipped back to the government.”

I said, “Well, I’m sure we can get them back again. If you’ve never had a derogatory comment on the subject of narcosynthesis, I think that maybe we ought to review your cases or something.”

“Oh, they’re dispersed all over the place.”

“Oh, you mean there’s no way to check back against your word… we have to take your word that there’s no harm in narcosynthesis. You don’t have a single clinical record, then, that backs this up.”

“Well, no, of course not.”

“Why don’t you sit down and we’ll get on with the lecture.”

Naturally the fellow had known it time and time again but he said “Here’s a gimmick, here’s some way I can probe into the mind somehow or another and dramatize that attempted abortion which I’ve been carrying around all these years, and nobody’s going to take this dramatization away from me.”

But it didn’t do anything for the serviceman. What would you have done as a serviceman in 1945 in this society to receive any relief for nervousness, anxiety or anything of the sort? The answer is nothing. There was no profession in 1945 which produced any relief or any betterment in the field of psychosomatic illness, nervousness or the human mind.

Now, that’s an awfully flat, blunt statement, and I am not really given to making statements that can’t be backed up. That’s the truth. There was none in 1945. It’s 1954 now. We’ve just reversed those numbers, and there is one, and that’s the Scientologist. You can go to a Scientologist.

And so if you wake up sweating in the middle of the night, the Scientologist can do something about it. He doesn’t have to work with this character for 189 hours to do something about a symptom or a manifestation like that. This is a big broad symptom.

The fellow says, I’ve got. .. my legs get so nervous, I get so tense, I can’t see what I’m doing, I’m just about to go mad.” The Scientologist has techniques which reduce this, almost immediately.

Interesting, isn’t it? It looks like something must have happened here, then, in the last twenty-five years. There was nothing in 1945; there is something in 1954. Well, that’s the difference. Let’s look at the facts of the case, and let’s not try to fight through, anymore, a bunch of fog and haze that is thrown up in front of people. What are the facts of the case? And the facts of the case are there was nobody functioning in the society to bring about surcease from sorrow. Nobody.

A lot of people were talking about it and getting paid for it, but they weren’t doing it. And now in Scientology we have people who are doing it.

Now, this investigation covered the whole field of the mind. It started out, actually, not in the field of nuclear physics, but started out, really, in the field of Freudian analysis. I was fortunate enough to be trained to some degree by Commander Thompson, who had himself studied with Sigmund Freud. And I was very young while this was going on. The first time I ran into Freudian analysis I was twelve years old. It’s very amusing. But in banging around the world, I never had much time to go to school. I never went to high school. I took New York regents examinations and went immediately into engineering school in college.

There were many years in there when most boys are pinned down in classrooms when I wasn’t. Well, I got quite interested when I was twelve, mostly because I was interested in Commander Thompson. And the years went along and I knew Thompson again here and there, and I read books that he sent me and so forth.

But in the interim I was in India, and I was struck with a horrible fact. India has all the data and none of the energy. The West has all the energy and none of the data. Freud was a… being sort of in the Oriental Europe, you might say, was more or less at a crossroads where the superstitions of the East would mingle with the force and efficiency of the West. He for the first time really decided to do something about this if he could, and that is what is remarkable about Freud. The decision to do something about it, and the teaching that something could be done about it was not introduced by Scientology, not by a long way. It was introduced by Sigmund Freud. And if he only introduced that fact, no matter how funny some of his solutions may seem to us, remember that this was a new and startling fact in a world which was totally unsympathetic.

He was a medical doctor. He gave up his entire medical career. He was thrown out of medicine, bodily, for daring to say that something could be done about the mind. Up to that time the mind was something that belonged to the priests and the witches. And Freud said it doesn’t have to belong to the priests and witches, it really should belong to the field of medicine. And medicine sixty years after still had refused to accept the responsibility for the mind.1

Notes

  1. Hubbard, L. R. (1954-04-06). Universes. Fifth American Advanced Clinical Course, (5ACC-06). Phoenix, AZ. ↩

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Lecture: Mechanics of the Mind (1953)

Based on R&D transcripts. This was checked against an old reel for LGC-3, but the reel only contains the second half of this lecture. The start of the reel is marked below. We did not find any omissions.]

This is the third lecture today: In this lecture we’re going to talk something about the mechanics of the mind. Now, you must realize that there’s quite a bit of work and technology underlies this material in Dianetics and Scientology. The amount – the amount of data which has been sorted really would stagger one if he summed it all up and put it in one place.

Perhaps a word about the source of this data would not be amiss. This data might be said to be a combination and a reevaluation of Eastern and Western culture. And as much as anything else, that marriage, which hitherto has been a misalliance, is responsible for Dianetics and Scientology, making it a little more compatible.

I was very young when I first went out to the East, extremely impressionable as a child would be. I struggled along in north China, India and was back in the States and then back out there again.

And while in the States on a very early visit, a stay, I met Commander Thompson of the United States Navy who was just returned from having studied with Sigmund Freud in Vienna, Commander Thompson was a very sound man, a very solid friend of mine. He had no boy of his own and was quite interested in me, mostly as a personality.

It’s very odd to realize, as I did one day, that in subsequent years I have approximated to a very remarkable degree the career of Commander Thompson – to show you what an impressed – impressionable boy can have handed to him suddenly.

I have followed that, however, fragmentarily. It just sort of dubs in to the career that I have been following to this degree that – I didn’t realize this until one day I looked at a map, and in the field of expeditions, explorations, I always favored certain quarters of the world, always went there and, when there, did certain things. It fits Commander Thompson’s record. Amusing.

[R&D Note: Commander Thompson: Joseph Thompson (1874-1943), a commander in the US Navy Medical Corps who studied with Sigmund Freud in Vienna and was a friend of L. Ron Hubbard when Ron was a boy.]

It just suddenly struck me one day, I hadn’t ever realized it. Nothing would do at a certain place I went but what I would dig up one of the old, ancient tribal burial grounds. Never realized the significance of this until one day – I hadn’t known this, you see – I was standing in the Bishop Museum in Hawaii and saw there the exhibit of Commander Thompson on some of the men he had dug up in a tribal burying grounds. All right. He directed my attention toward many things and perhaps imparted to me, fragmentarily or otherwise, the basic tenets of Sigmund Freud and also imparted to me the fact that Freud didn’t think he’d solved it.

That’s an interesting datum we append right on to there; it should be more than appended.

Freud wasn’t at war with those other lines of thought to amount to anything: He was trying to find out, 1920 or something like that. He even wrote a paper and said he hadn’t, It’s called “Psychoanalysis, Terminable and Interminable.” And it’s rather heart broken sort of a paper.

[R&D Note: “Psychoanalysis, Terminable and Interminable”: reference to Volume V of the collected papers of Sigmund Freud, entitled Analysis, Terminable and Interminable.]

Right at that time when he was writing that, I was taking a look at Hindu snake charmers, wondering why the audience believed there was a snake there. Well now, it would be handing myself bouquets (which one should never do) to say that one would pick up where somebody else left off, but one was going forward there. There are many things in Dianetics and Scientology which are directly Sigmund Freud’s – directly. They’re reevaluated. They’ve been fitted in at the right places for Dianetics and Scientology and have been evaluated against workability. For instance, association. There aren’t as many things as you would think, by the way, but there’s the whole business of associative thought, all kinds of things here and there.

In the first place, he put his stamp on this culture. He put his stamp on there with a great big stamp. And you don’t realize to what degree you have been influenced by Sigmund Freud. You would have to read the literature of 1880 and then the literature of 1950 sequitur (one right after the other) to realize that something happened: the evaluation and characterization of story characters in 1880 and 1950 – quite different.

The whole literary world bought psychoanalysis, and they use it as their modus operandi for plotting. And as a result, the whole society has been salted with this as a background. It’s interesting, isn’t it?

And today, we find this man who began on his course of investigation into the teeth of the medical profession, was practically thrown out of everything, was hammered at and beaten at and thrown away and chewed up in general. We find that his work opened a door, and it opened a door in this fashion. It said, “Something can be done about the human mind.” That doesn’t sound very startling to you, but believe me, that was a startling statement to make when he was first working.

In 1894, when he released his libido theory after his work with Breuer, he was basing it on results he had had. Unfortunately, to a large extent, Freud was the sort of an auditor – let’s get that straight – I said Freud was a sort of an auditor who added in a lot of extra personality factors. And every time he added one of these things into a session, he didn’t know what he was doing, he never said what he was doing, he never knew what he was doing and he left all kinds of xs all over – unknowns, unknowns, unknowns, unknowns.

How can one auditor take Book One and produce miracles and another auditor not? That’s because there are unknowns in the personal address of the auditor to the preclear.

Just as in Group Auditing – and this becomes very pertinent to you – in Group Auditing there are unknowns from auditor to auditor before the children. They will be unknown to the Group Auditor; they are not unknown to the professional auditor. He’d know how to get rid of these unknowns. But one is confronting the group with a personality. And the tone of voice and the general personality and the stage presence of the Group Auditor will make Group Auditing different in its results from one group to the next, one Group Auditor to the next.1

Notes

  1.   Hubbard, L. R. (1953-01-10). Lecture: Mechanics of the Mind. (LGC-3, 5301c10). ↩