going-clear-scientology-hollywood-and-the-prison-of-belief-by-lawrence-wright-2

intellectual smorgasbord of everything that had ever puzzled the mind of man—you
know, how did it all begin, where do we go from here, are there past lives—and like a
sponge he was just absorbing all this esoteric information. And all of a sudden, there
was a kind of swishing in the air and he heard a voice, ‘No, not yet! He’s not ready!’
And like a long umbilical cord, he felt himself being pulled back, back, back. And he lay
down in his body, and he opened his eyes, and he said to the nurse, ‘I was dead, wasn’t
I?’ ” The nurse looked startled, and the doctor gave her a dirty look for letting Hubbard
know what had happened.
In Hubbard’s own written account of the event, he remembers voices crying out as he
is being restored to life, “Don’t let him know!” When he came to, he was “still in contact
with something.” The intimation that he had briey been given access to the divine
mystery lingered for several days, but he couldn’t call it back. “And then one morning,
just as I awoke, it came to me.”
In a fever, he dashed o a small book he titled Excalibur. “Once upon a time,
according to a writer in The Arabian Nights, there lived a very wise old man,” the book
begins, in the brief portion that the church has published of the fragments it says it has
in its possession. The old man, goes the story, wrote a long and learned book, but he
became concerned that he had written too much. So he sat himself down for ten years
more and reduced the original volume to one tenth its size. Even then, he was
dissatised, and he constrained the work even further, to a single line, “which contained
everything there was to be known.” He hid the sacred line in a niche in his wall. But still
he wondered, Could all human knowledge be distilled even further?
Suppose all the wisdom of the world were reduced to just one line—suppose that one line were to be written today
and given to you. With it you could understand the basis of all life and endeavor.… There is one line, conjured up out
of a morass of facts and made available as an integrated unit to explain such things. This line is the philosophy of
philosophy, thereby carrying the entire subject back into the simple and humble truth.
All life is directed by one command and one command only—SURVIVE.
Hubbard sent excited telegrams to publishers in New York, inviting them to meet him
at Penn Station, where he would auction o a manuscript that would change the world.
He wrote Polly, “I have high hopes of smashing my name into history so violently that it
will take a legendary form even if all the books are destroyed.”
But Excalibur was never published, leading some to doubt that it was ever written. The
stories Hubbard later told about the book added to the sense that it was more mythical
than real. He said that when the Russians learned of the book’s contents, they oered
him money and laboratory facilities to complete his work. When he turned them down,
they purloined a copy of his manuscript from his hotel room in Miami. Hubbard
explained to his agent that he ultimately decided to withdraw the book from publication
because the rst six people who read it were so shattered by the revelations that they
had lost their minds. The last time he showed Excalibur to a publisher, he said, the reader
brought the manuscript into the room, set it on the publisher’s desk, then jumped out the