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

little about recovering from the war, then remarks, “The main diculty these days is
getting sane again. I nd out that I am making progress. Of course there is always the
danger that I will get too sane to write.” He is angling for a Guggenheim grant for his
book on psychology. Meantime, he was so pressed nancially that he begged Heinlein
for a loan of fty dollars. “Golly, I never was so many places in print with less to show
for it,” Hubbard complained. “I couldn’t buy a stage costume for Gypsy Rose Lee.”
Hubbard was writing these letters from Savannah, Georgia, in the waning days of
1948 and the spring of 1949. He said he was volunteering in a psychiatric clinic at St.
Joseph’s Medical Center, “getting case histories at the request of the American
Psychiatric Assoc.” It is a shadowy period in his life, but it was in Savannah that he
began to sketch out the principles that would form the basis of his understanding of the
human mind. He claimed to be getting phenomenal results on nearly every malady he
addressed. “One week ago I brought in my rst asthma cure,” he writes to Heinlein. “I
have an arthritis to finish tomorrow and so it goes.”
It’s unclear whether Hubbard himself was receiving treatment in Savannah. “My hip
and stomach and side are well again,” he writes to Heinlein, adding that he is
“straightening out the kinks that have held down production on the money machine.”
In his letters, Hubbard continually speculates about the book he hopes to nish soon.
“It ain’t agin religion,” he boasts to Heinlein. “It just abolishes it.… It’s science, boy,
science.” He makes a vague reference to the research he’s performing on children. “This
hellbroth I cooked up works remarkably well on kids,” he remarks. “Took a scared little
kid that was supposed to be stupid and was failing everything and worked on him about
thirty-ve hours just to make sure. That was last month. So now he turns up this
afternoon with all A’s and all of a sudden reading Shakespeare.” He was also noting
improvement in himself, both in his work and in his recovered sexual powers. “I am
cruising on four hours sleep a night. But the most interesting thing is, I’m up to eight
comes. In an evening, that is.”
Heinlein was eager for details. Hubbard responded by outlining what he would later
call the Tone Scale. It describes the range of human emotional states, from one to four.
At bottom, there is Apathy, then Anger. These lower tones were governed by the
unconscious, which Hubbard says should be called the “reactive mind.” The third level,
which was as yet untitled, is the normal state for most of humanity; and the fourth is a
condition of happiness and industriousness. Hubbard’s experimental technique aimed at
raising an individual out of the lower tones and into the superior state of the fourth
tone. His method, as he described it to Heinlein, was to drain o the painful experiences
and associations that an individual has accumulated in his lifetime. Once that’s done,
“astonishing results take place.” Asthma, headaches, arthritis, menstrual cramps,
astigmatism, and ulcers simply disappear. There is a huge boost in competence. The
reactive mind is eliminated, and the rational mind takes over.
At the end of April 1949, Hubbard sent a note to Heinlein that he was moving to
Washington, DC, for an indenite stay. There was no word about Sara. Three weeks
later, the thirty-eight-year-old Hubbard applied for a license in Washington to marry
twenty-six-year-old Ann Jensen. The application was canceled the next day at the