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

history,” he wrote to a puzzled contributor. “It produces the sort of stability and sanity
men have dreamed about for centuries.” He assured a young writer that Hubbard would
win the Nobel Peace Prize for his work.
The book itself, Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, appeared in May. It
was completely unexpected, given Hubbard’s history as a writer. He intended it to stand
as a capstone to the “fty thousand years of thinking men without whose speculations
and observations the creation and construction of Dianetics would not have been
possible.” In Scientology, Dianetics is known as Book One. “With 18 million copies sold,
it is indisputably the most widely read and inuential book on the human mind ever
published,” the church maintains. Scientology dates its own calendar from 1950, the
year Dianetics was published.
Hubbard’s theory is that the mind has two parts. The analytical, or conscious, mind is
the center of awareness, the storehouse of all past perceptions. Nothing is lost from its
data banks. Every smell or pattern or sound attached to one’s previous experiences is
present and capable of being completely recaptured. This is the mind that observes and
thinks and solves problems. It is rational and aware of itself.
The other form of mentality is the reactive mind. It is the single source of nightmares,
insecurity, and unreasonable fears. It doesn’t think. It is a repository of painful and
destructive emotions, which are recorded even while an individual is sleeping, or
unconscious, or still in the womb. The recording is not the same as a memory, in the
sense of being a mental construct; it is physically a part of the cellular structure and
capable of reproducing itself in generations of new cells. “Cells are evidently sentient in
some currently inexplicable way,” Hubbard speculates. When awakened by some
stimulus, the recording—Hubbard calls it an “engram”—turns o the conscious mind
and seizes control of an individual’s actions or behavior.
Hubbard compares the engram to a posthypnotic suggestion. He describes a man in a
trance who has been told that every time the operator touches his tie, the subject will
remove his coat. When the subject is awakened, he is not consciously aware of the
command. “The operator then touches his tie,” Hubbard writes. “The subject may make
some remark about its being too warm and so take his coat o.” This can be done
repeatedly. “At last the subject may become aware, from the expressions on people’s
faces, that something is wrong. He will not know what is wrong. He will not even know
that the touching of the tie is the signal which makes him take o his coat.” The
hypnotic command in his unconscious continues to govern his behavior, even when the
subject recognizes that it is irrational and perhaps harmful. In the same way, Hubbard
suggests, engrams work their sinister inuence on everyday actions, undermining one’s
self-condence and subverting rational behavior. The individual feels helpless as he
engages in behavior he would never consciously consent to. He is “handled like a
marionette by his engrams.”
Although there were no recorded case histories to prove his claim that hundreds of
patients had been cured through his methods, through “many years of exact research
and careful testing,” Hubbard oered appealing examples of hypothetical behavior. For
instance, a woman is beaten and kicked. “She is rendered ‘unconscious.’ ” In that state,