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3
Going Overboard
Given his biography, it would be easy to dismiss Hubbard as a fraud, but that
would fail to explain his total absorption in his project. He would spend the rest
of his life elaborating his theory and—even more obsessively—constructing the
intricate bureaucracy designed to spread and enshrine his visionary understanding of
human behavior. His life narrowed down to his singular mission. Each passageway in
his interior expedition led him deeper into his imagination. That journey became
Scientology, a totalistic universe in which his every turn was mapped and described.
Hubbard’s own logic was inclining him toward conclusions that he was at rst
reluctant to draw. By admitting the validity of prenatal memories, he was bound to
confront a dilemma: What if the memories didn’t stop there? When patients began
having “sperm dreams,” Hubbard had to accept the idea that prenatal engrams were
recorded “as early as shortly before conception.” Then, when patients began to remember
previous lives, Hubbard resisted the idea; it threatened to tear apart his organization.
“The subject of past deaths and past lives is so full of tension that as early as last July
1950, the board of trustees of the [Dianetics] Foundation sought to pass a resolution
banning the entire subject,” he conded. Still, the implications were intriguing. What if
we have lived before? Might there be memories that occasionally leak through into
present time? Wouldn’t that prove that we are immortal beings, only temporarily
residing in our present incarnations?
Instead of remembering, the patient undergoing Dianetic counseling “returns” to the
past-life event. “There is a dierent feel to another period in time that’s so basic it’s
hard to describe,” Hubbard’s top US executive, Helen O’Brien, recalled. “If you nd
yourself in a room, there may be color with unfamiliar tones because of gaslight shining
on it. The air has a strange quality. Its particles of dust derive from unmodern
constituents. Even human bodies seem to radiate a dierent kind of warmth when they
are covered with the fabrics of another age. Memory, per se, lters out all that. When
you return, you nd the past intact.” Some of the “returnings” were shocking or painful.
O’Brien’s rst past-life experience in an auditing session was that of being a young Irish
woman in the early nineteenth century. She could feel the coarse texture of her fullskirted
dress as she walked down a narrow country lane, hearing the birds and feeling
the warm country air. But when she turned a corner of her house, she saw a British
soldier bayoneting her fourteen-year-old son in the yard. “I literally shuddered with
grief,” O’Brien writes. When the soldier threw her to the ground and tried to rape her,
she spit in his face. He crushed her skull with a cobblestone. O’Brien’s auditor had her reexperience
the scene over and over until she was able to move through the entire bloody
tableau unaected. “By the end of it, I was luxuriously comfortable in every bre,” she