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

clerical error in the registration. The smokestack was emblazoned with the initials
“LRH.”
Hubbard spent most of his time in the air-conditioned captain’s cabin on the
promenade deck of the Royal Scotman, surrounded by windows to take in the ocean
vistas. He rarely drank on the ship, except perhaps to take the chill o on a cold night
on the bridge. Drugs were nowhere in evidence. His days were largely solitary, passed
in auditing himself and writing policy papers. His oce on the top deck was called the
Research Room. It was behind a pair of highly polished wooden doors with brass
handles. The oor was a bright red linoleum covered with Oriental rugs; there was a
massive mahogany desk and a huge mirror above a replace. Crew members passing by
on the upper deck could see him writing with his usual rapidity on foolscap, using a
green pen for policy bulletins and a red one for the “tech”—that is, his vast corpus of
coursework and procedures that comprised Scientology’s spiritual technology. His
restless leg would be jiggling as his hand raced across the page, faultlessly, in
handsome, legible script. For other writing, he turned back to his typewriter. “I think he
was doing automatic writing,” said Jim Dincalci, one of his medical ocers. “The pages
would be ying. When he came out of it, he would blink his eyes, as if coming awake,
and he did this thing with his lips, smacking.”
Hubbard and Mary Sue would dine in his oce between eight and ten p.m. Sometime
after three in the morning, Dincalci would give Hubbard a massage and he would go to
sleep. After that, everyone on the ship had to be quiet until Hubbard awakened,
sometime before noon, and remain absolutely mute while he was auditing himself on
the E-Meter.
In Hubbard’s opinion, the device operated just below the level of conscious awareness;
it somehow knew what you were thinking before you did. It was eerily compelling.
Anything that registered on the meter was seen as being signicant. The trick was
divining what the needle was saying. Sometimes the reaction was so violent that the
needle would pound back and forth like a berserk windshield wiper—you could hear it
snapping against the pins at either end. Hubbard called this a “rock slam.” Anyone who
registered such a reaction was deemed psychotic and certain to have committed crimes
against Scientology; if that person was in the Sea Org, he would be punished
automatically, the crime to be sorted out later.
After initially resisting the concept of past lives, Hubbard became passionately
interested in the subject. “We Come Back” was the motto of the Sea Org. Hubbard began
recalling many of his own previous existences, which the E-Meter validated. He claimed
to have been a contemporary of Machiavelli’s, and he was still upset that the author of
The Prince stole his line “The end justies the means.” He said he had been a marshal to
Joan of Arc and Tamburlaine’s wife. He told stories about driving a race car in the alien
Marcab civilization millions of years before. He came to believe that in some of his past
lives on this planet, he had buried treasure in various locations, so he launched an
expedition to unearth his ancient hoards. He called it the Mission into Time. He selected
a small crew to go on the Avon River. Because he wanted to keep the mission secret, he
had two long rafts fashioned, which could be rowed ashore under cover of darkness and