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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
Auditing is the repetitive reliving of the engram-creating experience with the aid of a Dianetics auditor and while in a mild hypnotic trance. (The auditor is instructed to say "When I count from one to seven, your eyes will close." Hubbard maintains that the resulting state is "vastly different" from hypnosis because the subject isn't "asleep" and knows what's happening around him, but this just doesn't sound that different from what most hypnotherapists do.) The most significant engrams, the theory holds, are formed prenatally, starting with the moment of conception. Any words overheard in an "unconscious" state, even pleasant ones, will become a particularly tenacious and unpredictable part of the engram, which is why you must never ever speak to a woman who has, for example, just fallen down in the street. Help her up, but don't say a word! She might be pregnant!
It shouldn't take anyone 700 pages of gobbledygook to cover this material, so along the way it's easy to be distracted by Hubbard's numerous personal and writerly eccentricities. I kept scouting the book for hints of something I'd heard about, the wacky science fiction mythology that lies at the inner sanctum of Scientology, though I knew it wouldn't appear per se in "Dianetics." That's reserved only for those who have undergone the church's intensive training and indoctrination. Scientologists say they withhold this information because learning it can drive the unprepared person insane and give you pneumonia, but it's all over the Web, and it strikes me as far less likely to cause suffering than Hubbard's prose.
Critics say the church hushes up this story -- it involves an evil demiurge who, 75 million years ago, blew up 178 billion souls with hydrogen bombs planted in Earth's volcanoes, trapped them on "electrical strips," brainwashed them and packaged them into clusters that now cling to every human being and mess with our bodies and heads -- for two reasons. One is that the church needs a sufficiently dramatic payoff after stringing members along through years of courses and trainings, all costing upward of a quarter of a million dollars. The other reason is fear that revealing this fantasia of kooky stories might turn off potential converts -- but, hey, that never hurt the Old Testament.
Not only does "Dianetics" offer precious little sideshow appeal, it's impossible to read much of it without realizing that it's the work of a very disturbed man. (Here's where things get less entertaining.) Hubbard's grandiose preoccupation with "an answer to the goal of all thought," the reiteration of fantasies of perfect mastery foiled by invasive, alien forces (engrams are described as "parasites"), the determination to envision the mind as a machine that can be brought under absolute control if only these enemies can be ejected -- all these are classic forms of paranoid thinking. The alarm bells really start to ring when Hubbard describes colorblindness as caused by a "circuit" in a person's mind that "behaves as though it were someone or something separate from him and that either talks to him or goes into action of its own accord, and may even, if severe enough, take control of him while it operates."
All self-help books -- and for all its attempts at intellectual hauteur, "Dianetics" is just that -- resort to examples and case studies, and those examples tend to reflect the values of their time and the author. When "Dianetics" was first published in 1950, pop psychology books were still widely read by men (now, it's mostly a women's genre), and they often tackled such problems as how to get ahead at the office and deal with wives who nagged or withheld sex -- the concerns of the average middle-class '50s guy.
"Dianetics" is way off the reservation in this department. Certain motifs keep recurring with a compulsive regularity that suggests Hubbard himself was anything but clear of past traumas. Eventually, these recurring images and examples gel into a sad and scary narrative that must have had particular power for Hubbard, since it keeps cropping up throughout the book.
It involves an adulterous wife and a brutal husband. The wife becomes pregnant (presumably by her lover) and fears discovery of the affair. She tries repeatedly to abort the pregnancy on her own, using orange sticks and other household objects. Her husband, suspecting the truth, beats her, punching her pregnant belly, calling her a "whore" and "no good." When the child is born, the parents pretend it was wanted, but the child's only true ally is a grandmother, who thwarted the mother's attempt to abort him and cares for the child when he's sick. Eventually, the mother starts beating the child, using many of the same insults her husband has flung at her.
This horrific tale never appears in its entirety in "Dianetics," but the book is haunted by it. Every time Hubbard reached into his mind for an example of how a fetus might come to feel pain, or how an engram "keys in," or how engrams are passed on through generations, he came up with a piece of this story.
The prevalence of physical violence -- almost exclusively domestic violence -- in "Dianetics" makes itself felt early on. Among the first examples in the book (meant to illustrate the condition of "unconsciousness") describes a woman being knocked down and kicked by her husband, and beaten women appear throughout with bizarre regularity. Hubbard also seemed to be obsessed with attempted abortion, which he believed to be widespread. Admittedly, when "Dianetics" was written, legal medical abortion wasn't available in the U.S., but even so, the assertion that "twenty or thirty abortion attempts is not uncommon" among women who aren't Clears is simply demented.
From reading "Dianetics" alone, you can glean a picture of Hubbard as a man wrestling with mental illness, who saw his mind as a potentially superhuman machine beset by invaders and parasites. Without knowing anything about his life, you can tell that this is someone raised in an environment of betrayal, secrecy, bullying and violence, someone who stands a good chance of re-creating the same conditions in his adult life if he's not careful. You can figure out all of this just from reading "Dianetics," like I did. Then, afterward, you can go on the Web and check out the many sites devoted to critiquing Scientology and documenting the truth about Hubbard. Chances are what you find there won't surprise you at all.
