Chapter 130. From Dianetics to the Sea Org: L. Ron Hubbard and the Church of Scientology

Christian Science (Chapter 128) located illness in “mortal mind”. Spiritualism (Chapter 129) claimed that personality survives the body. In the mid-twentieth century a pulp-fiction writer combined both themes, a mental cause of suffering and an immortal spiritual being, into a technique sold as science. Within three years he had reorganised it as a church. The Church of Scientology became the best-known example of a movement whose relationship with the state was itself a doctrinal and institutional issue. It fought tax authorities, infiltrated government agencies, campaigned against psychiatry, sought celebrities, and won or lost recognition as a religion from one country to the next. This chapter sets Hubbard’s own texts and the church’s self-presentation beside its critics, chiefly the ex-member Bent Corydon and Hubbard’s estranged son L. Ron Hubbard Jr. Each claim is attributed to its source.

Hubbard’s System in His Own Words

Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health (1950) presents itself as a discovery about the structure of the mind. Hubbard distinguishes an “analytical mind”, which perceives, remembers and computes, from a “reactive mind”, which records without understanding during moments when the analytical mind is shut down. “The engram is a moment of ‘unconsciousness’ containing physical pain or painful emotion and all perceptions, and is not available to the analytical mind as experience.” “The action of the analytical mind during a moment of intense pain is suspended.” [L. Ron Hubbard, Dianetics, #7456]. His standard example is: “A woman is knocked down by a blow. She is rendered ‘unconscious.’ She is kicked and told she is a faker… A faucet is running in the kitchen. A car is passing in the street outside. The engram contains a running record of all these perceptions” [Hubbard, #7456]. Later words, sounds or smells similar to those in the engram “restimulate” it and produce aberration or illness. Hubbard holds that the reactive mind had survival value for the fighter “half out on his feet” or “the burned man who drags himself out of the fire” [Hubbard, #7456]. Therapy, called auditing, takes the patient back through engrams until they lose their charge. The goal is the “Clear”, defined in Dianetics: The Original Thesis as “an individual who has been cleared of all engrams and engram chains and who has achieved a general Tone 4”. In a Clear, Hubbard says, “there are no pain-inducing memories” [Ron Hubbard, Dianetics: The Original Thesis, #63451, glossary; Hubbard, Dianetics, #7456].

The church’s edition of The Original Thesis closes with a hagiographic “About L. Ron Hubbard”. It opens: “‘To really know life,’ L. Ron Hubbard wrote, ‘you’ve got to be part of life. You must get down and look, you must get into the nooks and crannies of existence. You have to rub elbows with all kinds and types of men before you can finally establish what he is.'” The same back matter promotes later programmes such as the “Purification Program”, presented as Ron’s “major discovery” that drug residues “remained in a person’s body long after ingested” [Hubbard, Dianetics: The Original Thesis, #63451, “About L. Ron Hubbard”]. A Romanian reader, Alexandra Beatrice Kiseleff, describes Dianetics as “a kind of psychoanalysis that allows someone to exercise a talent without any prior training”. She adds that “the general theory of dianetics admits, like Freud, the existence of the subconscious, but while the Freudian subconscious is extremely cunning, being copied from the devil, Hubbard’s subconscious is made only of recordings and therefore incapable of understanding the meanings of human actions” [Alexandra Beatrice Kiseleff, Sfidarea Paranormalului, #9649].

From Bestseller to Church, 1949–1953

Corydon’s book opens with a compressed history: “In 1949 a broke middle-aged science fiction writer authored a book which became a best seller… Mail arrived at his doorstep by the sack-load, and the money rolled in. In 1952 that author, L. Ron Hubbard, unveiled a more spiritually oriented subject, Scientology. One year later, he founded the Church of Scientology, using his Dianetic following as a base” [Bent Corydon & L. Ron Hubbard Jr., Hubbard, Messiah or Madman?, #5642, Part I]. Willis fills in the gap. After his divorce Hubbard “was broke and desperate. Dianetics had provided his 15 minutes of fame, but it was beginning to fade… He had a book but did not yet have a religion to go with it. Then, in 1952, Hubbard even lost the rights to Dianetics in bankruptcy proceedings. Thus it was that Scientology was born.” Citing Russell Miller, Willis says that Hubbard “first pitched Scientology to 38 people gathered in a room” who, “upon payment of a fee,” could rise through levels of teaching [Jim Willis, American Cults, #63203, “The Church of Scientology”].

The commercial side runs through all the critical sources. Goldwag writes: “to argue about whether Scientology is a mental health regimen or a religion is to miss the point. It’s a business. By the end of 1950, when Dianetics had sold more than half a million copies, Look magazine noted that Hubbard was charging $500 for the one-month course that auditors were required to take” [Arthur Goldwag, Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies, #73961, “Scientology”]. His entry comes directly after his entry on Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan. Breitbart and Ebner call auditing “essentially a confessional” and say Scientology is “the sect that began calling itself a church at conveniently the same time the Internal Revenue Service started demanding tax payments” [Andrew Breitbart & Mark Ebner, Hollywood, Interrupted, #71622, Part III]. Cordon’s encyclopedia calls it “the most successful psychotherapy-themed cult of all” and “surely the world’s costliest religion”. It notes that Hubbard places up to 200 engrams before birth, in a womb he saw as “a very frightening, dangerous place”. It sets the official biography against the record. Hubbard is said to have been “trained as a nuclear physicist” and to have “served in all five theaters of the war, winning many medals… crippled and blinded” in 1944, while “[The U.S. Navy says that he saw no combat.]” [L. Cordon, Popular Psychology: An Encyclopedia, #31458, “Dianetics/Scientology”].

The Sea Org and Life Ashore

Willis writes that “by the late 1960s, the IRS was looking into Hubbard’s finances. He responded by moving offshore,” creating the Sea Organization, “a sort of floating boot camp for what was to become Scientology’s clergy”. When Mediterranean ports closed to his ships, “he snuck back to Florida and, practically speaking, hid from the IRS for the rest of his life” [Willis, #63203]. Corydon notes that Sea Org recruits “were (and still are) required to sign a billion-year contract.” In “The Sea Org Goes Ashore” he describes the move to Clearwater, Florida. The Fort Harrison hotel was bought under the cover name “United Churches”. When the St Petersburg Times exposed the arrangement, Mayor Cazares opened hearings [Corydon & Hubbard Jr., #5642, ch. 10]. Ashore, the disciplinary “Rehabilitation Project Force” continued, together with an “RPF’s RPF” in the hotel’s boiler rooms. Corydon reproduces Tonja Burden’s sworn account. She joined at thirteen, was paid “between $2.50 a week and $17.50 a week,” described the RPF as a “concentration camp” for “security threats,” escaped through an air duct in November 1977, and was later billed “$58,000.00 for auditing” [Corydon & Hubbard Jr., #5642, ch. 10]. In “Souls Turned Inside Out” Corydon examines the E-meter and auditing. “The E-meter is a tool, as are the actions of basic auditing. They can be used as tools to help others… Or they can be used as bait, to lure another into a trap” [Corydon & Hubbard Jr., #5642, ch. 12].

The Guardian’s Office, Fair Game and Operation Snow White

The church’s intelligence arm, the Guardian’s Office (GO), carried out a policy that critics trace to Hubbard’s own words. Staton reproduces the HCO policy letter of 18 October 1967: “A suppressive person becomes fair game,” and an “enemy may be deprived of property or injured by any means by any Scientologist without any discipline of the Scientologist… may be tricked, sued, lied to, or destroyed” [Jerry Staton, Hollywood, Satanism, Scientology and Suicide, #71559]. Corydon quotes Guardian Order GO 121669 MSH on “Internal Security”. Its “Major Target” was “to use any and all means to detect an infiltration, double agent or disaffected staff member… and by any and all means to render null” them [Corydon & Hubbard Jr., #5642, ch. 13].

Corydon’s chapter 13, “Snow White and the Scientology 11”, relies on an FBI statement drawn largely from the testimony of the operative Michael Meisner. Mary Sue Hubbard and other GO officials later stipulated to it as true. In 1974 Guardian Order 1361 declared “full-scale war on the IRS”. Its covert weapons were “the penetration of the IRS Intelligence Division, the IRS Special Services Staff, and the Chief Counsel’s Office”. The plant Gerald Wolfe (“Silver”) took a clerk-typist job. Meisner and another operative “placed the bugging device in a wall socket” of an IRS meeting room and taped “the big pow wow about what to do about us.” In the first five months of 1975 the documents copied “totalled some ten feet in height”. The operatives forged IRS identity cards and copied files from the office of Assistant U.S. Attorney Nathan Dodell. On 25 May 1975 Mary Sue Hubbard wrote that the strategy was “to use any method at our disposal to win the battle and gain our non-profit status” [Corydon & Hubbard Jr., #5642, ch. 13]. Corydon notes that “among the files stolen were those on then California governor Edmond Brown Jr., Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley, singer Frank Sinatra, John Wayne and others”. He reports Hubbard’s denial, “I learned about it like everyone else, after the fact”, and adds that the FBI had labelled Hubbard an “Unindicted Co-conspirator”. The church’s own commissioned account, Omar Garrison’s Playing Dirty, portrayed the operation as the work of “freedom fighters”. According to Garrison, a government official remarked that it “would have done credit to the intelligence service of a major country” [Corydon & Hubbard Jr., #5642]. After the 1977 FBI raids, “in 1979… 11 senior people in the organization were convicted of obstruction of justice, burglary of government offices, and theft of documents and government property” [Willis, #63203].

The Confidential Cosmology: OT III and Beyond

Above “Clear” lie the “Operating Thetan” (OT) levels. Willis summarises the teaching that humans are immortal “Thetans” who have lived many past lives, and that before arriving on earth they were extraterrestrials. “Some 70 million years ago, Xenu was the ruler of a confederation of planets and was responsible for bringing billions of alien beings to Earth. They were then killed by thermonuclear weapons.” This material was disclosed only by former members [Willis, #63203]. Staton’s compilation gives the defectors’ version of OT III: “75 million years ago, the solution to overpopulation in a space confederacy” was carried out. Staton claims that each leaf on the Sea Org emblem represents one of its planets. The surviving disembodied “body thetans” (bts) and “clusters” attach to human bodies, and “the purpose of auditing at the OT III level… is to contact and audit the bts and clusters so that [they] leave the body.” Within the same compilation the figures vary (26 or 76 planets, 75 or 76 million years). Staton states that the church “steadfastly stonewalled and denied OT 3 was OT 3” until court filings in the Fishman/Geertz litigation showed that the “OT 3 that they had denied for 30 years was in fact their real OT 3.” He also discusses a disputed “OT 8” document, whose authenticity the church denies [Staton, #71559]. Staton’s text must be read on its own terms. It is an anonymous internet compilation titled “The Fable”, whose authors state that “no claim is made… that any statement in this fable… is factual” and present it as “allegory”. Its value here is as a record of the defector literature and of documents that circulated in litigation [Staton, #71559, “Special Disclaimer”].

Psychiatry, the State and Hollywood

Scientology’s hostility to psychiatry has had legislative effects. Abrams’s standard ECT textbook cites Burton (1991): “Scientology’s vitriolic attacks on psychiatry, psychopharmacology, and ECT are financially motivated.” He illustrates “the disproportionate effectiveness of the anti-ECT lobby” with the passage of “the highly restrictive Assembly Bill 4481 for legislating ECT use in California” and the FDA’s failed attempt to reclassify ECT devices [R. Abrams, Electroconvulsive Therapy, 4th ed., #37660, ch. 1]. The movement also reached the post-Soviet world. The Russian healer Serghei Lazarev describes taking a Moscow car whose friendly driver promoted Dianetics. He describes feeling his soul “run hopping after this man who promised me money, health, capacity and success”. He places the episode in a discussion of “totalitarian sects”, from which he says recovery takes “a year and a half” [Serghei Nikolaevici Lazarev, Indrumar de Supravieţuire, #61440, ch. 5].

The tax question was settled in the church’s favour. Breitbart and Ebner write: “For decades Scientology fought the IRS, until an odd thing happened in 1993—the IRS capitulated and granted Scientology tax-exempt status after one of the group’s high ranking officials had an unscheduled, closed-door meeting with the then head of the IRS” [Breitbart & Ebner, #71622]. Today, Willis notes, it is “a tax-exempt church” holding real estate “worth… hundreds of millions of dollars” under David Miscavige [Willis, #63203]. Its fight with critics continued. Staton reports that “Scientology’s ‘scorched earth’ litigation tactics [Scientology filed 44 lawsuits] drove the Cult Awareness Network into bankruptcy,” and that the church then sought to take over its assets (see Chapter 136) [Staton, #71559]. Europe has refused what the IRS granted. Willis notes that Germany calls it “an ‘anti-constitutional sect'” and France “a dangerous cult” [Willis, #63203]. The reference shelf records that German domestic intelligence keeps it under observation as an “abusive business masquerading as a religion” [Wikipedia: Scientology in Germany]. In France a 1995 parliamentary report listed it as a cult, MIVILUDES classified it in 2006 as “a dangerous cult,” and “seven officials… have been convicted of crimes such as embezzlement, and contribution to suicide” [Wikipedia: Scientology in France].

The celebrity strategy is central to most accounts. Breitbart and Ebner quote John Travolta: “I would say that Scientology put me into the big time.” They also report criticism from dyslexia experts of Tom Cruise’s public statements on dyslexia [Breitbart & Ebner, #71622]. Staton’s compilation discusses Cruise’s OT III auditing, and its opening chapters are devoted to “Why Scientology Pursues Celebrities” [Staton, #71559]. Willis ends with the case for and against: “Some very successful people declare that Scientology is a life-saving religion. Others call it a business. Still others swear it is a cult” [Willis, #63203].

Key points

• Hubbard’s Dianetics (1950) holds that engrams recorded by the reactive mind during “unconsciousness” cause aberration, and that auditing produces a “Clear” free of them [Hubbard, #7456; #63451].
• Corydon and Willis trace the move from a bestseller (1950) to Scientology (1952) and a church (1953), after Hubbard lost the Dianetics rights in bankruptcy in 1952 [Corydon & Hubbard Jr., #5642; Willis, #63203].
• Goldwag, Cordon and Breitbart and Ebner stress the commercial side: the $500 auditor course, “the world’s costliest religion”, and church status adopted when the IRS sought taxes [Goldwag, #73961; Cordon, #31458; Breitbart & Ebner, #71622].
• The Sea Org, with its billion-year contracts and the RPF, appears in Corydon’s sources as a regime of strict control [Corydon & Hubbard Jr., #5642].
• Operation Snow White infiltrated the IRS and the Justice Department, bugged an IRS meeting and stole files on public figures. Eleven officials were convicted in 1979, and the FBI called Hubbard an unindicted co-conspirator [Corydon & Hubbard Jr., #5642; Willis, #63203].
• Fair Game (1967) and the confidential OT III cosmology (Xenu, body thetans) come down through defectors and litigation. The church long denied OT III’s content, and Staton’s compilation describes itself as a “fable” [Willis, #63203; Staton, #71559].
• Scientology campaigned against psychiatry and ECT (Abrams), won U.S. tax exemption in 1993, drove the Cult Awareness Network into bankruptcy, and is treated as a dangerous or anti-constitutional organisation in France and Germany [Abrams, #37660; Breitbart & Ebner, #71622; Staton, #71559; Willis, #63203].