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us 05
---
title: "Understanding Scientology — us-05"
source: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Library/Shelf/wakefield/us-05.html
retrieved: 2026-06-28
---
Understanding Scientology, by Margery
Wakefield
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Chapter 5
## Dianetics -- May You Never Be the Same Again
The creation of Dianetics is a milestone for Man comparable
to his discovery of fire and superior to his inventions of the wheel and
arch.... This is useful knowledge. With it the blind again see, the lame
walk, the ill recover, the insane become sane and the sane become saner.
-- L. Ron Hubbard
Who are you? Have you lived before? What is your name? Say your name
over to yourself a few times. Say it over and over. Come on, say it some
more. Now say your name a few more times. Now say it a few more just to
make sure of it.
That is right. Better go back and do it a few more times if you
missed.
All right. Now let's ask it again. Who are you? Where did you really
come from?
How do you know you haven't lived before?
Dianetic techniques indicate that you have. And Dianetics, which has
revealed so much to the Western World, comes up now with this strange
data. You are you. But you may have lived elsewhere under another name
without even suspecting it yourself.
-- L. Ron Hubbard, Have You Lived Before This
Life?
The book Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health is to
Scientologists much the same as the Bible is to Christians: the
indisputable word of God (Hubbard) which provides the rationale for
belief and the basis for faith. Interestingly, just as there are many
Christians who do not read the Bible, there are many Scientologists who
either have not read Dianetics, or who have tried to read it and been
put off by its style, which one writer calls "abstruse, rambling,
repetitive, studded with confusing neologisms and littered with
interminable footnotes." (1)
In spite of its style, however, the Dianetics book was a publisher's
dream. Although the original printing of the book was a cautious 6,000
copies and initial sales were slow, by the end of 1950 sales had reached
over 150,000 copies. The book sparked an avalanche of interest across
the country in this new do-it-yourself psychotherapy.
Part of the success of the book had to do with the sweeping promises
made by Hubbard throughout the book. Never one to be modest, Hubbard
claimed that in Dianetics, "the hidden source of all psychosomatic ills
and human aberration has been discovered and skills have been developed
for their invariable cure."
He grandiloquently surveys the scope of Dianetics in the beginning
of the book: "A science of mind is a goal which has engrossed thousands
of generations of man. Armies, dynasties and whole civilizations have
perished for
the lack of it. Rome went to dust for the want of it. And down in the
arsenal is an atom bomb, its hopeful nose full-armed in ignorance of
it."
"No quest," he continues, "has been more relentlessly pursued or has
been more violent. No primitive tribe, no matter how ignorant, has
failed to recognize the problem as a problem, nor has it failed to bring
forth at least an attempted formulation."
In Dianetics, he concluded, the answer has at last been found.
His promises of salvation were like manna from heaven for the
thousands of souls who sought then, and still seek, relief from the
vicissitudes of life. Like shipwreck survivors in a tossing sea, people
by the thousands grasped desperately for the lifeline Hubbard was
dangling from the passing rescue ship. The recently formed Hubbard
Dianetic Research Foundation in Elizabeth, New Jersey, was soon
inundated with calls and letters requesting more information about the
new "science."
The problem, according to Hubbard, was basically simple. The mind is
actually like a computer. "The optimum brain," he writes in Evolution
of a Science, a small book telling the story of his discovery of
Dianetics, "should be able to recall any perception, even the trivial,
asleep and awake from the beginning of life to death. It should think
with such swiftness that vocal pondering would be utterly unable to keep
pace with a thousandth part of one computation. And ... it should never
be wrong." (2)
The mind, which in Dianetics theory is composed of what are called
the "memory banks," "contains a complete color-video record of a
person's whole life. Every perception observed in a lifetime is to be
found in the (memory) banks. All the perceptions. In good order." (3)
The memories, he continues, "are filed by time. They have an age and
emotional label, a state of physical being label, and a precise and
exhaustive record of everything perceived by organic sensation, smell,
taste, tactile, audio and visio perceptics plus the train of thought of
the analyzer of that moment." (4)
But something must be wrong. Most of us cannot remember every
memory, awake and asleep, of our lives. Why not?
There is, Hubbard explains, a villain in the piece, a villain known
in Dianetics as the "reactive mind." The reactive mind is the dark side