Hays advised the discouraged Hubbard to make use of his extensive mailing list. There were many followers who still believed in the man and his method. Some had had meaningful emotional breakthroughs. Others had experiences—such as leaving their bodies—that conclusively proved to them the validity of Hubbard’s claims. These acolytes provided the bedrock of support that Hubbard needed to regenerate his broken organization, rebuild his finances, and repair the stain on his reputation caused by his personal scandals.
In addition to Hubbard’s relentless self-confidence, several new factors salvaged his movement. He had a new device, the E-Meter, developed by one of his followers, which Hubbard revealed in March 1952. The E-Meter would replace the Dianetic reverie with what appeared to be a more scientific approach, one that didn’t look so much like a hypnotic trance. “It sees all, knows all,” Hubbard declared. “It is never wrong.” And he had a new wife, Mary Sue Whipp, a petite Texan, twenty years his junior, whom he married that same month. She was already pregnant with the first of their four children.
Hubbard also had a new name for his movement. From now on, it was Scientology.
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1 According to the church, “There was something under the water and it was definitely hostile, and after they dropped their charges, there was oil and something sunk.… It definitely happened.”
2 A conspicuous example of Dianetic processing involved John Brodie, the outstanding quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, who suffered an injury to his throwing arm in 1970 that threatened to end his career. Despite the best medical attention and physical therapy, his elbow remained sore and swollen. Finally, he went to Phil Spickler, a Scientologist and Dianetic auditor, who asked Brodie to tell him about previous incidents that might be keeping his arm from healing. Brodie related that he had been in a severe traffic accident in 1963, in which his arm had been broken. As he explored the incident with Spickler, Brodie seemed to recall one of the ambulance attendants saying, “Well, that poor sonofabitch will never throw a football again.” And yet Brodie was unconscious at the time. How could he have such a memory? Spickler told him this was all part of an engram that was keeping him from getting well. “The ambulance attendant’s prediction had been simmering in my unconscious for seven years, agitating all my deepest fears of declining ability or failure,” Brodie later writes. “It had finally surfaced as this psychosomatic ailment in my throwing arm. Phil made me tell the story again and again and again, until no charge showed on the E-Meter” (John Brodie and James D. Houston, Open Field, p. 166). The swelling on Brodie’s arm diminished. He went on to have one of the greatest seasons of his career, and was voted the National Football League’s most valuable player that year.
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.