Free Inside Scientology by Janet Reitman Page A

allowing its practitioners to discover the anatomy of the human soul. Hubbard called that entity the thetan (
theta,
Hubbard said, meant "life") and said it represented a person's "true," or innate, self, which was wholly separate from the body, the mind, and the physical world.
    Thetans, Hubbard explained, existed long before the beginning of time and had drifted through the eons, picking up and then discarding physical bodies as if they were temporary shells. Bored, they created the universe. But after a while, they got trapped in that creation. During the lengthy course of their history, which Hubbard called the "whole track," they had been implanted, through electric shock, pain, or hypnotic suggestion, with a host of ideas, some positive, like love, and others contradictory or negative—such as the ideas of God, Satan, Jesus Christ, and political or bureaucratic government. Eventually they came to believe themselves to be no more than the bodies they inhabited—Hubbard called them "theta beings"—and their original power was lost.
    The goal of Scientology, Hubbard said, was to restore that power, which was the purpose of Scientology auditing. Thanks to the E-meter, * which for starters would enable people to recover buried memories, this form of therapy would be far more precise than Dianetics auditing.

    By the time Jana Daniels arrived in Phoenix, Arizona, in the summer of 1952, the Hubbard Association of Scientologists (founded that April as a training facility, book publisher, and exclusive seller of E-meters) was enjoying moderate success. Hubbard had left Wichita several months earlier and moved west, taking with him his adoring new bride, Mary Sue Whipp, an attractive nineteen-year-old former student of the University of Texas. To the delight of many male students, though not to the women ("She was a nothing," Helen O'Brien told Russell Miller; "Her favorite reading was
True Confessions
"), Mary Sue had been studying at the Wichita Foundation since the summer of 1951. About thirty or so people soon gathered at the association in Phoenix: science fiction fans, musicians, artists, a few psychologists, and various young people—a scruffier and less professional crowd than those who'd surrounded Hubbard in Elizabeth and Los Angeles, but just as fascinated by what he had to sell.
    Daniels, then twenty-two, had been a fan of Hubbard's since she'd first read
Dianetics,
in 1950. Like Helen O'Brien, she'd been a young housewife, somewhat bored, and she became curious about this new "science of the mind." Then living in Shreveport, Louisiana, she was also curious about Hubbard, whom a friend had described as "a Hollywood person who was an acolyte of Aleister Crowley and went about the streets dressed in white robes and wearing a turban."
    But the L. Ron Hubbard whom Daniels met in Phoenix didn't live up to this exotic description. "My first impression of him was of a fairly tall, orange-haired, pink-skinned man who had lips that looked like raw liver and who appeared somehow moist," she said. "I considered him a singularly unattractive man. He was not a snappy dresser and often looked as if he had slept in his clothes." And yet something about Hubbard drew Daniels in. "He was immensely charismatic. He was
magnetic,
" she said. He was also, Daniels added, "a man of many faces. He was who you wanted him to be. There were countless facets to his personality. He would put them on as if they were clothing."
    Hubbard had begun to promote the myth that his life had been one of sober exploration. According to this revision of his biography, he had wandered the world to gain understanding of the human mind and spirit, and had written science fiction as a way to fund that extensive "research." He now claimed to have spent a full year at Oak Knoll Naval Hospital, where he had access to the whole medical library, including the records of former prisoners of war. He met these men and began to treat their psychological