THE REDISCOVERY OF THE HUMAN SOUL by L.Ron Hubbard

A Word On Rediscovering The Human Soul

I have been engaged in the investigation of the fundamentals of life, the material universe and human behavior,” wrote L. Ron Hubbard of his larger philosophic journey towards Dianetics and Scientology, and proceeded to reference a search “down many highways, through many byroads, into many back alleys of uncertainty.” In a further explanation of that search is the introduction and first chapter to a retrospective, “The Rediscovery of the Human Soul.”

Begun in 1956, but never completed, the manuscript effectively tells of all that preceded what appears in this publication. As a word of general background, let us add a few salient points: Although events recounted here mark the commencement of Ron’s philosophic search, he had previously spent several years, as he elsewhere put it, “poking an inquisitive mind” into related fields. Of special note, were his early psychoanalytic studies with United States Naval Commander Joseph Cheeseman Thompson, who, incidentally, had been the first United States military officer to study under Freud in Vienna, and among the first to enter Freudian theory into the field of ethnology. Also bearing mention was Ron’s very early friendship with the deeply spiritual Blackfeet tribesmen in and around his home in Montana, and what amounted to folkloric studies with a locally famous medicine man. The point, in both cases: well before his arrival at George Washington University, Ron had pondered much. Finally, and as referenced here, Ron had also spent nearly two years in a prerevolutionary China and, in fact, had been among the first Westerners after Marco Polo to gain entrance into forbidden Tibetan lamaseries scattered through the southern hills of Manchuria.

Regarding “The Rediscovery of the Human Soul,” let us add that in referencing the “formidable and slightly mad” chief of George Washington University’s Psychology Department, he is actually speaking of Dr. Fred August Moss, infamous among students for trick questions and the running of rats through gruesome electrical mazes. Meanwhile the “very famous psychiatrist” who reviews Ron’s calculations on human memory capacity was none other than William Alanson White, then superintendent of Washington, DC’s St. Elizabeth’s Hospital and still celebrated for his outspoken opposition to psychosurgery. Most importantly, however, let us simply understand this: In recalling his work through these years, and particularly his efforts to isolate the repository of human memory, he was factually raising a crucial philosophic question. That is, when we attempt to explain all human memory in terms of purely physical phenomena, we will ultimately find ourselves staring at the singular flaw in the whole of the Western scientific creed. Namely, no diagram of the human brain can account for all we are capable of remembering (much less imagining). It was not for nothing, then, that William Alanson White remarked, in response to Ron’s memory calculations, “You have just laid to waste the entire foundation of psychiatric and neurological theory.”

Today, of course, psychologists, psychiatrists, neurologists et al., continue to turn themselves inside out in an effort to propose theories broad enough to explain human memory in purely physical terms. (One of the latest involves a model of nonlocalized, or scattered memory traces along synaptic contacts so that memories are superimposed upon one another, while another holds that memory is recreated through dynamic neural interplay.) But in either case, questions Ron posed in 1932 are still not answerable within a wholly material context. Hence the increasingly frequent admissions from the scientific community that perhaps, after all, as Ron puts it, “man, as a learned whole, knew damned little about the subject.”

The Rediscovery of The Human Soul 

Once upon a time man knew he had a soul; he would have been shocked if he had been told that someday a book would have to be written to inform him, as a scientific discovery, that he had one.

And yet that is what this book is about. It is not about your soul. It is not designed to tell you to be good or bad or a Christian or a Yogi. It is written to tell you the story of the rediscovery of the human soul as a scientific, demonstrable fact.

Here at a moment when all religions everywhere face extinction by Communism, psychiatry, psychology, dialectic materialism and other “ologies” and “isms” without number, one might believe this book was an effort to create adequate religious fervor to stem the onslaught of the propaganda pamphlets which, all other things aside, are really the most hideous aspect of these threats to man; however this volume seeks no such thing: it is doubtful if religious control of man was very successful either. In the scorch of friction created by such conflicts one might not realize that the soul is worth investigating and writing about for its own sake, not for the sake of capital to be gained from its establishment or extinction.

The tale of the rediscovery of the soul is a considerable adventure entirely from the philosophic and experimental aspect; the adventure has been quite heightened by the amount of preconception and rebuff encountered because of these “isms” and “ologies.” One would think that ideologies were quite swollen with their fine opinion of themselves to believe that any investigation of the soul would of course be meant as a personal affront to each or all.

One conceives the view, after he has been awhile investigating the soul, that amongst all these modern disagreements there existed only one agreement: that the subject of the human soul, for bad or good, was only within the personal sphere of each. Thus, publishing this book will in itself be an adventure for it will discover amongst these “isms” and “ologies,” each one, the conceit that it itself is being attacked, and to “attack” that many oppositions at one fell charge requires in an author either the hide of a rhinoceros, the Citadel of a Christophe, or the legs of an impala. Having none of these but only a certain confidence in the stupidity of all these schools of slavery we locate in ourselves a willingness to accept the risk if not the combat.

Our main controversy, quite aside from minor ones, is whether or not the soul or knowledge about it could be considered a “scientific subject.” For by definition in these dialectic times, science is a somethingness which considers itself concerned entirely with matters of matter and has sought to accumulate to itself alone—much like other “isms” and “ologies”—the entire proprietorship of knowledge and has then sought to demonstrate that knowledge is only to be found in materialism. This somewhat detoured view becomes artificial on its first inspection. “Science” means only “truth” being derived from the Latin word “scio” which is “knowing in the fullest sense of the word”; more severely and lately used, “science” infers an organization of knowledge: and if this is the case, then this material concerning the human soul, being based on critically observational knowledge and being organized, certainly meets the criteria of “scientific” knowledge.

Being then, based on observable, measurable truth or knowledge and being organized, we assigned to this body of information about the human soul, the word Scientology, which is to say, the “knowledge of knowledge” or “knowing how to know” or “study of truth,” thus and thereby, with the word, taking sides with the “ologies.” But we could just as well call this material “soulism” or “the doctrine of the human soul” and take the alignments of the “isms,” thus, so to speak, edging over on the good side of each and thus avoiding war.

Scientology as a word is quite necessary since we need an identifying symbol to represent these particular discoveries and data and the methodology of their use and to prevent our making errors in conversation; the subject of the soul lends itself readily to any branch of any knowledge, and to keep oriented and localized with the information contained herein we need the word.

Very well, now that we have, we hope, announced our political climate—or lack of one—and have given a word to what we are doing, let us examine WHAT we are doing.

We are studying the soul or spirit. We are studying it as itself. We are not trying to use this study to enhance some other study or belief. And we are telling the story of how it came about that the soul needed rediscovering. And now that we’ve rediscovered it, we are also discovering if the information thus attained can in any way assist us to live better, or for that matter, die better.

Thus you can plainly see that this book is perfectly safe to read. It does not seek to alter your ideological or religious beliefs. If these alter simply because you read this book, no one is to blame but yourself and it was not the author’s intention to tamper.

Of course if you DO read this book and do its few simple experiments, your ideological and religious beliefs will alter, there’s no doubt of that. However, remember, should the idea of blaming anyone occur to you, that whatever actually HAPPENS, we didn’t really INTEND to change your philosophic pattern—all we intended to do, quite innocently, was to give you some data about the human soul—not even your own soul, just the soul in general.

The story starts in the physics laboratories of George Washington University in 1930. Quite coincidentally at almost this same time Professor Thomas Brown in charge of that department, was launching experiments which within fifteen years would bring forth an atomic bomb upon earth largely through Dr. George Gamow an assistant in this same laboratory.

Unwitting of the ferocity being planned within a few yards of me, I was engaged upon an experiment about poetry. Now usually poetry has little to do with a physics lab but this time it did. Majoring in engineering a trifle under duress and studying nuclear physics with a skeptical eye, my tedium had found a relief in conceiving that one might find why poetry in any language sounded like poetry whether one spoke the language or not.

Using an aged Koenig photometer to measure voice vibrations I was reading a line of Browning and then a line of prose alternately and studying any difference between the symmetry of vibrations in the poetry as contrasted to the prose. I discovered after a little, that there was a definite symmetry and was about to concoct a more complex test when it struck me that the mind was NOT a Koenig photometer. I drew back and looked studiously at the ugly machine with its four mirrors and glass frame and commented to myself that it would be a frighteningly uncomfortable thing to have kicking about between one’s ears. BUT if one did not have one between one’s ears, one DID or at least MUST have some kind of mechanism which would translate and measure not only the impulse of sound but also the symmetry of that sound. And, having measured it, that something did the additional trick not only of storing that symmetry but of recalling and viewing it at will.

Thus was born a search, a search which went on for a quarter of a century. Thus was born the train of intuition, observation and experiment which finally rediscovered, as a scientific fact, the soul, and gained methods of doing things to it, for it and with it with scientific certainty.

But here in 1930, serving out my time in “the salt mines of F Street” no such serious end was in real view. My interest, I must confess, went more to soaring planes at Congressional Airport, upsetting the faculty by my articles in the university paper and always making sure that the most demanded girl on the campus was the sweetheart of the professional engineering fraternity and mine to dance with, of course.

Probably nothing would have come of my search at all if I had not tried to solve something of the problem by calling on the formidable and slightly mad chief of the psychology department. He, in the secrecy of his opinions of his fellows, mainly wanted to know what I was doing out of the Engineering School and why I didn’t leave such things properly to psychologists. This challenged me a trifle. As a sensitive youth, soiled by the courtesy of the Orient in which I had spent much precollege time, I objected to people being so thoroughly Occidental, and after I had laughed at him a few columns in the university paper, I wheedled all the psychology textbooks out of a psychology major whose themes in English class I used to write and heavied my eyelids but not my understanding by studying them hard during my German and surveying lectures which bored me intensely anyway. But though I studied and comprehended what I read, the comprehension I began to believe was a trifle one-sided. These texts, like the courtesy of the psychology dean, were somewhat wanting.

Like the picture of the picture of the picture on the cereal box, psychology simply assigned all this first to the brain and then to the cell. Going no further, it still failed to describe any sound-recording-recalling devices. With youthful scorn I consigned psychology to that moldy heap of pretenses which so often pass their polysyllabic nonsense off as learning and decided to think some more about thinking—a trick to say the least.

About this time a biology major and I were accustomed to meeting after classes at (bygone days) a speak-easy up 21st Street for a round of blackjack and a couple shots after classes and whilst trying to detour my eyes from his nimble fingers he regaled me with bits and things about what went on in the world of biology. One day he actually did manage to slip me the card I didn’t want by remarking to me that the brain contained an exorbitant number of molecules of protein and that each molecule “had been discovered” to have holes in it. Fascinated, I bled him of data and a few days later made the time to calculate memory.

It seemed to me that if molecules had holes in them to a certain number, then memory, perchance, might be stored in these holes in the molecules. At least it was more reasonable than the texts I had read. But the calculation, done with considerably higher math than psychologists or biologists use, yet yielded a blank result. I calculated that memory was “made” at a certain rate and was stored in the holes in these punched protein molecules in the form of the most minute energy of which we had any record in physics. But despite the enormous number of molecular holes and the adequate amount of memory, the entire project yielded only this result: I was forced to conclude, no matter how liberal I became, that even with this system, certainly below cellular level, the brain did not have enough storage for more than three months of memory. And in that I could recall things quite vividly, at least before the beginning of the semester, I was persuaded that either the mind could not remember anything or that much smaller energy particles existed than we knew about in nuclear physics.

Amusing, a decade later, this theory, which I had imparted to a very famous psychiatrist complete with the figures, came back as an Austrian “discovery” and was widely accepted as the truth. I always wondered at the psychiatrist’s carelessness in losing that last page which declared by the same calculations that the mind could not remember.

Laying it all aside for a long time I was yet recalled to my calculations by physics itself. There are some odd movements noticeable in atomic and molecular phenomena which aren’t entirely accounted for and supposing that a “smaller” energy might make these movements amongst the larger particles, I came face to face with the grossness of the measuring equipment with which we have always worked in physics. We have only streams of electrons even today to “see small.” And I was so struck with the enormity of the Terra Incognita which physics had yet to invade that it seemed far simpler to do what I eventually did—went off and became a science fiction writer.

Living the rather romantic life of an author in New York, Hollywood and the Northwest, going abroad into savage cultures on expeditions to relax, I did little about my search until 1938 when a rather horrible experience took my mind closer to home than was my usual mental circuit. During an operation I died under the anesthetic.

Brought back to unwillingly lived life by a fast shot of adrenalin into the heart, I rather frightened my rescuers by sitting up and saying, “I know something if I could just think of it.”

In my woods cabin in the Northwest I had quite a little while to think of it. The experience had made me ill enough to keep me in a reading frame of mind and I didn’t get far from a teapot, a blanket and books for some weeks.

The alarm caused those “nearest to me” when I sought to regale them with this adventure of death, amused me. That they were not disturbed that I had actually and utterly died medically and coroneresquely, they were dismayed that I would talk about it. Deciding it was not a popular subject I nevertheless looked into the rather extensive library I sported and found that the thing was not unknown in human experience and that a chap named Pelley had even founded a considerable religious study on it. Quite plausibly he went to heaven and came back and lived to tell of it.

The psychiatric texts which I kept around for unpronounceable ailments to put in the mouths of my fictional doctors were as thoroughly alarmed as my near of kin. They called any such experiences by a nice ugly name, “delusion” and made fat paragraphs out of its mental unhealthiness. Only in that matter of unhealthiness could I agree with them. I always have, always will and did then consider that dying was unhealthy. They also seemed to feel that people who died ought to stay dead. Concluding that the littleness they knew about such happenings was best expressed by the voluminous inconclusions they wrote about it, I turned to the classic philosophers and while these had much to say, very little of it was concisely to the point.

I realized, after wandering through some five hundred pounds of texts, some things which altered my life quite a bit more than merely dying. During those weeks in the cabin my studies pressed me toward some conclusions. I concluded first that dying had not been very damaging. I concluded second that man, as a learned whole, knew damned little about the subject. For better or worse, I concluded that man had better know not just a little more about dying but a lot more about man.

And that shaped my destiny.