What is the Church of Scientology?

Ron L. Hubbard is the founder of Dianetics and Scientology. In 1950 he wrote a book called Dianetics, the Modern Science of Mental Health. That was a book; sort of a "how to manual" on techniques he had been developing over a few years that he had communicated through other means. Dianetics postulates there are moments of physical and emotional pain in a person's past that are affecting them now, today, but they are not aware of it. The techniques of Dianetics involve staking a person. The Auditor guides a person to look at these incidents in the past. Examine them completely according to certain procedures. The person looks at it fully. They see what it is. They have an "Ah-ha" moment, and that thing no longer affects them that way in the future. That hidden influence is gone. It was a technique he had been applying. He published this book. He said he was getting bags of mail all the time. He got tired of answering the questions. So, he wrote the book. The book was very, very popular and a lot of people bought the book, and started doing Dianetics. So in 1950, you had something that wasn't necessarily a spiritual movement. It was this new idea about the mind and about something he had done to alleviate problems that were thought to be caused by the past. A lot of people started doing this practice. A lot people starting teaching, and then it mushroomed into this thing.

He continued to further develop what was happening. He further developed his techniques, looked at what was happening, examined new data, and so forth. And he had been interested in Philosophy in the past. So, he was already interested in the broader subject of, "Who are we, why are we here, and where are we coming from?" Dianetics to him represented something concrete that you could do to help somebody, change their condition.

Other practices and other forms of Auditing developed. And where Dianetics dealt pretty much only with, "Here's you. Here are the mental images the mind is, here are these mental pictures. He started to step back and say, "Well, who is looking at these pictures? What is the person himself?" And, that brought out a philosophical context. Why do these pictures seem, for example, to be from a previous life? What is going on here? What do we do with this point of people coming up with experiences from the past? The answer, sort of developed in the direction of, "You are an immortal spirit, that has a mind and a body, but you are not those things. You have lived lifetime after lifetime, and you will live again."

Also, some early philosophical underpinnings of Dianetics was the idea that the person is seeking to survive. That's the common denominator in life, but it's not like you just want to survive for yourself. Dianetics talked about your surviving as yourself, for your family for procreation with groups and as mankind. As Scientology developed as this broader philosophical base, as a life form, and through cooperation in the physical world as a spirit, and then ultimately in relationship to or as infinity or God, so this thing developed. You have all these different areas in your life you're very intimately involved in. You're not just about yourself. A normal real person isn't just trying to survive just for themselves. Their motivations and their desires include survival in the benefit for all these things. And that can also become an ethical calculation. How do you calculate what is the best thing do? What is the greatest good? You have to look at all these areas in life. So this became a part of Scientology, early on. The final thing was, you know, underneath all this junk that is piled on top of everybody, we are basically good. Underneath the painful experiences, the past, the baggage you got, the bad things you did to somebody else, underneath all that the, spirit is basically constructive. Therefore, the answer to sin is something a person can address. It's a piece of thing that is stuck to you.

I liken it to the Christian idea of "Made in the image of God." There's a stain. I guess we would say, "Beings made in the image of God." We have a different viewpoint on the body thing.

So Dianetics was a movement, different organizations formed. In the mid-50s the movement sort of self-consciously said, "You know this certainly seems, sound like religion." And just in order to say what it really is, to have this self-identity, and the self-protection, the first church organization was incorporated. So it evolved.