Book: Dianetics: The Evolution of a Science (3)
February 4, 2012 by admin
Filed under Hubbard's research, Scripture, Source
Author: Hubbard, L. R.
Book title: Dianetics: The Evolution of a Science
Publication date: 1950
Edition: 1989
Location: Los Angeles
Publisher: Bridge Publications, Inc.
Description: Hubbard discusses the scope of information he studied in development of Dianetics. For answers to existence, Hubbard says he turned to a magician whose ancestors served in the court of Kublai Khan and a Hindu who could hypnotize cats.
In a lifetime of wandering around many strange things had been observed. The medicine man of the Goldi people of Manchuria, shamans of North Borneo, Sioux medicine men, the cults of Los Angeles, and modern psychology. Amongst the people questioned about existence were a magician whose ancestors served in the court of Kublai Khan and a Hindu who could hypnotize cats1, 2 Dabbles had been made in mysticism, data had been studied from mythology to spiritualism. Odds and ends like these, countless odds and ends.
If you were constructing this science, where would you have started? Here were all the various cults and creeds and practices of a whole world to draw upon. Here were facts to a number which makes 1021 binary digits look small. If you were called upon to construct such a science and to come up with a workable answer, what would you have assumed, gone to observe, or computed?
Everybody and everything seemed to have a scrap of the answer. The cults of all the ages, of all the world seem, each one, to contain a fragment of the truth. How do we gather and assemble the fragments? Or do we give up this nearly impossible task and begin postulating our own answers?
Well, this is the story of how Dianetics was built. This, at least, was the approach made to the problem. Dianetics works, which is what an engineer asks, and it works all the time, which is what nature demands of the engineer.
Hubbard. (1950). Dianetics: The Evolution of a Science (1989 ed., pp. 12-13). Los Angeles: Bridge Publications, Inc.
Notes
- L. Ron Hubbard admitted that this Hindu was Joseph Cheesman Thompson. See Chris Owen’s analysis of Hubbard’s autobiography. http://www.solitarytrees.net/cowen/misc/auto2.htm ↩
- See also Lecture: The Story of Dianetics and Scientology. Hubbard claimed Thompson taught him how to train cats. ↩