Refund and Reparation

Now, ridges are points where attention is too fixed. There are too many anchor points per unit of space if the ridge is a painful or unwanted ridge. So, what do you do? You just got too many anchor points in the same unit of space...

Now, let's take where we have no attention; I mean, it's just all over the place. You really have a condition there of unable to fix on any anchor point. And you'll find that there's a near vacuum around this person. There's just — there's just no attention units in it at all, no anchor points in it.

So, these two conditions are the two conditions of a case. But both of the conditions change as the spiral is unwound backwards or as it proceeds down through life.

You find this girl who is scattering her attention here and there will eventually get into a situation where her - oh, something happens - life and some young fellow marries her or something and leaves her or something happens like that. All of a sudden her attention goes bong and fixes. This is how you hypnotize somebody. You lead him into dispersing his anchor points all around, see, and then making him suddenly fix on one anchor point.

This is very curious. I had this happen a few times. One notable time I noticed this was - I was just a kid and it was a situation which had a little bit of - a lot more drama than is permissible on this planet.

Down along the docks and this - I had a ship, the old Doris Hamlin, and a sailor who was wobbling around and pretty, pretty darned drunk took out a knife and started in my general direction and I planted a shot exactly to part his hair, just exactly and that's exactly what happened. That's very dramatic. This doesn't happen very often on this planet. You don't get this opportunity unless you're young and don't care what the police say.

The guy went into a complete hypnotic trance. His attention unit was completely dispersed all over the place, you see, and then all of a sudden this slug and a sudden noise takes a few of the hairs out of the top of his crown of his head and it was no impact there or anything like that; it knocked his hat off He went into a complete hypnotic trance. He just stood there and his eyes dilated from the relatively small point they were in, completely out! They just went zzrooomm. There he was!

Anyway, I said to him, seeing something had happened to him with regard to this - I says, "You will now be a model sailor and will be very obedient to your captain." And he was.

For years, though, I wondered why he got sick after he left that ship. He got real sick.

The Couch and the Tree: Dialogues in Psychoanalysis and Buddhism: Anthony Molino. London: Constable. 1999. Pp. 361.

Review by: David M. Black

This book is that thing which James Strachey said did not exist: a cake made of nothing but currants. It is an anthology of writings on Buddhism and psychoanalysis, mostly by psychoanalysts of different schools, but sometimes by Buddhist teachers. There are thirty pieces in all, including three interviews, between Jung and the Zen teacher Hisamatsu, between Joyce McDougall and the Dalai Lama and between Anthony Molino and Nina Coltart. If I say it is composed entirely of currants, I mean to imply that the shrewd reader will enjoy it, but will probably choose to consume it more slowly than the driven reviewer.

Molino has put together a fascinating variety of texts. He begins with a historical section, stretching back to the 1920s and the exuberant writing of Joe Tom Sun (also known as the Chicago psychoanalyst, Joseph Thompson), and a splendid period-piece by Franz Alexander, ‘Buddhistic training as an artificial catatonia’.

1922-1923: 

L. Ron Hubbard moves north to Puget Sound in Washington State. He joins the Boy Scouts of America in April 1923. As a member of Tacoma Troop 31, he becomes a Second Class Scout on 8 May and two months later, on 5 July, advances to First Class Scout.

In October, Harry Ross Hubbard receives orders to report to the nation’s capital. Ron and his parents board the USS Ulysses S. Grant on 1 November 1923 and sail to New York from San Francisco through the recently opened Panama Canal. They then journey to Washington, DC. During this voyage, Ron meets Commander Joseph “Snake” Thompson, who has recently returned from Vienna and studies with Sigmund Freud. Through the course of their friendship, the commander spends many an afternoon in the Library of Congress teaching Ron what he knows of the human mind.

By 11 December 1923, Ron, now part of Washington’s Boy Scout Troop 10, earns his Carpentry, First Aid and Fireman merit badges.

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.”