Refund and Reparation

And I used to occasionally go out with some of my friends who were mostly newspaper reporters and so on, and we'd have a few drinks of bathtub gin brought in by the very best gangsters. And the next morning I knew for sure I was awful stupid. So I told them, "Look, if you could take a few drinks on the night before and become stupid the next morning, haven't you changed your intelligence?" And they said, "That has nothing to do with it."

So here was a segment of human knowledge which, as far as I was concerned, was left wide open. I kept on writing. I wrote more and more successfully. Everything was going along fine. Went down to Hollywood, wrote pictures, things like this. Had a very full life, as a matter of fact, professionally. And all the time I was hiding behind the horrible secret. And that is I was trying to find out what the mind was all about. And I couldn't even tell my friends; they didn't understand. They said, "Here's Hubbard, he's leading a perfectly wonderful life. He gets to associate with movie actresses. He knows hypnotism and so has no trouble with editors. He has apartments and stuff." They said - couldn't understand, every time I'd try to mention it, why I would be interested in anybody's mind or anybody's life. I used to plague them most awfully and ask them embarrassing questions.

And by 1938, I thought I had a common denominator to all life. After all, I had associated rather thoroughly with twelve different native cultures, not including the people in the Bronx. And I had a pretty good idea - pretty good idea of what this study would comprise by that time. I found out that primitive man and civilized man had a great many things in common, but not all of them had one thing in common, except survival. Only survival did they all have in common, let me state it that way. They were all evidently trying to survive one way or the other, whether they were civilized or uncivilized, whether they were Tlingits up in Alaska or Aleuts or Chinese or Tagalogs or Chamorros. Whatever they were, they were trying to survive.

And this urge towards survival became a very definite study after 1938.

[...]

So when I got out of the war I didn’t take that for finance. I must confess to you that this subject "study of finance and advance" was not really by the sweat of the brow. I took that and bought a yacht and went down for a cruise in the West Indies when the war was over. But when that was gone I realized I had to have some money. So I collected my treasury checks and that was what financed the first of the research from which we benefit now. It’s very funny but that was what financed it. I went right down in the middle of Hollywood, I rented an office, got ahold of a nurse, wrapped a towel around my head and became a Swami. And I said – oddly enough, I gave nobody my name, I didn’t say what I was doing, and by 1947, I had achieved clearing.

I worked like mad. And in Los Angeles occasionally, the local operation there will once in a while, occasionally, receive a call saying, "You know, I’ve seen a picture of Dr. Hubbard, and there was somebody who looked quite like him that operated over in Hollywood years ago and that did something or other with me and I have been quite well and happy ever since. Is it the same man?" And, of course, they have orders to say no. They’d spoil the whole series. Those people were never told anything, and yet some of them were Clears.

Now, those were the first Clears. And they were left there without further education or anything of the sort to act as a progressive series.