Refund and Reparation

In explaining how he came to invent Dianetics, and later Scientology, Hubbard marked his off-curriculum “experiments” at George Washington University, which he attended in 1930-32, as the beginning of his “search for life force.” He also claimed that he was “fired initially” on this search by Commander "Snake" Thompson USN, whom Hubbard said he met in 1923 on a ship travelling between San Francisco and New York through the Panama Canal.

Although Hubbard identifies Thompson as the person who gave him his basic “education in the field of the mind,” and schooled him in “Freudian analysis,” there is a strong suggestion that Thompson was also, and more importantly, his initiator and mentor in the occult. (Ref. Lecture: Further Introduction to Dianetics)

The “experiments” Hubbard claimed he conducted at GWU had the same focus or goal as the “experiments” magicians or occultists had carried out for many years. Aleister Crowley's “primary teacher” and yoga instructor Charles Bennett had been “experimenting on a machine for registering the power of thought,” which involved a galvanometer. (Ref. Ananda Metteyya ) Scientology’s E-meter, of course, is a skin galvanometer. Crowley called occult activities and experiences “experiments,” and Hubbard in his “Admissions” called his sex magic ritual with occultist John W. Parsons a “psychic experiment.” Hubbard even called his writing of the “Admissions” an “experiment … to re-establish the ambition, willpower, desire to survive, the talent and confidence of myself.”

The life force that Hubbard “experimented” to find and measure at GWU he would call in Dianetics and Scientology “theta” and symbolize it with the eighth letter of the Greek alphabet.