r. Judah:
Where did the subject of Dianetics and Scientology start?
LRH:
The whole subject was born out of engineering. Both of these subjects extend from engineering, which was taken on top of my study in the Orient as a boy. From the age of about sixteen, to about twenty-one, I spent a great deal of my time in the Orient and I was well acquainted with various Oriental schools. I came back and my father forced me to take physical science as a religion, which gave me a background of mathematics and physics. My basic interest was the field of religion—Buddhism, Taoism were fascinating to me. However, I didn’t think they were very good for people, or they couldn’t possibly contain all the answers, for this one reason: the people who were practicing them were poor, unhealthy and in very bad relationship to the physical universe.
So quite by accident, in 1932, I was working down here in a George Washington University laboratory, and I was trying to add up poetry. I couldn’t understand why poetry read in Japanese would obviously be poetry to somebody who spoke only English—why poetry of various kinds was poetry, even when translated. What was this thing about poetry?
I went over and picked up a Koenig photometer, one of these little gas photometers, that you talk against the diaphragm, and it gives you vocal vibrations. I made graphs of poetry and I wanted to know how the mind responded to those sounds—why the mind responded to those sounds. I could not get any real basis for why did the mind respond to certain sounds and rhythms and not to others? Why did the mind differentiate between noise and a note, for instance? And this didn’t seem to me to be a covered subject in my field. And I became interested enough to go up to George Washington University’s psychology laboratory, at that time run by Dr. Fred August Moss, and he floored me—I hadn’t known something; I hadn’t known we didn’t know.
It was a very odd thing, for anybody to be educated in the engineering sciences—where you know what you know when you know it and how you know it—to be given a bunch of statements which didn’t explain at all my problem. I was simply an engineer taking on confidence the fact that all other sciences, even those in human relations, were all understood, and I ran into somebody who could not answer my questions. And I read all of the books I could find, down here in the Library of Congress, on psychology and the mind. I found out I was looking at a field that didn’t know what it knew. It was a baffling thing to me. I turned around to philosophies of various kinds. I made this a very positive hunt and it wasn’t until 1938 that I was totally convinced we didn’t know.
We didn’t have a basic principle of existence. There was no point of jump-off for the human mind, or the study of the human spirit. We didn’t even know what a spirit was. We didn’t have a definition for it. We said where it went, and what would happen to it, and how it could be punished, but we never said what it was, what was its relationship?
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These questions could have been answered perhaps in some field, somewhere, at some time, but I just couldn’t seem to find the answers. Whether it was Nietzsche or Schopenhauer, Kant, or any of the rest of them. These men were all groping. So I said, here’s a wide-open field.
I have the world’s worst grades in the university because I was interested in everything except my subject. Between my leaving the university and 1938, we were in a depression. Any job that I had had offered me was long gone by the time I stepped out. And I used my engineering in the field of writing science fiction—I made very well at it. I spent a whole career before World War II as a successful writer. I was in Hollywood, went on three expeditions to study wild and savage peoples and find out what they thought about things, and I paid for them with writing. And I did very well as a writer, I was president of the American Fiction Guild and so on. But all this time, all I was really doing was trying to eat, and pay my way, and pay for my research, and finally get up to some point where I had some clue.
In 1938, I decided totally that nobody had stated, neither Darwin nor in the field of evolution, the basic principle of existence. And I said then, for good or bad, I’m going to have to state one, in order to launch any sort of a further investigation, because all I had done was look at question marks. And I did.
The basic work that I wrote has never been published. I wrote a 125,000-word work, and it has never seen the light of day.
