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By Root 1136 0

reaching for the back of his neck," she told her husband later that night. In fact, Winter's equivocation was attributable to his growing conviction that Dianetics should be in the hands of people with at least a minimal amount of medical training. Since the book's publication, he'd been bothered by the slapdash atmosphere at the foundations and was frustrated by Hubbard's sloppy research techniques. Two preclears he knew of had suffered nervous breakdowns as a result of auditing, a result that wasn't unusual. "People had breakdowns quite often," Perry Chapdelaine, a former student at the Elizabeth Foundation, told the biographer Russell Miller in 1986. "It was always hushed up before anyone found out about it. It happened to a guy on my course, a chemical engineer. They wanted to get him out of the school and I volunteered to stay with him in an adjoining building. He never slept or ate and was in a terrible state, no one could do anything with him, and in the end they took him off to an asylum."

And yet new auditors were being certified every day. Winter was also bothered by Hubbard's continued claim that he could produce Clears—he once maintained he could produce this state in as little as twenty hours of auditing. Winter felt sure that it was impossible. "I know of persons who have had 1,500 to 2,000 hours of therapy and do not approximate the state of 'clear' as defined," he later wrote. "I have not reached that state myself, nor have I been able to produce that state in any of my patients."

But O'Brien knew nothing about Winter's reservations, and not long after attending his lecture, she signed up to be audited by a man she had met there. "Looking back, it is hard to believe that I had no doubts or hesitation about entrusting myself to these unorthodox therapies," she wrote in her 1966 memoir, Dianetics in Limbo. "I became a Dianetic preclear by the simple actions of taking off my shoes and lying down on a cot."

Though she'd been raised a Christian, O'Brien had never been particularly devout. A generation later, she might have been called a "seeker," for she had studied Sanskrit and Chinese and was familiar with the I Ching, the Tao Te Ch'ing, and the Rig-Veda. Nothing she'd learned previously prepared her for Dianetics—in her very first auditing session, O'Brien felt she had returned to her mother's womb. On another occasion, she reexperienced her own birth. The event was so traumatic, she said, that she continued to experience it for a week between auditing sessions. "It nearly floored my auditor and it was a living nightmare to me," she said. "I can vividly recall how it felt to be smothered and helpless while being violently handled by the flesh, muscles, and bones of another human body."

Soon afterward, O'Brien was being audited when she found herself in another body. "I was a husky young woman wearing a rough-textured, full-skirted dress," she recalled. She was in Ireland, circa 1813. British soldiers had arrived in her barnyard, and a boy she recognized as her fourteen-year-old son lay on the ground, about to be bayoneted. "The violence of that sight was terrific. I literally shuddered with grief," she said. Moments later, O'Brien felt herself being thrown down onto a hillside, about to be raped by one of the soldiers. "I snapped into vivid awareness then, and spit into his face. His response was immediate. He picked up a loose cobblestone and crushed my skull." At that moment, O'Brien experienced her own earlier death.

The session lasted for three hours, with O'Brien continually reliving the violence and horror of the incident until its "charge," or emotional impact, was nullified. "By the end of it, I was luxuriously comfortable in every fiber, yawning and stretching and taking breaths in full, deep satisfaction that seemed to reach to the soles of my feet." When the sessions ended, she walked down the stairs into her living room, which was decorated with Christmas lights. O'Brien was dazzled. "I was freshly there from another age. For the first time in this lifetime, I knew I was beyond the laws of