Inside Scientology - Janet Reitman [32]
Located just outside the tiny town of East Grinstead, Saint Hill was the former residence of the Maharaja of Jaipur. In a note published in the journal of the Explorer's Club, of which Hubbard was a member, the founder of Scientology said he had "sort of won" the estate in a poker game. In fact, the house had been up for sale for almost a decade before Hubbard abruptly purchased it for the fire-sale price of £14,000 (about $70,000). The people of East Grinstead had no idea that the founder of a religious movement had moved into their village. Most newspapers, in fact, ignored Hubbard's association with Scientology and described "Dr. L. Ron Hubbard" as a celebrated American scientist and humanitarian, who had moved with his wife and their four young children from America to conduct, among other things, horticultural experiments.
At Saint Hill, Hubbard was industrious and almost manically busy, spending his days conducting research, training and coaching new auditors, and lecturing several times a week. Hubbard also ran all of Scientology's organizations, which by the early 1960s were located in a dozen cities in the United States and in Canada, Mexico, and South America, as well as throughout Europe and in countries such as South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and Rhodesia. "This was a guy working eighteen hours a day, seven days a week for years on end," said Alan Walter, who was one of a number of young people interested in Hubbard's theories who made the pilgrimage to Saint Hill. "Definitely not the Lord of the Manor."
Contrary to Scientology's later claims, L. Ron Hubbard did not single-handedly come up with all of Scientology's techniques. He was helped by scores of special assistants like Walter, who came to Saint Hill to attend the Special Briefing Course, in which the work, to a large degree, revolved around the creation of new processes or auditing techniques. "You had professors, doctors, paupers, multimillionaires—you name it," said Walter. "They were your students, your fellow classmates, your coaches. So the mixture of knowledge was enormous. There were a hundred students on the course at any given time at Saint Hill—the top processors from all over the world."
About half of these elite auditors were sponsored by a Scientology organization; the rest paid their own way. Walter, an Australian businessman and former professional Australian-rules soccer player, was part of the latter category. "I was between jobs and I didn't quite know what I was going to do with myself, which was a perfect way to go study something," said Walter. "I had no agenda other than to get knowledge."
Most of the students were seduced by Hubbard's charisma, though many remained skeptical of the leader's credentials. "We all saw him as a bullshit artist because you'd have to be forty people to have lived what he said he did," said Walter. Hubbard claimed to be a doctor of philosophy, having earned a degree from Sequoia University. "Everybody knew that had come out of a diploma mill. But that was accepted. Don't forget, we'd come out of the 1950s when everything was thought to be a façade. Just about everyone was pretending to be someone they weren't."
Hubbard's academic bona fides may have been suspect, but his focus on the technology and its results struck Walter as admirable. The criterion for success was easy to judge: a person's life improved after auditing. If auditing worked, "the guy became more alert, more aware, and life became easier. If he didn't, it was back to the drawing board."
A Scientology process, as it developed, was a formulaic type of therapy—Walter called it "structured therapy." A common "identity process," for example, might ask a subject to list all of his or her qualities to find out what aspects of the self the person might keep hidden. One item might have particular "charge," indicated by a jump of the needle on the