I watched a 4.5-hour Dianetics DVD so you don't have to

Poo-poo-ing Scientology is fun. That meme of Tom Cruise going all bouncy castle on Oprah's couch still makes me lol and now France has declared some of its practices unlawful, so the mainstream media's back to its school-boy sneers about Xenu and e-meters. Silly as it all sounds, I wanted to find out for myself what Scientology was about, just to make sure I wasn't ignorantly missing out on potential salvation and what appears to be a pretty star studded club membership.


I got my hands on a Dianetics DVD and held one of those trendy live tweet sessions, which a place called Breaking Tweets picked up on and even wrote a column about. But there's only so much critical thought you can compress into consecutive 140-character diatribes, so I thought I'd write a whole blog with screengrabs from the film. Let's begin!

The disc lays out the basic principles of Scientology through a series of glammed up slow-mo Crash-worthy re-enactments. There were lots of multi ethnic actors (mostly white, black, and Latino...but not Indian/Asian - evidently those Hindu/Muslim/Buddhist fuckers are not worth wasting time on).

A friendly but confident voice begins to explain that all of us store painful memories or "engrams" in our reactive ("subconscious") mind, which are the cause of all of our mental anguish and anti-social behaviour.

If we experience a trauma and pass out (i.e. in a car accident), the reactive mind continues to record every sound and sight around us, creating the engram, which can then be triggered without our knowledge. For example, someone who was run over by a red car, may develop a fear of all things red, or yell at their kid the same way the paramedic yelled at them, without realising what they are doing.

Tom Cruise helps illustrate this point with a skit where he gets irrationally angry at a passerby:

(I swear it's him)

Turns out engrams also cause a lot of psychosomatic illnesses too, so for example, if you broke your arm in the car accident, it can start to hurt every time you see something red. (This is why Scientologists aren't keen on meds - "it's all down to those darn engrams," they say).

This theory may waft strongly of Pavlovian conditioning and dear old Freud. When L. Ron Hubbard, a - totally unsuspiciously - successful science fiction writer, wrote Dianetics in the '60s, he was really into all the new theories of the mind and the emerging cult of pop psychology.

Confusingly though, as part of my degree in Psychology (which focused heavily on research done in the five decades since Dianetics was written), I learned that human memory is actually dependent on consciousness and attention. We only remember things we actively pay attention to. If we did record every sight/sound/smell in our surroundings, our brains would implode from confusion. (For proof of how shit we actually are at inattentional memory, see the really fun Gorilla suit experiment.)

But Dianetics claims that engrams ARE made without consciousness or attention, and can date as far back as infancy and even our pre-natal lives. In fact, Scientologists believe the process of birth is the most painful engram there is. (Who to believe?!)

Example: if, when we are born, the doctor says something like "Gosh, you're an angry one, aren't you", we will remember this phrase because it was paired with trauma, and replay it in our minds later on.


According to Mr. Hubbard, at that moment, a baby's mind records every sound around them so accurately that even though he can't understand what the doctor or is saying, he makes sense of this auditory memory when he actually learns to speak. (Ummm...)

To avoid pre-natal engrams couples should not have sex during pregnancy and mothers should avoid talking loudly or even sneezing. Keen readers of the Daily Mail will recall that this is exactly why Katie Holmes had to be absolutely silent during labour.

(Aside: scientifically speaking, no one can actually physically "recall" anything that's occured before about the age of two, because infantile braincells do not survive into toddlerhood, never mind gullible adulthood.)

Ironically, Scientologists aren't concerned with petty little scientific facts - they even claim that memories are recorded in every cell of your organism, and are passed on as your cells divide (a kind of microcosmal cellular Lamarckism, if you will). Nice.

Apparently the only way people can rid themselves of all these horrible subliminal scars is via a process called "auditing" - a kind of psychotherapy, where Scientologists buddy-up to recover (or confabulate) repressed engrams and cancel the negative effects of a trauma by bringing it into the conscious realm. Here are some screengrabs of what this looks like:

"Remember, it's not what you have done, but what's been done to you"

An example of a successful auditing session given on the DVD involved someone remembering being poked by an object while still in the womb. This was later confirmed to be a coat-hanger abortion attempt by their mother.

At the end of every session, the person being audited should be able to breathe a sigh of relief or even laugh at what they've just uncovered.

Psychoanalysis (which Hubbard blatantly borrows from) has always been met with a ton of skepticism, and its effectiveness remains debated, but conveniently L. Ron Hubbard doesn't want you to believe in Dianetics as a science, he wanted you to believe in it as a faith. Clever clever.
So once you've "canceled" your pre-natal engrams, just keep going, digging for earlier engrams on your in any previous lives your soul or "thetan" has inhabited (allowable time-line stretches as far back as 75,000,000 years, which, as you'll find if you stick with Dianetics long enough and pay close to £12,000 for, is about the time an intergalactic dictator called Xenu populated the earth with alien souls he brought over in a giant Boeing). A pretty genius move - this ensures that followers have to be in auditing for, well, the rest of eternity.

The ultimate goal of Scientology is to reach an absolute state of "clear" where all of your engrams are erased. Until then, you will continue being ill, angry, sad, confused, manic, violent, untruthful, cheating and all those other things in the past people have told you were your fault.

At the end of the DVD they show TSC-worthy testimonials from people extolling the virtues of Dianetics, even claiming it's helped cure their MS, and saying they were surprised by what they remembered - "I could feel myself...exiting the womb, and coming out...". Impressive stuff.

OH, ONE MORE THING, for a marginalised religion, the Dianetics DVD featured a lot of recognisable brand names. (Plus, I thought you weren't allowed to do that without the brand's permission? HMMM...)

Apple, Stater Bros and Burt's Bees have not returned my e-mail inquiries about whether their inclusion on this DVD was consensual. (Probably caught them in the middle of an auditing session.)

Besides the above screen-grabs, I also saw Ralph Lauren, Nike and Sony logos flash on the screen.

So anyway, that's the end of my only slightly biased review of the Dianetics DVD.

THE END