Friday, May 12, 2006

May 10, 1950

Something important happened for humanity on May 10, 1950, and most people don't know it and couldn't associate that date with anything of significance to their lives. That was the date that the book "Dianetics, The Modern Science of Mental Health" was published by L. Ron Hubbard. It's a date of signifigance now mainly to Scientologists, who celebrate it annually as one of the beginning dates of that new religion. Back in the last 1940's, Hubbard was doing research into the mind, that no one else had done. He went with what worked, as therapy, and built the system of Dianetics to help people help each other using it. The book swept the country, Dianetics centers sprang up everywhere, and Hubbard created the Hubbard Dianetics Research Foundation to keep looking into the mind. When you look deeply enough into the mind (which he found was composed of mental image pictures), you eventually had to ask, "Who's looking at those pictures?" And he stumbled upon the human spirit quite by accident. By 1952 he'd pretty thoroughly researched the capabilities of the human spirit, which he recorded in a series of lectures in Phoenix and Philadelphia. Realizing that they were dealing with the human spirit directly, others then founded the Church of Scientology.

I attended my first celebration of the publication of this book on its 21st birthday, on a lark in 1971, at a hotel in Seattle, with a bunch of Scientologists I had only recently met. I was still in college then, and still doing street drugs. I wanted desperately to get off the drugs, but was pulled to them with a force that was hard to resist and that I didn't comprehend; it was hard to look at the various reasons why I was doing drugs.

The Scientologists rolled up their sleeves and helped me get off the drugs and get them out of my system completely, not just physically but spiritually as well. Dianetics, their old workhorse of mental technology, came to my personal rescue in the form of something called the "Drug Rundown". It helped break me out of the "woodenness" a word that perfectly describes my inability to reach out, to feel, or to communicate. Drugs lost their allure mentally and their hold physically -- and I became drug-proof for the last 30 odd years. I'm not a teatotaler, and I'm not an addict. I can have a drink with friends, and I can take a drug if I absolutely must for my health.

It would have been easier in today's world to get off the drugs I was on, with the tough and dedicated staff of Narconon available to help now -- back then Narconon was just getting going.

Actress Kirstie Alley has said that Narconon saved her life, twice. Once helping her break her addiction to cocaine, and once after she was poisoned. Narconon uses the techniques developed by Hubbard to help people get off drugs. It's not Scientology, but is workable de-addiction technology spun off of Hubbard's research into the mind. The recidivism rate of most drug rehab programs is around 80% meaning that the vast majority of those going through drug rehab slide back onto drugs. The recidivism rate of Narconon is extremely low, below 20%, last time I checked the stats. Ask any Narconon graduate. If you're interested in actual drug rehabiliation, Narconon is the way to go.

Narconon started in 1966 when Willie Benitez, an inmate, got hold of several Scientology books and started the first Narconon self-help group with other prisoners at Arizona State Prison. He could not have predicted it would become the tremendous force it is today in helping rehabilitate those on drugs and in prison.

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