My Library

Here, then, was an extension into humans of the automatic stimulus-response mechanisms which the early Russian researcher, Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936), demonstrated existed in his experimental dogs and other animals. Hubbard postulated that everyone had a reactive mind -- and by extension the entire planet was populated with reactive minds and reactive (as contrasted to causative) situations. One can, of course, either be cause or effect -- and the reactive mind caused one to be the effects of IT. Hubbard proposed that the way to "clear" one of one's reactive mind was to identify the reactive circuits and "erase" them by consciously digging them up and re-experiencing them in "present time" until the circuits lost their dynamic energy and vanished. Once this happened, the person would then be "a clear," as it was put in Scientology. From this resulted the "steps toward becoming clear," a series of strict processes to be administered by a "professional Scientology auditor." Each of the steps cost dollars. Naturally, vested interests in our American culture felt that Scientology represented an "aberrant" form of psychotherapy, a term which Hubbard turned back onto his critics by holding that THEY were aberrant because of their reactive minds. I don't know for sure if this was the original cause of the persecution of Scientology and Mr. Hubbard. But soon his spreading organizations were being raided by the FBI, etc., which seized equipment and confiscated literature and files.