Bare-Faced Messiah

Madhuri reviews Russell Miller’s book, subtitled ‘The True Story of L Ron Hubbard’, in part also through the eyes of the Human Design system.

Bare-Faced Messiah
The True Story of L Ron Hubbard
by Russell Miller
Sphere Books Ltd, London, 1987
520 pages
amazon.co.uk

Not too long ago I reviewed a book by an escaped child of Scientology; it was harrowing enough, hair-raising and scary. But this book is in a whole other league, and I was enthralled from the beginning, reading late into the night with laughter and astonished noises coming out of me. I enjoyed the first part, which described the lively and loving family of parents, aunties and grandparents into which L. Ron Hubbard was born, and by whom he was greatly spoilt: a Western scene, Nebraska, Montana, prosperous people enjoying the natural bounty and gorgeous sceneries, clear water and clear skies, orchards full of fruit, rivers of fish – that hardworking white people could still hope for, if not expect, in those days.

But the red-headed boy-child born to a daughter of this family was exceptional from the first – and I was hugely delighted to find LRH’s exact birth details included, so that I could run a Human Design chart for him. And it was all there… lord, it was all there! Every adjective I might use about this gifted con-man, this lying, bombastic, profligate son-of-a-bitch, is included in his Design: manipulative, impatient, overbearing, grandiose… The pitfalls he was heir to, the rumbustious excesses he would perpetrate, the genius he was possessed of, but mis-managed through ignorance and denial – all there; including, most especially, that denial.

I’m including his chart (click on it to see details) so that students of Human Design can see for themselves: the one open center, the place where his obsessions would focus, where he would mistakenly strive to ‘be’ something – is the G, or identity. That man wore so many hats in his lifetime – often literally – that it would be a long chore to list them: Captain, Commodore, Writer, Explorer, Glider-Pilot, Movie-Director, Prospector, Philosopher, PhD, Saviour, Messiah, Businessman, Anthropologist, Black Magic Acolyte, etc etc – and nearly every one of these was unfounded – many of them downright lies.

This was an attempt to ‘be somebody’ instead of letting himself be lost into the Mystery, the skies of the Vaster Self, as would be the possibility if he had known about that open center and what it implies. Instead he tormented himself and everyone around him – trying to Be This or That, and absolutely destroying anyone who doubted whatever Self he was into that day. This is classic open G center; inability to receive any criticism whatsoever; a feeling that your very soul is being killed by others’ disapprobation.

Then, as a Manifesting Generator, he was forever trying to initiate schemes – and failing. And his Money Line ensured that he would bulldoze all in his path, again and again and again, and with the defined Ego in Denial: No, it isn’t like that, it’s like this!

The only thing he really succeeded at was writing science fiction – and setting himself up to make staggering amounts of money as a ‘religious’ leader. But even then he was as apt to throw good things away as to hold onto them – he tried to whitewash over his past as a well-known and well-liked pulp fiction writer when he stepped into the (smelly, I’m afraid) shoes of a Great Religious Figure. But one of his real gifts was fantasy – it was one of the ways his mind worked – and it definitely informed his life.

And yes, he could also channel – and receive inspiration – with much Individual wiring. So he had to be an Oddball, and he had to write, and he might have even had a couple of valuable insights, though they were subsumed into the mountains of disaster he created around himself.

Fiction has at least to make some kind of logical sense, but real life has no such obligation. And so we go on a crazy ride – the jaw-dropping, preposterous, hilarious, wildly colorful life story of one of the greatest arseholes of the 20th century.

It’s a really good biography – dense, well-researched, and full of action (since the subject’s life was exceedingly twitchy). We can feel the author’s amazement at his subject’s antics; recounted in a measured tone that contrasts sharply with the demented wanderings, extortions, and promiscuities of the ginger anti-hero.

I was particularly amused by the troubles LRH got into with various wives and ex-wives. On one occasion, early in his career as a writer, when he’d spend a lot of time in New York while his wife lived in Washington State with the kids – his wife found in the mailbox two letters he’d written to different women in New York. She opened them and switched the letters, sealed them up again, and put them back in the mailbox. Then later, after the postman had taken them away, she told LRH what she had done. This prompted an epic sulking-and-rage attack on his part!

Throughout the book we find ourselves rooting for the pissed-off women he leaves strewn about.

Another typical story: during WWII he blagged his way into an officer’s commission, and was given command of an anti-submarine ship. He sailed it from Seattle down as far as Portland, where he suddenly felt that he had perhaps seen an enemy periscope in the water. He began firing depth-charges at whatever it was (or wasn’t), and summoned help. Five ships ended up shooting 100 charges at… well, nothing, as it was later figured out by his superiors. This is the Manifesting Generator on steroids, going off half-cocked, unable to wait for a real enemy, or maybe, god forbid, no enemy.

As you get deeper into the book the plot thickens much, much more – never a dull moment. LRH seems to be, according to a young psychology-student lover, a manic-depressive paranoiac – and we are also convinced by this diagnosis.

But there was one thing that gave me pause for awhile – descriptions of the ‘auditing’ that his disciples could learn to do, and which became, for a while in the early 50’s, a craze all across America. As nearly as I could figure out, ‘auditing’ is a kind of trance journey wherein you encounter previous traumas which are contributing to some negative situation in your current life. You might also find yourself in past lives – this kept happening to early auditees, so LRH jumped onto it with enthusiasm (we read about a time when he was living on a rusty old ocean liner in the Mediterranean with a lot of disciples, and he kept sending them out to shore with metal detectors to look for treasure he had buried in various temples and so on, in his past lives).

Not much more is said about the precise nature of the work – only that some people could not handle what they saw in their subconscious and suffered psychotic episodes. Others though were cured of all sorts of ailments. Auditees who worked with LRH himself sometimes had singular and powerful experiences that changed their lives; others felt nothing and were left flat. But he always, of course, claimed absolute success.

If meditation had had any place in all of these proceedings it might have made an enormous difference. But the word is not even mentioned in the book – nobody had any idea. And a Manifesting Generator like LRH, with all his bubbling psychological accoutrements, would have found the very idea of Waiting and Space and Sitting Still to be anathema. He needed a much, much greater Master than he had any conception of…

When LRH was nearing death, he told one of his helpers that what had really driven him all his life was not a longing to help humanity, as he’d professed publicly again and again – but “an insatiable lust for power and money.” This shocked the helper greatly. So maybe it wasn’t the right lifetime for him to meet a master. What to do – apparently all kinds of people are needed!