Dear Readers,
I would like to tell you my story of how I found Dianetics.
For me it all started nineteen years ago in early 1988. I was a young man, twenty-two years of age, married with two baby daughters. One afternoon I was performing a routine engine exchange, when suddenly the engine hoist gave way while my hands where still on the chains and when everything came crashing down my right hand was crushed.
My immediate reflex action pulled my hand back fast and cupped it in my left hand. It was at this very moment that something strange happened. First it was like time slowed down, then I felt electrical impulses shoot from my head down to my hand, one after another. It seemed as if my brain was trying to reestablish contact with my hand. Then there was a second wave, this time it felt like the impulses were trying to fibrillate or reboot my hand, then it was like I felt something say “we lost it.”
I knew at this instant without even looking that I had lost part of my hand, then my hearing went, then my eyesight went, my knees began to buckle, but before I fainted I thought “I have two babies in the house, I can’t faint.” I pushed back at the knees, reopened my eyes, but something else was commanding my body and all I could do was watch.
I grabbed a dirty grease rag and wrapped up my hand, all the while I was thinking “don’t wrap your hand in that, it’s filthy.” By this time my endorphins where kicking in and everything was getting blurry. So off to the hospital I went to begin eight months worth of surgeries and skin grafts. Well before the first set of stitches had been removed, I found out that my wife was having an affair, and shortly after that I found out that my identity had been stolen and that I was in debt to an amount that I could not pronounce at the time. So not only did my engine come crashing down but my whole life came crashing down with it.
From this point forward nothing could ever be the same again. The initial event (crushing my hand) had opened something in my mind and the other two events where holding it open. For about the next year, information about everything downloaded into my mind from out of nowhere. Mostly chemistry, physics and biology. But there was also a lot of information about words. Somehow I knew that there was a part of my brain that took everything I heard literally. It could not understand sarcasm or humor, so without even looking I dove straight off the high dive into the pool of theology. I studied the Bible day and night. I had the Bible in large print, small print, red print and cassette.
After about three years my search in theology faded out so I turned to science and spent the next fifteen years studying one by one different branches of science. In science, I never really found anything that pinpointed my experience but I found a good solid foundation to stand on. I began to disregard my earlier experience to painful imaginations and adopted a new outlook on life. If I can see it, smell it, hear it, taste it or touch it, it is real, and if I can’t, it’s not.
Then Quantum Physics came along and knocked me right off the cliff. Now my solid physical universe was gone. Now all my depression of the past started coming back fast, all the years of my quest seemed like a waste of time. My childhood was about as stable as a fox in a hen house and the pain of that was catching up to me also. I couldn’t find good in anything and didn’t want to live anymore.
I reached the point that if I didn’t have to work that day I wouldn’t get out of bed. I felt the dying process begin in my body. After about a year I went to the doctor knowing that something was wrong with me and I tested positive for Type II Diabetes and a list of other complications. I tried the medicine but my body wouldn’t really accept it.
Now about this time my second wife of ten years was also dealing with mass depression and started attending a local church and was really hoping to get me to attend. I went with her a few times but I just couldn’t get excited, I’d heard it all before and I just couldn’t do it again.
So one night while she was at Bible study I was sitting in my chair wondering what to do and where do I go from here, when suddenly I remembered a TV commercial from back around the time I had my injury in ‘87-’88. “Dianetics the owners manual to the human mind”. Then I remembered that nearly ten years ago I had acquired that book from a store here in Salt Lake City. I went digging through my books and there it was!
I sat down, opened the cover and started from the very first page. When I read the “Important Note” my interest flared right there. I had never opened a book before that told you how to read and understand it, much less a book that spoke to me and gave definitions on the same page. I started at book one and I couldn’t put it down.
The next day as soon as I got home from work I started book two, chapter one, “The Analytical Mind”, loved it. Next was chapter two, “The Reactive Mind.” About a quarter of the way in I yelled “BINGO!”. It took me the better part of the next week to finish the book but now I had so much information to process that I began to reread the book. That was taking too long so I jumped on the “NET” and ordered Dianetics, book on CD. Now I could listen to it on my way to and from work everyday, and I drive an hour each way.
Now I knew I needed to find a Scientology Center. It turned out that I worked a block and a half away from one. My wife and I went to the Center that following weekend for the workshop. I explained to Wendy, the auditor, my recent experience. She sent me home with the “Self Analysis” book so my wife and I could start light processing. Little did I know what I was about to embark on in the “Self Analysis” book! Like before with the Dianetics book, I started at the very first page and began reading and like before the book was very good. Then I reached chapter four “On Our Efforts for Immortality.” L. Ron Hubbard begins by explaining the four elements: matter, energy, space and time. Now he really has my attention because for the last fifteen plus years I had been studying, contemplating, theorizing and examining these four elements extensively.
Then he throws the fifth element (”Life Energy”) at me in a way I had never looked at it before. I had never viewed life as an independent element. I viewed life as an atomic molecular probability that was confined by space and time. But after seeing life as an independent element it made perfect sense now why no mathematical formula could predict how any one person would experience any given situation.
I kept reading and then I reached the part on half conscious. I realized that I met the level at or below half conscious, and then I realized that I was dying. I had never been my own best friend and really had not wanted to live for some twenty-five years. I could see clearly now how all the pain I had been carrying was slowly killing me and that brought me to the juncture of choice, live or die. Right then I dropped the book using my thumb as a book marker and said out loud “I WANT TO LIVE!!!”
I just laid there for awhile out of myself but I had to finish the book so I kept on reading and when I reached the end of chapter six, L. Ron Hubbard said “If you aren’t being a friend of yourself, I’m your friend.” I got chills through my whole body and now felt comfortable so I put the book down. I went to sleep early that night, something I had not been able to do for quite awhile.
About 3:00 AM I was awakened out of my sleep by a feel good burning sensation throughout my entire body literally from head to toe. I could feel everything in my body turning back on. This lasted about a half hour and when it was finished I was left laying there in a prenatal memory that answered a lot of my problems. I must add that I did not sleep again for about forty hours.
Now I have never felt better, I have energy again, all my symptoms of Type II Diabetes have left, including constant chest pains, pain in my lower back and in my legs that I had had for the last three years. Prior to this experience, my body temperature had not been above 95 degrees for several years (on record with my doctor). It is now back to normal. For a few years I was white as a ghost - my wife and other people would comment on this regularly. Now my complexion is healthy. My past does not bother me anymore and I’m excited about life. Within two weeks from this experience I changed my career and left a dead end job that had me trapped for seventeen years.
In my opinion L. Ron Hubbard is an absolute genius and society could never repay him their debt. Little did I know that the entire time I was reading his books, he was auditing me. People have asked me how he did it and I tell them that they’ve got to read the books to find out. I feel I owe him my life. Thank you, Clayton Liston.
Posted by C. Liston on March 20th, 2007
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