Scientology: A History of Man
L. Ron Hubbard
 As the original title suggests, What to Audit / A History of Man was written as a guide for Scientologist auditors, pointing out various Space opera "incidents" that are said to have occurred in all of our "past lives". The book sets out a description of the areas to be audited. It proposes that the human body actually houses two separate entities. The most important is a thetan, the spiritual being said by Hubbard to be the "true self" of a person. According to Hubbard, this is accompanied by a 'genetic entity', or GE, which is "a sort of low-grade soul" located more or less in the centre of the body, and which passes to another body when the current body dies. The book describes numerous "incidents" that, according to Hubbard, occurred to the thetan or the genetic entity in past lives. Although commonly misinterpreted as an alternative theory of evolution, the purpose of the incidents list is not to suggest that clams begat sloths who begat cavemen. What Hubbard claims is that we have buried memories of past lives as clams, sloths, and cavemen, and that those memories - or engrams - affect us today. Hubbard also presented the vague concept of the "genetic entity" which he claims progressed through each of these prehuman forms before finally ending up in a homo sapiens body. These stages of biological history, some typified by an animal and others typified by other items, were marked by traumatic incidents which have to be "run out" using an E-meter. Hubbard stressed that these incidents are not limited to the list below: for example, he notes "there are many steps and incidents between the Birds and the Sloth". The list simply arbitrarily names some incidents that Hubbard found particularly worth commenting on: * The Atom, "complete with electronic rings". According to Hubbard, "There seems to be a 'hole in space' immediately ahead of the Atom", which generates a particular state of mind in a person. * The Cosmic Impact, based on the premise that "As physicists tell us, cosmic rays enter the body in large numbers and occasionally explode in the body. Very early on the track the impact of a cosmic ray and its explosion is very destructive to the existing organism." * The Photon Converter, essentially an early photosynthetic organism such as an alga or plankton. Hubbard deemed the Photon Converter to be responsible for fears of "light and dark, the storms of the sea, the fight to keep from rolling into the surf." * The Helper, an incident of mitosis (cell division) in some unnamed organism which was "a confusing area for the [genetic entity] which therein has much cause for misidentification." * The Clam, one of a number of incidents between The Helper and The Weeper. The others include seaweed and "jellyfish incidents [which] are quite remarkable for their occasional aberrative force". Encounters between jellyfish and cave walls are held to be responsible for the emergence of "a shell as in the clam." The Clam itself is "a deadly incident" involving a "scalloped-lip, white- shelled creature" which suffered from a severe split personality or "double-hinge problem. One hinge wishes to stay open, the other tries to close, thus conflict occurs." According to Hubbard, the hinges of the Clam "later become the hinges of the human jaw" and the Clam's method of reproducing using spores is said to be responsible for toothache. In one of the most famous passages of the book, Hubbard advised that :Should you desire to confirm this, describe to some uninitiated person the death of a clam without saying what you are describing. "Can you imagine a clam sitting on the beach, opening and closing its shell very rapidly?" (Make a motion with your thumb and forefinger of a rapid opening and closing). The victim may grip his jaws with his hand and feel quite upset. He may even have to have a few teeth pulled: At the very least he will argue as to whether or not the shell stays open at the end or closed. And he will, with no hint of the death aspect of it, talk about the "poor clam" and he will feel quite sad emotionally. :He goes on to warn the reader that &#34;your discussion of these incidents with the uninitiated in Scientology can cause havoc. Should you describe the &#34;clam&#34; to someone, you may restimulate it in him to the extent of causing severe jaw pain. One such victim, after hearing about a clam death, could not use his jaws for three days.&#34; * The Weeper/Boohoo incident deals with a mollusk that rolled in the surf for half a million years, pumping sea water out of its shell as it breathed, hence its name. Weepers had &#39;trillions of misadventures&#39;, prominent among them the anxiety caused by trying to gulp air before being swamped by the next wave. &#39;The inability of a pre-clear to cry,&#39; Hubbard explained, &#39;is partly a hang-up in the Weeper. He is about to be hit by a wave, has his eyes full of sand or is frightened about opening his shell because he may be hit.&#39; * The Volcanoes occurred at several points - violent volcanic eruptions which choked the genetic entity&#39;s host organism with choking sulphurous smoke. Hubbard suggests that these eruptions hastened the progress of evolution, &#34;for there is a lack of real reason why this evolution should not be continuing on even today.&#34; Volcanoes, believed by Scientologists to be used by Xenu to murder billions of thetans, are a prominent symbol frequently used in Scientology. * Being Eaten is the next class of incident on the list. &#34;In that so many fish and animals were equipped with so many teeth, it is inevitable that somebody somewhere on the track would have been eaten.&#34; And so it is. for there are a great many &#34;being eaten&#34; engrams. Technique 80 is recommended by Hubbard for dealing with these problems. &#34;Few auditors, in the absence of Technique 80, have been able to run these incidents&#34;. * The Birds were a traumatic incident caused when &#34;birds of a very crude construction developed a taste for clams&#34;. As a result of bird attacks on ancestral clams, modern man suffers from &#34;falling sensations, indecision and other troubles.&#34; * &#34;The Sloth&#34;, says Hubbard, &#34;is a chain of incidents and misadventures&#34; covered under this general name. According to Hubbard, the Sloth was &#34;slow and easily attacked and he had bad times falling out of trees when hit by snakes, falling off cliffs when attacked by baboons.&#34; * The Ape is the name of the next incident, by which time the genetic entity was inhabiting an &#34;agile and intelligent&#34; host. &#34;The Ape is usually an area of overt acts against animals and incidents of protecting young&#34;. (pg.54) * The Piltdown Man was &#34;a creature not an ape, yet not entirely a Man.&#34; It was not &#34;the real Piltdown Man&#34; but had some similarities. It resulted in a variety of psychological conditions in modern humans, including &#34;obsessions about biting efforts to hide the mouth and early familial troubles.&#34; The Piltdown Man was characterized by &#34;freakish acts of strange &#39;logic,&#39; of demonstrating dangerous on one&#39;s fellows, of eating one&#39;s wife and other somewhat illogical activities. The PILTDOWN teeth were ENORMOUS and he was quite careless as to whom and what he bit and often very much surprised at the resulting damage.&#34; * The Caveman was the final stage of evolution prior to modern man. The genetic entity&#39;s host still had marital trouble, though not quite on the level of &#34;eating one&#39;s wife&#34;. Instead, &#34;one crippled one&#39;s woman to keep her [at home] or poisoned one&#39;s man for having kept her there.&#34; Memories of this era were responsible, in Hubbard&#39;s view, for &#34;any condition of interpersonal relationships&#34; such as &#34;jealousy and overt acts around it, strangling, smashing in heads with rocks, quarrels about homes, tribal rebukes, pack instincts.&#34; Hubbard also described numerous incidents of &#34;implanting&#34; by hostile alien races which caused traumatic memories in the thetan. This formed part of what soon became an elaborate cosmology of alien civilizations, interstellar dictators and brainwashing implants - collectively, matters that Hubbard described as &#34;Space opera&#34;.