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What was that “Battle Royale?” Well, according to the Board of Directors at that New Jersey Foundation, it didn’t matter whether past lives were valid or not. So by actual Board decree, they attempted to “outlaw” any and all discussion of the matter. Why? Because if you wanted establishment blessings in 1950, you didn’t talk about anything that couldn’t be described in terms of physical phenomena.
But if that was prevailing think as of 1950, consider a much older “Battle Royale” — one that backtracks all the way to fourth century Rome. Now up until that point, past lives were common knowledge. Everyone lived more than once, and everyone knew it.
So what changed? Roman Emperor Constantine had a “vision” on the battlefield and attributed his victory to a newfound faith in Christianity. And suddenly, Christianity progressed from a “persecuted cult,” to the official State religion of the Roman Empire. There was, however, a tradeoff. The Emperor wanted something in return — and he got it. The Christian bishops outlawed past lives. The issue wasn’t even theological, it was political. Or, as the historians explain it: “The Church needed the whip of Judgment Day to keep the faithful in line. It was therefore a matter of survival for the Church not to allow belief in reincarnation to take hold among her followers.”
And if you’ve never heard of the Paulicians of Thrace, the Bogomils of Bulgaria, or the Patarenes of the Balkans — that’s because those were all people who doggedly held to their knowledge of past lives, and were slaughtered for it. That was the end of past lives across the western world.
That was also precisely what LRH encountered when the Foundation Board attempted to outlaw research in 1950. In response, LRH simply told them this: “You can’t pass resolutions to say what is or isn’t in the human mind. And you can’t tell me what to research!” At which point he traveled to pre-communist Havana, Cuba, away from such distractions, to commence the next step of research, with Science of Survival.
So came LRH’s breakthrough, to account for all phenomena observed through the previous months — the “Theta-MEST theory.” He explained it this way: “Theta
is thought, life force, élan vital, the spirit, the soul, or any other of the numerous definitions it has had for some thousands of years. The physical universe would be the universe of matter, energy, space and time (MEST). As soon as we separate these two entities, a host of problems heretofore quite complex resolve into simplicity.”
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