A well known science-fiction author visits the dentist for a serious procedure. During the course of the treatment, he has a religious experience, an apparent revelation of some deep cosmic truth. He then spends most of the rest of his life attempting to refine his understanding of what he experienced. In broad outline, this odd anecdote is the story of two famous, and rather different, twentieth-century Americans. In 1938, L. Ron Hubbard, then a science-fiction writer for pulp magazines, underwent a dental operation. Having received a gas anesthetic, Hubbard believed that he had a brush with death, during which the Read more