SCIENTOLOGY: The Now Religion. By George Malko. 205 pages. Delacorte Press. $5.95.

Halfway through this mind-boggling book, in the middle of a discussion of affinity tone scales, black Thetans spitting white energy, the planet Helatrobus, aircraft door implants and gorilla goals, George Malko pauses to observe, "of course all this struck me as being insane garbage."

Of course. Up to this point, Malko had been so stoically groping his way through the mystagogical smog of L. Ron Hubbard's mind that one wanted to scream at him: but it's preposterous! Since screaming at books is about as useful as voting in presidential elections, the tension grew until Malko chose to relieve it.

One can thereafter endure Scientology's E-Meters, Alice games, gradient scale drills, capping beams and opposition terminals — not to mention the eight dynamics, the 24 logics and the 58 axioms — with that same incredulous gape one brings to the economic theories of Ezra Pound or Wilhelm Reich's orgone energy accumulator of the protocols of Zion or the Flying Nun.

Malko, a freelance writer and film producer, tells us the whole inspiring story of L. Ron Hubbard, who rose from the lowly estate of a science-fiction novelist to become our first operating Thetan.

Hubbard operates these days from a fleet of ships somewhere in the Mediterranean, seeking his previous incarnations with the help of the $140,000 a week he receives as his 10 per cent cut of Scientology's gross income. His "thetan" (beingness) has been liberated because he got rid of the one basic "engram" (the sound impression a psychic trauma makes on our protoplasm), which "was received by the human race many, many centuries ago, and probably was a supersonic shot in the forehead, chest and stomach, incapacitating, and reducing, the size and function of the pineal gland." Not to slight the "to forget" goal planted on him at the Helatrobus station "some 38 trillion to 43 trillion years ago" . . .

I can't go on. Fortunately, Malko managed to do so, because 15 million people subscribe to Hubbard's fantasy. It's a church with a tax exemption, inside which the parishioners play games to free their theta bodies from their METS (matter-energy-time-space) bodies. It offers a little bit of everything orientalia (reincarnation); psychoanalysis (talking about one's aberations); scientific authority (e-meters to measure one's anxiety, tone scales to chart one's progress); fantasies of omnipotence (a theta body will be capable of telepathy, psychokinesis, etc.); sci-fi romance (all that galactic gallivanting, those goal-implanting stations on other planets); utopia (total freedom), and Descartes (the pineal gland makes a comeback!).

However suspect the disordered ravings of Hubbard against his real and fancies enemies, no one appears to have been permanently hurt. And when a scientologist tells you that, while thinking about the reasons why he had a toothache, he suddenly saw a gorilla — gorilla goals having been implanted in his theta 83 trillion trillion trillion years ago — and the pain disappeared, what can you say? If he thinks it works, maybe it works, like new criticism, glue-sniffing, astrology, yarrow stalks and bubblegum.