Going Clear

by Lawrence Wright

  In 1976, at the Manor Hotel, Haggis went “Clear.” It is the base camp for those who hope to ascend to the upper peaks of Scientology. The concept comes from Dianetics. A person who becomes Clear is “adaptable to and able to change his environment,” Hubbard writes. “His ethical and moral standards are high, his ability to seek and experience pleasure is great. His personality is heightened and he is creative and constructive.” Among other qualities, the Clear has a flawless memory and the capacity to perform mental tasks at unprecedented rates of speed; he is less susceptible to disease; and he is free of neuroses, compulsions, repressions, and psychosomatic illnesses. Hubbard sums up: “The dianetic clear is to a current normal individual as the current normal is to the severely insane.”

  Haggis was Clear #5925. “It was not life-changing,” he admits. “It wasn’t like, ‘Oh my God, I can fly!’ ” At every level of advancement, he was encouraged to write a “success story” saying how effective his training had been. He had read many such stories by other Scientologists, and they felt overly effusive, geared toward getting through the gatekeepers so that the students could move on to the next level.

  THE BRIDGE TO TOTAL FREEDOM is a journey that goes on and on (although confoundingly, in the Scientology metaphor, one moves “higher and higher”—up the Bridge rather than across it). Haggis quickly advanced through the upper levels. He was becoming an “Operating Thetan,” which the church defines as one who “can handle things and exist without physical support and assistance.” An editorial in a 1958 issue of the Scientology magazine Ability notes that “neither Buddha nor Jesus Christ were OTs according to the evidence. They were just a shade above Clear.”

  When Haggis joined the church, there were seven levels of Operating Thetans. According to church documents that have been leaked online, Hubbard’s handwritten instructions for Operating Thetan Level One list thirteen mental exercises that attune practitioners to their relationship with others. The directives for OT I are so open-ended it could be difficult to know whether they have been satisfactorily accomplished. “Note several large and several small male bodies until you have a cognition,” for instance. Or, “Seat yourself unobtrusively where you can observe a number of people. Spot things and people you are not. Do to cognition.” The point is to familiarize oneself with one’s environment from the perspective of being Clear.

  In the second level, OT II, Scientologists attempt to delete past-life “implants” that hinder progress in one’s current existence. This is accomplished through exercises and visualizations that explore oppositional forces: “Laughter comes from the rear half and calm from the front half simultaneously. Then they reverse. It gives one a sensation of total disagreement. The trick is to conceive of both at the same time. This tends to knock one out.”

  Each new level of achievement marked the entrance to a more select spiritual fraternity. Haggis didn’t have a strong reaction to the material, but then, he wasn’t expecting anything too profound. Everyone knew that the big revelations resided in OT III.

  Hubbard called this level the Wall of Fire.

  “The material involved in this sector is so vicious, that it is carefully arranged to kill anyone if he discovers the exact truth of it,” he wrote in 1967. “So in January and February of this year I became very ill, almost lost this body, and somehow or another brought it off, and obtained the material, and was able to live through it. I am very sure that I was the first one that ever did live through any attempt to attain that material.”

  In the late seventies, the OT mysteries were still unknown, except to the elect. There was no Internet, and Scientology’s confidential scriptures had never been published or produced in court. Scientologists looked toward the moment of initiation into OT III with extreme curiosity and excitement. The candidate had to be invited into this next level—Scientologists were cautioned that the material could cause harm or even death to those who were unprepared to receive it. The enforced secrecy added to the mystique and the giddy air of adventure.

  One could look back at this crucial moment and examine the pros and cons of Haggis’s decision to stay in Scientology. The fact that people often sneered at the church didn’t deter him; on the contrary, he reveled in being a member of a stigmatized minority—it made him feel at one with other marginalized groups. The main drawback to belief was his own skeptical nature; he was a proud contrarian, and it would never have occurred to him to join the Baptist church, for instance, or to return to Catholicism; he simply wasn’t interested. Intellectually, faith didn’t call to him. Scientology, on the other hand, was exotic and tantalizing. The weirdness of some of the doctrines was hard to fathom, but there was no doubt in Haggis’s mind that he had gained some practical benefits from his several years of auditing and that his communication skills had improved through some of the coursework. None of that had required him to “believe” in Scientology, but the religion had proved itself in certain ways that mattered to him. The process of induction was so gradual that things that might have shocked him earlier were more acceptable by the time he came upon them. Whenever he ran into something on the Bridge to Total Freedom that he couldn’t fathom, he convinced himself that the next level would make everything understandable.

  Scientology was a part of his community; it had taken root in Hollywood, just as Haggis had. His first writing jobs had come through Scientology connections. His wife was deeply involved in the church, as was his sister Kathy. His circle of friends was centered in the church. Haggis was deep enough into the process by now to understand implicitly that those relationships would be jeopardized if he chose to leave the church. Moreover, he had invested a considerable part of his income in the program. The incentive to believe was high.

  He was also looking forward to having the enhanced abilities that his fellow adherents on the Bridge were constantly talking about. Although Hubbard had explicitly told Operating Thetans not to use their powers for “parlor tricks,” there was a section of Advance!, a magazine for upper-level Scientologists, titled “OT Phenomena,” where members could report clairvoyant or paranormal experiences. Parking spaces magically made themselves available and waiters immediately noticed you. “I saw that my goldfish was all red and lumpy,” one Scientologist writes in Advance! “My husband, Rick, said that he’s had goldfish like that before and they don’t recover.” The correspondent relates that she used her abilities to “flow energy” into the fish “until a big burst of matter blew. I ended off. When I went home that night the fish was completely healed.” She concludes, “It was a big win for me, and the fish. It couldn’t have been done without the technology of L. Ron Hubbard.” Even if such effects were random and difficult to replicate, for those who experienced them life was suddenly full of unseen possibilities. There was a sense of having entered a sphere of transcendence, where minds communicate with each other across great distances, where wishes and intentions affect material objects or cause people to unconsciously obey telepathic orders, and where spirits from other ages or even other worlds make themselves known.

  “A theta being is capable of emitting a considerable electronic flow,” Hubbard notes, “enough to give somebody a very bad shock, to put out his eyes or cut him in half.” Even ordinary actions pose unexpected dilemmas for the OT, Hubbard warns. “How do you answer the phone as an OT?” he asks in one of his lectures. “Supposing you get mad at somebody on the other end of the telephone. You go crunch! And that’s so much Bakelite. The thing either goes into a fog of dust in the middle of the air or drips over the floor.” To avoid crushing telephones with his unfathomable strength, the OT sets up an automatic action so he doesn’t have to pick the receiver up himself. “Telephone rings, it springs into the air, and he talks. In other words, through involuntary intention the telephone stands there in mid-air.” The promise of employing such powers was incredibly tantalizing.

  Carrying an empty briefcase, Haggis went to the Advanced Organization building in Los Angeles, where the OT III material was held. A su
pervisor handed him a manila envelope. Haggis locked it in the briefcase, which was lashed to his arm. Then he entered a secure study room and bolted the door behind him. At last, he was able to examine the religion’s highest mysteries, revealed in a couple of pages of Hubbard’s handwritten scrawl. After a few minutes, Haggis returned to the supervisor.

  “I don’t understand,” Haggis said.

  “Do you know the words?”

  “I know the words, I just don’t understand.”

  “Go back and read it again,” the supervisor suggested.

  Haggis did so. In a moment, he returned. “Is this a metaphor?” he asked.

  “No,” the supervisor responded. “It is what it is. Do the actions that are required.”

  Maybe it’s an insanity test, Haggis thought—if you believe it, you’re automatically kicked out. He considered that possibility. But when he read it again, he decided, “This is madness.”

  * * *

  1 It has since been spectacularly renovated and turned into Scientology’s premier Celebrity Centre.

  2 Hubbard sometimes disparaged the term “lie detector” in connection with E-Meters. “In the first place they do not detect lies and in the second place the police have known too little about the human mind to know that their instrument was actually accurate to an amazing perfection. These instruments should be called ‘emotion detectors’ ” (Hubbard, “Electropsychometric Auditing Operator’s Manual,” 1952). According to David S. Touretsky, a research professor in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University (and a prominent Scientology critic), what are called “thoughts” are actually “fleeting patterns of chemical and electrical activity in our brains” that have no actual mass. “The meter is really more of a prop or talisman than a measuring instrument. Interpreting needle movements is like reading tea leaves. A good fortune teller picks up on lots of subliminal cues that let them ‘read’ their subject, while the tea leaves give the subject something to fixate on. And the subject is heavily invested in believing that the auditor and the meter are effective, so it’s a mutually reinforcing system.” The E-Meter measures skin resistance, like a lie detector. “Strong emotional reactions do cause changes in muscle tension or micro-tremors of the fingers will also cause changes in the current flowing to the meter, so it’s not purely measuring the physiological changes associated with skin resistance like a real lie detector would. (And real lie detectors also look at other variables, such as pulse and respiration rates.)” (David Touretsky, personal correspondence.)

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  Source

  The many discrepancies between Hubbard’s legend and his life have overshadowed the fact that he genuinely was a fascinating man: an explorer, a best-selling author, and the founder of a worldwide religious movement. The tug-of-war between Scientologists and anti-Scientologists over Hubbard’s biography has created two swollen archetypes: the most important person who ever lived and the world’s greatest con man. Hubbard himself seemed to revolve on this same axis, constantly inflating his actual accomplishments in a manner that was rather easy for his critics to puncture. But to label him a pure fraud is to ignore the complex, charming, delusional, and visionary features of his character that made him so compelling to the many thousands who followed him and the millions who read his work. One would also have to ignore his life’s labor in creating the intricately detailed epistemology that has pulled so many into its net—including, most prominently, Hubbard himself.

  Lafayette Ronald Hubbard was born in Tilden, Nebraska, in 1911, a striking, happy child with gray eyes and wispy carrot-colored hair. His father, Harry Ross “Hub” Hubbard, was in the Navy when he met Ledora May Waterbury, who was studying to be a teacher in Omaha. They married in 1909. By the time their only child came along two years later, Hub was out of the service and working in the advertising department of the local Omaha newspaper. May returned to her hometown of Tilden for the birth.

  When Ron was two, the family moved to Helena, Montana, a gold town that was famous all over the West for its millionaires and its prostitutes. It was also the capital of the frontier state. Hub managed the Family Theater, which, despite its name, shared a building downtown with two bordellos. Even as a young child, Ron loved to watch the vaudeville acts that passed through, but the enterprise shut its doors when a larger theater opened nearby.

  Ron’s maternal grandparents lived nearby. Lafayette Waterbury was a veterinarian and a well-regarded horseman who doted on his redheaded grandson. “I was riding broncs at 3½ years,” Hubbard later boasted. He supposedly began reading at the same precocious age, and according to the church he was “soon devouring shelves of classics, including much of Western philosophy, the pillars of English literature, and, of note, the essays of Sigmund Freud.”

  When the United States entered the First World War in 1917, Hubbard’s father decided to re-enlist in the Navy. Ledora got a job with the State of Montana, and she and six-year-old Ron moved in with her parents, who had relocated to Helena. When the war ended, Hub decided to make a career in the Navy, and the Hubbard family was launched into the itinerant military life.

  Hubbard’s family was Methodist. He once remarked, “Many members of my family that I was raised with were devout Christians, and my grandfather was a devout atheist.” Ron took his own eccentric path. Throughout his youth, he was fascinated by shamans and magicians. As a boy in Montana, he says, he was made a blood brother to the Blackfoot Indians by an elderly medicine man named Old Tom Madfeathers. Hubbard claims that Old Tom would put on displays of magic by leaping fifteen feet high from a seated position and perching on the top of his teepee. Hubbard observes, “I learned long ago that man has his standards for credulity, and when reality clashes with these, he feels challenged.”

  A signal moment in Hubbard’s narrative is the seven-thousand-mile voyage he took in 1923 from Seattle through the Panama Canal to Washington, DC, where his father was being posted. One of his fellow passengers was Commander Joseph C. “Snake” Thompson of the US Navy Medical Corps. A neurosurgeon, a naturalist, and a former spy, Thompson made a vivid impression on the boy. “He was a very careless man,” Hubbard later recalled. “He used to go to sleep reading a book and when he woke up, why, he got up and never bothered to press and change his uniform, you know. And he was usually in very bad odor with the Navy Department.… But he was a personal friend of Sigmund Freud’s.… When he saw me—a defenseless character—and there was nothing to do on a big transport on a very long cruise, he started to work me over.”

  No doubt Thompson entertained the young Hubbard with tales of his adventures as a spy in the Far East. Raised in Japan by his father, a missionary, Thompson spoke fluent Japanese. He had spent much of his early military career roaming through Asia posing as a herpetologist looking for rare snakes while covertly gathering intelligence and charting possible routes of invasion.

  “What impressed me,” Hubbard later remarked, “he had a cat by the name of Psycho. This cat had a crooked tail, which is enough to impress any young man. And the cat would do tricks. And the first thing he did was teach me how to train cats. But it takes so long, and it requires such tremendous patience, that to this day I have never trained a cat. You have to wait, evidently, for the cat to do something, then you applaud it. But waiting for a cat to do something whose name is Psycho …”

  One of Thompson’s maxims was “If it’s not true for you, it’s not true.” He told young Hubbard that the statement had come from Gautama Siddhartha, the Buddha. It made an impression on Hubbard. “If there’s anybody in the world that’s calculated to believe what he wants to believe and to reject what he doesn’t want to believe, it is I.”

  Thompson had just returned from Vienna, where he had been sent by the Navy to study under Freud. “I was just a kid and Commander Thompson didn’t have any boy of his own and he and I just got along fine,” Hubbard recalls in one of his lectures. “Why he took it into his head to start beating Freud into my head, I don’t know, but he did. And I wanted very
much to follow out this work—wanted very much to. I didn’t get a chance. My father … said, ‘Son, you’re going to be an engineer.’ ”

  THOMPSON WAS ABOUT to publish a review of psychoanalytic literature in the United States Naval Medical Bulletin; indeed, he may have been working on it as he traveled to Washington, and no doubt he drew upon the thinking reflected in his article when he tutored Hubbard in the basics of Freudian theory. “Man has two fundamental instincts—one for self-preservation and the other for race propagation,” Thompson writes in his review. “The most important emotion of the self-preservation urge is hunger. The sole emotion of the race-propagation urge is libido.” Psychoanalysis, Thompson explains, is the “technic” of discovering unconscious motivations that harm the health or happiness of the individual. Once the patient understands the motives behind his neurotic behavior, his symptoms automatically disappear. “This uncovering of the hidden motive does not consist in the mere explaining to the patient the mechanism of his plight. The understanding alone comes from the analytic technic of free association and subsequent rational synthesis.” Many of these thoughts are deeply embedded in the principles of Dianetics, the foundation of Hubbard’s philosophy of human nature, which predated the establishment of Scientology.

  In 1927, Hubbard’s father was posted to Guam, and Ledora went along, abandoning Ron to the care of her parents. For a man as garrulous as L. Ron Hubbard turned out to be, reflections on his parents are rare, almost to the point of writing them out of his biography. His story of himself reads like that of an orphan who has invented his own way in the world. One of his lovers later said that he told her that his mother was a whore and a lesbian, and that he had found her in bed with another woman. His mistress also admitted, “I never knew what to believe.”