Snapping
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Whether this darkening was actual or metaphorical is difficult to establish, although researchers have found evidence of a reduction in the peripheral vision of cult members. The effect, however, gives an inside view of a quality that has been reported by many who have had contact with cult members. As the individual enters this sustained altered state, the appearance of his eyes may undergo a dramatic change, taking on a glassy look, a cloudiness, giving the impression that the person is "not really looking back at you." This change in the eyes, more than anything, would seem to indicate an alteration in the individual's capacity to receive, process, and communicate information.
In our interviews we heard many versions of the physical transformations of cult members' eyes. One mother in the Midwest swore to us -- and observers confirmed -- that during a confrontation with her daughter, who was in a Christian cult, she actually saw a beam of red light shoot out of the girl's eyes. Even the young cult member herself was stunned by the phenomenon.
A former Krishna devotee recalled the effect his altered state had on his childhood friend, the family dog.
"Our dog wouldn't have anything to do with me for days after I joined the cult," he told us. "I came home and the dog didn't like me at all. He would growl at me and then bark as if I were a stranger. It wasn't because of smells or my looks or anything. When I first came back home I still had my hair, but it didn't make any difference. Then when I came back after I left the cult, I didn't have any hair at all, but he recognized me just the same and we were pals again."
In addition to changes in appearance, cult members may be affected by a number of other physical changes in their sustained altered states. Quite often, their voices change markedly. The pitch rises and the tone becomes more shrill, an alteration many believe to be a reflection of mounting tension within the individual. Entire speech patterns may change dramatically as well, and posture and mannerisms may be transformed beyond recognition. With each new day the cult member may drift further out of touch with his former thoughts, feelings, and personality, as the cult environment pours in new information to destroy and replace the old. In this state, the individual may be virtually incapable of genuine communication or relationship. His speech becomes a mindless parroting of cult doctrine, his thoughts never deviate from what he has been told by his superiors. Now his alienation from the outside world and his former self reaches its maximum, and his identification with the cult becomes all-encompassing and self-sustaining.
During this time, when long-standing pathways of information processing in the brain are being destroyed and reconstructed, it is still possible to deprogram an individual and restore his freedom of thought and feeling. This condition may persist for months, or even years -- perhaps throughout the individual's involvement in the cult. At some point, however, as we have observed among a number of veteran cult members, the individual's impaired thought processes become less noticeable, and eventually the telling signs of his altered state may disappear. Then, the transformation complete, he is, to all but those who knew him before, quite undetectably a new person altogether.
The Delusional Phase
This second and more advanced form of information disease concerns reality and illusion and an individual's ability to distinguish between the two. In addition to the fundamental processes of perception that bring information to the brain, the human brain also possesses the remarkable capacity to create information of its own. This capacity is generally referred to as imagination .
Man's power of imagination would seem to provide still more evidence of the holographic nature of the brain. The fusion of apparently unrelated components into new images -- dreams offer the most vivid example -- suggests an almost obvious projection of information within the brain. But more importantly, our human capacity of imagination demonstrates the brain's organic ability to recombine the metabolized components of experience, merging people, places, objects, and symbols into new images and forms. The reach of imagination is limitless. Every physical sensation can be matched or superseded by an imagined one. Each image and idea can be instantly transformed into another. The human brain, with its enormous information-storage capacity, its incomparable powers of association, and its consummate playful nature, is capable of conjuring up all kinds of visions and sensations in superabundant detail.
For most people, the ability to distinguish between reality and imagination, between fact and fancy, is so basic that it can be taken for granted. At times, an individual may be so awestruck by the sharpness or novelty of an experience as to question whether he is awake or dreaming, but on those rare occasions a quick pinch is usually enough to set matters straight. In fact, this elementary form of verification is the best of all possible arbiters, for the ability to distinguish between perception and imagination is inseparably dependent on our ability to feel. Feeling, as we have come to understand it, is the ultimate human response, the champion of all information-processing capacities, precisely because it is the most comprehensive activity human beings perform, representing the fullest integration of body and mind.
Yet, powerful and primary as the capacity for feeling may be, it is a surprisingly simple and straightforward matter to weaken or destroy it. A direct attack on human feeling may leave an individual stunned and numb, momentarily incapable of any emotion. A more concentrated and prolonged assault may bring about a lasting alteration of this capacity and, in doing so, break down the individual's fundamental ability to distinguish between reality and fantasy. This is the delusional phase of information disease, a direct consequence of the destruction of human feeling.
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Scientology defines itself as "the study of knowledge in its fullest sense." The Church of Scientology, founded in the 1950s by a science-fiction writer named L. Ron Hubbard, consists of two major branches of activity: the "pandenominational religious philosophy" contained in Hubbard's books and the practices of the church and the "applied philosophy," which is defined as "methods which enable the individual to attain a higher state of existence through personal processing." Since its early days, Scientology has grown to include church organizations and processing centers on every continent. It now claims to be the largest "self-betterment organization" in the world.
It may also be one of the most powerful religious cults in operation today. The tales that have come out of Scientology are nearly impossible to believe in relation to a religious movement that has accumulated great credibility and respect around the world in less than twenty-five years. It has also gathered an estimated 3.5 million followers. Nevertheless, the reports we have seen and heard in the course of our research, both in the media and in personal interviews with former Scientology higher-ups, are replete with allegations of psychological devastation, economic exploitation, and personal and legal harassment of former members and journalists who speak out against the cult.
To most Americans, however, Scientologists are known for the aggressive street encounters in which they attempt to recruit customers for the organization's self-betterment program. The course, known as Dianetics, employs a technique called "auditing," ostensibly to raise an individual to higher levels of being. Halfway up the ladder of Scientology, after the individual has passed through roughly eight levels of auditing, is the level of "clear," a state of existence in which the subject is supposedly capable of transcending all the quirks and pains of his past. At the top of the Scientology ladder, about eight levels above clear, is "O.T." or "Operating Thetan," which Hubbard defines as "The person himself -- not his body or name, the physical universe, his mind, or anything else -- that which is aware of being aware; the identity that IS the individual" (Hubbard's punctuation and emphasis).
Participants in Scientology's self-betterment program pay for auditing by the hour. The cost of attaining the level of clear, which may require several hundred hours of auditing, has been known to run into tens of thousands of dollars. Some individual payments for Scientology techniques have been reported to exceed $100,000.
/> But for the casual customer choosing among a vast assortment of currently available techniques for self-betterment, the Scientology procedure is well-known, attractive, and inexpensive to begin. The auditing process takes place in private sessions between subject and auditor, in which the subject's emotional responses are registered on a device called an E-meter, a kind of crude lie detector. The subject holds the terminals of the E-meter in his hands, and the rise or fall of electrical conductivity in response to the perspiration emitted from the palms is explained as a measure of emotional response to the auditor's course of questioning. The average response registers in the normal range on the meter, with abnormal indicating an overreaction, "uprightness," or sign of trauma on the part of the subject.
The goal of auditing is to bring all the individual's responses within the range of normal on the E-meter. Using a technique that bears only superficial resemblance to the popular method of biological regulation known as biofeedback, the individual watches the E-meter and follows precise instructions given by the auditor to learn how to reduce his emotional response to the auditor's questions about past and painful experiences. When the individual has mastered this ability, he becomes eligible for admission to the elite club of Scientology clears.
We met a number of Scientologists in our travels, among them students, housewives, professionals, and even some respected scientists. All the individuals we talked to fell into one or the other of two categories: those who had just begun the auditing process or who were only occasional customers of Dianetics, and those who had become active members of the church or gone on to the advanced levds of auditing. While visiting a large city out West, we were introduced to Karla Kraus (not her real name), a housewife in her late thirties whom we found to be an expressive representative of the novice Scientologists we interviewed. When we met, Karla Kraus had been undergoing Scientology's auditing process for almost a year. She understood it to be a concentrated course of study and one-to-one therapy. She was attending auditing sessions several times a week and looking forward to the higher levels of existence she saw before her.
As we sipped coffee in her living room, she explained to us the motivation behind her excursion into Dianetics.
"In Scientology you confront past experiences until there is no charge left on them," she said. "Then, once you get all the charge off that painful instance, it will never be a source of any aberrant type of behavior."
She spoke matter-of-factly, careful not to misrepresent the auditing process.
"I hope to become a clear," she told us avidly, adding, "To the casual observer, this new terminology can sound almost like 1984, but these are simply new terms that have not been identified before."
As Karla Kraus understood it, "Clear means that your active mind is clear of all aberrational behavior, and all psychosomatic illness disappears." After two or three hundred hours of auditing, she said, she hoped to reach a permanent level of clear existence. Already, after less than one hundred hours, she had had glimpses of what that powerful state of being might be like. She recounted one of her most significant insights.
"One time during auditing I was returned to a prenatal experience," she said. "I heard my mother's voice just as clear as a bell. I've always had a vague feeling of not belonging, but I heard my mother say, 'I don't want babies.' I experienced pain and pressure, which my auditor told me was my mother sneezing or having intercourse or morning sickness. Through auditing they have determined that the fetus actually experiences and remembers these things."
Karla Kraus also revealed that her developing ability to control her emotional response to traumatic events in her earlier years was changing her ability to experience her present life in the everyday world. She viewed the change as positive.
"There are some residual effects to auditing," she told us. "Things get charged up while you're auditing which spill out onto your daily life. I can feel a change in my state of being, in my level of awareness. Where things used to cave me in, now there's nothing. Most disciplines give you ways to deal with negative emotions after they occur. This is something that I can go through which prevents those negative emotions from occurring in the first place."
She saw her potential for achievement in Scientology as infinite. She didn't know whether she would have the time or money to work her way up to the highest levels of Scientology awareness, but she looked with envy upon those who had the dedication to stick with it to the top. She offered us her perspective on life at those higher levels.
"It's really superpowerful stuff," she said. "For instance, individuals who are Operating Thetans are able to exteriorize at will. They can actually go into another person's body and find areas of disturbance and disease."
It is this level of O.T. to which devout Scientologists aspire. "When you are O.T.," she said, "if you believe something and really know it to be so, it will be so! Scientology leads you to a level of consciousness that is beyond faith. These people are into certainty. They know ."
In our opinion, however, Scientology does not lead people beyond faith to absolute certainty -- it leads them to levels of increasingly realistic hallucination. The crude technology of auditing is a direct assault on human feeling and on the individual's ability to distinguish between what he is actually experiencing and what he is only imagining. The bizarre folklore of Scientology is a tour de force of science fiction. Many people at its highest levels are confident that trillions of years ago they all knew each other on other planets, that they have the power to see at submicroscopic levels and leave their bodies at will. As we delved deeper into Scientology the evidence we gathered suggested to us that, more than anything else, this combination church and therapeutic service trains people in hallucination and delusion.
We gained an inside view of Scientology in a long telephone interview with a young man we will call Howard Davenport. During five and a half years as an active, dedicated Scientologist, he became a Dianetics auditor and moved freely within the highest levels of the organization.
Howard Davenport had been recruited by street encounter, the same manner of solicitation used by almost all religious cults. At first, however, the Scientology appeal was neither religious nor psychological. Like many other cults which have turned to indirect recruitment methods, Scientology's come-on was purely social. Davenport, a shy young man in his mid-twenties, recalled the moment of initial contact.
"I was alone at the time and pretty depressed," he told us, "and a very good-looking girl gave me an address and said, 'Be there at seven thirty.' I asked her what was there and she said, 'Just a bunch of groovy people.' I envisioned this big party, but it turned out to be a Scientology meeting. We heard a lecture and saw the introductory movie, which was narrated by Stephen Boyd, the movie star. It started out in a planetarium and he was standing there as if Scientology had found the stars or something."
After the movie, Davenport continued, the Scientology leaders brought out an E-meter and demonstrated how it worked. The guests were given an opportunity to try it out, and the Scientologists interpreted their readings.
"They put me on the thing and I registered way off the dial," he said. "They told me it meant that I was in an extremely messed-up state of mind, and they convinced me to take a fifteen-dollar 'communication' course. This very good-looking girl took me into a little private room. She got up close to me and said she could see that I was depressed, that my life was in very bad shape, and that if I just took this course all my problems would be solved. I felt a great uplifting, like, 'Wow, finally here's someone who can take care of my problems!' "
Soon afterward, Davenport began his journey into Scientology via a series of highly structured, pseudoscientific drills, trainings, and processes. The first one, called TR-0 or Training Regimen Zero, was part of the basic communication course designed to develop the subject's ability to interact with others.
"On the first night, they sat me down across from this other guy. They told us it wasn't staring, but it was simply starin
g at each other -- two hours that first night. They take two novices and put them together, because they want you to feel like you're working at the same speed. At first it was very uncomfortable. We sat with our knees touching and we weren't allowed to blink. We were told, 'You don't think, you don't move, you don't twitch, you don't giggle. Just be there with the other person.' "
Davenport recalled the confusion that resulted from his first evening of "communication."
"After I had sat there for two hours, I couldn't figure out what the purpose was. I thought it was to help you learn how to look somebody in the eye when you talk to them, but it took me a couple of years in Scientology before I grasped the purpose of that drill. It was to teach you how to be able to look really high ."
From this initial course, Davenport went on to begin the auditing process. During auditing, he explained, the close personal contact continued.
"Each auditing session is run exactly like the last one," he said. "They're supposed to be two and a half hours long, but they can vary. The auditor sits in a little room that is decorated in a certain way so that they're all alike and interchangeable. Then he puts you on the E-meter and all you can do is look at each other, because there's not enough space in the room to look away. The auditor is not permitted to say anything except certain standard lines that are part of an exact script every time. You walk into the room and he says, 'Are you well-fed and rested?' and you say, 'Yes.' If he sees a reaction on the meter, he says, 'What did you think of there?' If there's no reaction on the meter, he says, 'Okay, that's good!' "