According to Davenport, the auditor continues to ask a series of questions about the person's past and present and waits until the meter shows no sign of a reaction. Emerging from several hours of this intense process may be an exhilarating experience, in some instances even a snapping moment of sorts.
"That's when you feel the highest," Davenport explained, "when your thought processes finally break and you go, 'Wow, I feelgood!' There's a feeling of peacefulness about it."
Continued auditing can bring on a condition that resembles the reduced awareness in the cults, complete with the accompanying changes in appearance and demeanor. In Scientology, however, there is a special technique that may disguise the changes.
"They have a drill to make your eyes look natural," he said. "You have someone sit three feet away from you, and you sit there and look at each other. Then one person acts as a coach and the other as the student, and he'll say, 'Start!' and if you blink your eyes in an unnatural way, he'll say, 'Flunk! You blinked in an unnatural way. Start!' He coaches you for hours like that. He'll say, 'Flunk! You're starting to smile. Start!' Like robots."
Almost all Scientology drills consist of similar set patterns of repeated commands and responses that continue for hour upon hour. According to Davenport, other Scientology drills are practiced with less innocent objectives in mind. Number three, for example, teaches the subject how to gain control over other people, a primary focus of other cult sales and recruitment techniques. The Scientology method, however, has no religious or spiritual pretentions.
"Training Drill Three," said Davenport, "is nicknamed Do Fish Swim? The whole drill is spelled out; its purpose is to get your question answered. It teaches you the various things a person can do to avoid answering your question, and it gives you a technique which you later use in counseling other people. You can force them to talk about anything at all, even if they don't want to talk about it."
The technique of Training Drill Three deals with control through communication.
"In this drill," Davenport continued, "if I were the coach and you were the student, you would look at me very naturally and say, 'Do fish swim?' You couldn't sound strained or in any way unnatural. Then you would have to acknowledge me for answering you."
Looking back, Davenport still recognized some of the practical value of these initial Scientology techniques. They gave him peaceful, relaxed feelings, he said, and they actually did improve his ability to communicate and assert himself socially. But he went on to explain what he considered the danger of the process.
"This is the thing," he stressed. "If people just took the communication course and then left Scientology for life, it would not be such a bad thing, because the beginning course does help you out. But then the technique itself sucks you into further and further courses. The counseling never ends."
As Davenport became more deeply involved in the auditing process, he also grew more dependent on the organization. Unlike most other cults, Scientology does not require that its members live in communal settings. But as people become more involved, they often tend naturally to associate more and more with other Scientologists. Davenport told us about one surprising experience that drew him further into the organization.
"When I first got in, I was with a friend whom I met in the course; we were talking to one of the guys who was way up in the organization. My friend asked him, 'Is it anything like drugs at those higher levels?' and he said, 'It's just like acid, man. I see colors all around just like particles flowing across the room.' "
Before long, Davenport began to experience those higher levels for himself, as he progressed to drills designed to teach him how to leave his body and travel through space. Looking back, he observed that in all likelihood the events never took place as described.
"They have drills that create images of things in your mind that do not exist," he said, "and they have drills that even change your image of what does exist. For instance, if I see this door that I'm looking at as being the way it is, Scientology would talk about it in such a way that I would see it in another light, their light."
This transformation of awareness seems to be accomplished by a specific and highly refined Scientology technique.
"It happens in degrees," he said, "and it may take years to achieve, although some people can do it in a matter of weeks. First you start just looking at something the way it is. Then they tell you that you can actually see all the molecules flowing through it -- that's just one example of something they would tell you that you should see. So you start looking for the molecules, and you try all these different ways to imagine it. At first you know that you're just trying to imagine it, but then suddenly you'll have this experience. You'll be sitting there and one day you'll look over at the door and you'll just see the molecules. It's a hallucination, but you actually see them, and the leaders of Scientology say, 'How do you know it's just a hallucination?' And they have a point."
The point is that by that time it may no longer be possible for the individual to distinguish what is real. Once this barrier is broken through, a person's sense of reality may seem wholly arbitrary. His daily life may become intermixed with vivid hallucinations. Davenport experienced this state of mind as well.
"One day I was walking around convinced that I was controlling the weather," he said. "I was out selling burglar alarms door to door to make money to pay Scientology so I could buy their higher levels. It looked like it was going to rain all day long, and I felt I was using my own thought to hold the rain back. Another time, as I was going to bed, I wanted to talk to a friend, so I thought to myself, I'll go exterior, and I started getting into these things about leaving my body and visiting people. The next day if they didn't say anything to me about it I would say that they weren't aware enough to have seen it."
Davenport told us that he was reluctant to call all his strange experiences hallucinations, especially in the light of the wealth of popular testimony concerning astral travel and telepathy. What he denied, however, was the validity of Scientology's fantastic world view and cosmology, despite the fact that many of the Thetans he worked with in the organization were strict adherents of Hubbard's sci-fi philosophy.
"People would remember experiences on other planets, or marriages from three or four lifetimes ago," he recalled. "They'd talk about people from Xerkeson who flew down to Earth in doll-bodies and drove around in long black limousines observing the people on our planet. When you use the techniques, finally you start seeing these things, too. And you say, 'Yeah, he's right. How come we were never aware enough to see them before?' "
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The delusional phase of information disease may result from a variety of techniques. In our opinion, Scientology has refined the most reliable methods for bringing it about, but it makes its appearance elsewhere across the spectrum of America's cults.
Similar techniques are also employed in many of today's popular therapies and self-help techniques. One method, called guided fantasy, is a clearly identified technique for using the power of the imagination to bring about changes in consciousness and personality. Another method, called psychodrama, is also one of the most potent and widely accepted techniques of modern psychiatric therapy. Psychodrama takes the imagination one step further than fantasy, engaging the individual in the physical dramatization of his psychological problems and past traumas. The power of this method lies in the conflicting patterns of information it gives rise to in the context of intense group interaction.
We spoke with a number of individuals who reported experiencing overwhelming discomfort, anxiety, and even intense snapping moments during role-playing and psychodrama. The experience left some in a state of disorientation for several months, during which they found themsalves constantly struggling to test the reality of their perceptions. Others admitted to being virtually paralyzed by the specter of images and emotions that defied validation. Only with the passage of time and the support of people close to them were they able once again to mark off the b
oundaries between what was genuine and certain and what was not.
Symptoms of the delusional phase of information disease can also be identified in another highly developed and controversial outgrowth of the human potential movement, Fritz Perls's Gestalt therapy, which was refined at Esalen during its heyday of experimentation. Among the many techniques of Gestalt, one toys directly with basic mechanisms of perception. A former participant in this therapy told us about a jarring moment in her training.
"I had only been in Gestalt for about a week," she said, "but they had this technique where you had to find a two-colored thing and stare at the two colors until they reversed. I spent a whole day trying to do this, looking at this two-colored pillow. Then suddenly it happened. I looked down at this pillow and the colors switched around. I jumped back and went, 'Whoa!' I'd never had anything like that actually happen, and I guess I was a little shocked by it. I tried to do it for the rest of the day, but I was never able to do it again."
And then there's est, which claims to borrow a little something from every branch of the consciousness movement but which in many ways is a direct offspring of Scientology. In the early seventies, Erhard had what is described as a brief flirtation with Scientology, and he now acknowledges that many of his est "processes" derive from Scientology's drills and regimens. Est appears to produce its own form of the delusional phase of information disease. There have been documented instances of est graduates suddenly coming to believe they could walk through panes of glass, breathe naturally under water, or perform similar feats in defiance of nature. Est's greatest challenge to the imagination, however, and perhaps its most compelling feature, is what we consider the grand delusions it fosters at the intellectual level. Its most controversial premise is its interpretation of self-responsibility; est training emphasizes that the trainees are responsible for their own fates and that, in fact, the individual "creates" everything that happens to him. In est sessions, trainers drive home the implications of this lesson. Est graduates report hearing that rape victims desire to be raped, that Vietnamese babies created the napalm that fell on them in the war, and that the Jews of Europe wanted to die in Hitler's concentration camps.
We spoke with a nationally prominent est graduate who found it only slightly uncomfortable to accept this line of reasoning.
"Yeah, now that's one thing where with my head I believe it," he told us, "although I haven't quite gotten my body to feel it yet. But I think it's true. I've talked to people about that, people who had parents in Germany who got destroyed, and I said, 'Would you accept the possibility that that's what they chose to do? They wanted to stay there and get destroyed?' The next day, one particular woman came back to me and said, 'I remember, they both had tickets to Argentina and they didn't use them.' "
During the ordeal of an est weekend, these perversions of logic make as much sense as anything else after a while, and they sink in along with the physical and emotional experience of the training. Once planted, however, this information takes root and, as we observed, becomes highly infectious, spreading into other areas of an individual's thought and understanding. This particular est graduate was quick to point out that the implications of est's philosophy of self-responsibility are enormous.
"If you really understand self-responsibility," he told us with unwavering conviction, "it means that nobody has to die unless he chooses to; all deaths are suicides, and there are no accidents. And you can fly if you allow yourself to know how."
Not Thinking
By far the most widespread and frightening threat to personality posed by America's cults and mass therapies is the impairment of an individual's most fundamental capacity of mind: quite simply, his ability to think, not just to think for himself, but to think at all to make sense out of the information he receives from experience and to use that information in a way that will best serve his survival and personal growth.
Almost every major cult and group teaches some form of not thinking, mind control, or, as it is often called, self-hypnosis as part of its regular program of activity. This process may take the form of prayer, chanting, speaking in tongues, or simple meditation. Initially, this quiescent state may provide physical and emotional benefits, feelings of inner peace and relaxation, or a calming of nervous tension. After a while, continued practice of the technique may even bring on various forms of euphoria: an emotional high, a feeling of bliss, or lightness of mind or body. In this state, an individual may have sensations of being in intangible realms or alternate realities. He may see divine visions, receive spiritual communications, or experience breakthrough moments of revelation or enlightenment.
With the extended cessation of thought, however, the cumulative effects of inactivity may wear upon the brain until a point is reached when it readjusts to its new condition suddenly and sharply. When that happens, as we have discovered, its information-processing capacities may enter a state of disruption or complete suspension, producing individual states of mind that incorporate all the other forms of information disease: disorientation, detachment, withdrawal, delusion, and the trancelike, altered state visible in the cults.
In America today, aware, intelligent individuals of all ages are being persuaded to stop thinking voluntarily. While many do so in their escape from the real world through authoritarian cult religions or extravagant psychological fantasies, an even larger number stop thinking with no immediate religious or psychological goals in mind. Their intentions are, instead, quite down to earth and practical as they pursue training in simple techniques for reducing brain activity that may produce immediately desired and beneficial effects. What they do not realize, however, is how the brain responds to that experience: positively, at first, but after a very short time the benefits may drop away as the brain readjusts in a catastrophic manner. When that happens, not thinking becomes the norm, and with it there is a reduction in both feeling and awareness. Moreover, once a person's brain enters this state, the individual may be incapable of coming out of it.
This can be the cumulative effect on personality of the experience known as meditation.
To gain a close-up view of meditation, we turned to a veteran -- and an insider.
A man we call Barry Robertson practiced Transcendental Meditation for four and a half years, for nearly two of which he earned his living as a beginning instructor in the popular technique. Transcendental Meditation is the largest and most successful self-help therapy in America. Transported from the Himalayas to the West in the late fifties by its developer, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, TM has been hailed in the United States as an instant, nonchemical tranquilizer for the relief of nervous tension. The basic meditation technique costs $125 to learn, and in 1977 the TM organization reported that in the United States alone 30,000 new meditators were signing up for the introductory course each month. According to a recent Gallup poll, 4 percent of Americans have become involved in Transcendental Meditation.
At the beginning of our talk, Barry Robertson cautioned us that his experiences in TM would come as a shock to most casual practitioners of the technique. This was because, according to him, most American meditators never succeed in actually transcending . Most, he said, only use their twice-daily sessions of meditation for simple rest and relaxation. Robertson, an energetic and resolute young man in his late twenties, slim, fair-haired, and eager to be heard, explained in detail why the transcendental form represents a particularly hazardous technique among the varieties of meditation.
"There are four basic types of meditation," he began, "and there is a major difference between TM and the others. First, there's contemplation, in which you take a sentence or a parable and you think about it. You just go into your mind and close out the outside world and you think. A good example which I find very funny is one the Zen Buddhists use: 'What is the sound of one hand clapping?' They think about it, they meditate on it for hours, and they come out with nothing. That's contemplation.
"Contemplation is similar to another type of meditation that I wou
ld classify as 'Christian meditation,'" he continued. "This consists of studying the scriptures and pondering God and thinking about how you can use that scripture to give meaning to your life. The third type of meditation is simply concentration, where you concentrate on one spot on the wall or on your navel or on a spot in the middle of your forehead. You concentrate on one thing and you try to get the ability to hold your thoughts there. If you find yourself wandering off into other things, you bring your mind right back to that one point."
As Robertson saw it, however, Transcendental Meditation is none of the above.
"In TM you empty your mind," he stressed. "You don't concentrate on anything because that would take up mental energy and make you control your mind. TM is switching your mind into neutral. You have no control over it; you try not to have control over it. You try to let your mind just go flat, with no thoughts whatsoever. When you concentrate on anything, you have at least one thought. TM attempts to go beyond that."
According to Robertson, to achieve this emptying of the mind, each student of Transcendental Meditation is given what is said to be his own custom-tailored 'mantra,' a Sanskrit word which the Maharishi has defined as a meaningless sound with a "vibratory effect" that will help the mind reach a quiet state. According to the TM organization, the various sound qualities of particular mantras have been known for over five thousand years.
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