by Sands Hall
flunk. start.
Copyright © 2018 by Sands Hall
First hardcover edition: 2018
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Excerpts from “Nohow On,” copyright © 1983 by Samuel Beckett. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic. Inc. Any third-party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited.
Excerpts from Waiting for Godot, copyright © 1954 by Grove Press, Inc; copyright © renewed 1982 by Samuel Beckett. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. Any third-party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hall, Sands, author.
Title: Flunk, start : reclaiming my decade lost in scientology : a memoir /
Sands Hall.
Description: Berkeley : Counterpoint Press, 2018.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017038728 | ISBN 9781619021785
Subjects: LCSH: Hall, Sands. | Ex–church members—United States—
Biography. | Scientologists—United States—Biography. | Scientology.
Classification: LCC BP605.S2 H345 2018 | DDC 299/.936092 [B] — dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017038728
Jacket designed by Jarrod Taylor
Book designed by Wah-Ming Chang
COUNTERPOINT
2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318
Berkeley, CA 94710
www.counterpointpress.com
Printed in the United States of America
Distributed by Publishers Group West
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This book is a memoir. The events, locales, and people described are as the author remembers them. In order to maintain anonymity and preserve privacy, she has changed the names and identifying characteristics of certain locales and individuals.
For Tom—
who lived so much of it with me
’Tis the temper of the hot and superstitious part of mankind in matters of religion ever to be fond of mysteries & for that reason to like best what they understand least.
isaac newton, A Historical Account of Two Notable Corruptions of Scripture
. . . later he believed he had learned the truth of Paul’s words where he said that God’s Word was like a mirror in which a man might see not only the man he was, but the man he might be, and he came to understand that the proper business of life was trying to do something about the difference.
harlan, in Unassigned Territory by Kem Nunn
contents
foreword: knowledge report
A note to the reader, and a bit about the endnotes
I: NOTHING BETTER TO BE
We need you to be a zealot
Claptrap
Enthusiastic devotion to a cause
If God exists, why is he such a bastard?
Training Routines
Dancing through life
This is so weird!
Saint Catherine’s wheel
He was kind of a nutcase
Nothing better to be
She went Clear last lifetime!
You do know C. S. Lewis was a Christian?
Imagine a plane
Age of Aquarius
Guilt is good
I’m me, I’m me, I’m me
Wills and things
II: THE WHOLE AGONIZED FUTURE OF THIS PLANET
You do know that guy’s a Scientologist?
Your brother’s had an accident
Please, please, please don’t take his mind
That’s that Scientology stuff he does
Hope springs eternal
That’s Source!
How much electricity?
A comb, perhaps a cat
Flunk. Start.
You could take a look at Doubt
The Ethics Officer
Every sorrow in this world comes down to a misunderstood word
The true sense of the word
Sunny
Gah
Imagination?
What is true for you is true for you
He has simply moved on to his next level
Because, you know, you did just turn thirty-six
Anasazi
Binding back
That spiritual stuff does matter
III: AFTER SUCH A STORM
Modernism?
It doesn’t matter
Spit happens
The loss of nameless things
Pilgrimage season
Who never left her brother for dead
After such a storm
Treasure
afterword: disconnection
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Endnotes
foreword
knowledge report
For a decade, I pretended that a decade of my life hadn’t happened. Those “lost” years included the seven I was involved with the Church of Scientology and the three it took to be certain I wouldn’t, again, return. Eventually, I began to peer and prod and then write about those years, and just as I’d completed a shaggy draft of this memoir, I found out that Jamie, the man who’d introduced me to the Church, had died. A memorial was planned for him in Los Angeles, a city I’d fled decades before and since visited just once—and then only because a book tour took me there. Because I’d been examining what had come of meeting and then marrying Jamie, it seemed imperative to attend his memorial, even though it meant putting myself back in the maw of what I’d found first scary, then intriguing and even engrossing, and then, during the awful time of leaving, terrifying.
I would also see people who’d once been incredibly dear to me but with whom, since leaving the Church, I’d lost contact. One of them, Paloma, who’d been not only a close friend but also one of my auditors (Scientology’s form of counselor), even offered her guest room. Paloma’s openheartedness and willingness to walk outside Scientology’s boundaries moved and surprised me. Generally, those in the Church do not associate with those who have defected from it. But Paloma welcomed me, and, as we always had, we talked deeply, including about what we were currently writing. She pressed, and finally I offered up that I’d finished a draft of a memoir.
“About Scientology!” She looked shocked.
I told her it was also about my family, “which was, in a way, its own kind of cult,” I said, laughing.
Clearly troubled, she asked me what I meant. After a bit more discussion, I suggested we not talk further about it. “When you get your next chunk of auditing,” I said, “you’ll have to answer all those security questions. I don’t want to make trouble for you in any way.”
Paloma shook her head. “I won’t let the Church dictate who are and are not my friends.”
I found this admirable, and, though surprising, even possible: Paloma has been married to a non-Scientologist for three decades; perhaps she and the Church—she and her own psyche—had figured things out. And for a few months after that remarkable and unexpectedly heartwarming time in Los Angeles, she and I stayed in touch. In one startling phone call she even implied that she might have accomplished all she needed to with and in the Church.
However, almost immediately after that confidence, if that’s what it was, the phone calls and emails stopped. As Scientologists put it, we “fell out of comm.” I was
not surprised. I knew she was regretting our candid discussions.
A few months later, a mutual friend told me Paloma was very ill. This, too, I did not find surprising. Because Scientology—like Christian Science and other spiritual paths—believes that physical troubles are linked to emotional and psychological ones, I was fairly sure that Paloma was tracing her illness back to our talks. If she had entertained any doubts, and certainly by communicating such feelings to an ex-Scientologist, she was guilty of transgressions against the Church. By now she’d be seeing someone known as the Ethics Officer. Maybe getting auditing. In any case, spending lots of money “handling” that she’d talked to an apostate. She would not be in touch again.
So I was startled when, a few months later, I received a business-sized envelope with her name and address in the upper left-hand corner.
Standing in the morning sun next to my mailbox, which is at the end of my driveway in the rural area where I live, I opened it. Inside were three typed pages. Centered at the top of the first page were the words:
Knowledge Report
For even a seasoned member of the Church of Scientology, the phrase “Knowledge Report” can buckle the knees; to be the subject of one can curdle the blood.1 Knowledge Reports are one of the increasingly totalitarian tactics L. Ron Hubbard employed as Scientology became bigger and more successful—and more controversial. In a 1982 policy letter, “Keeping Scientology Working,” he writes that for an organization to run effectively, “the individual members themselves enforce the actions and mores of the group.”2 This can lead to rampant paranoia, as it’s possible to imagine that every step you take in your job (especially in an organization established on Hubbard’s principles), and indeed in your life, is being observed. Snitching is actively encouraged. As a Knowledge Report may lead to intense disciplinary measures, to receive one is literally hair-raising.
The walk out to my mailbox that morning had been to take a break from writing; I was almost done with a second draft of the memoir. By that time, I had processed enough of my emotions about the Church to be able to give a laugh at what I held in my hand, although it was a shocked laugh. I understood why Paloma might have been led to write a Knowledge Report, but why on earth would she send me a copy? It would be placed in her ethics folder—this much I remembered from my time in the Church—but I wasn’t a Scientologist, hadn’t been one in more than a decade; Scientology’s protocols had nothing to do with me.
Nevertheless, as I read what Paloma had written, my world tilted and spun.
Time, Place, Form, Event, Hubbard requires in such a report, and Paloma supplied them.3 She described our friendship while I was in the Church, discussed her role as my auditor, addressed how my parents had been virulent in their disapproval, how the Church had dubbed them SPs—Suppressive Persons—and insisted I formally disconnect from them, which I’d refused to do. She also included details of our recent talks, including the fact that I’d called Scientology a “cult” and that—this was the “knowledge” she was “reporting”—I was writing a memoir about it. Except for perspective (her point of view was not mine), what she wrote was neither histrionic nor incorrect. It was knowledge—her knowledge—and she had reported it.
I scanned the pages again, wondering what her purpose was. Had she sent the Knowledge Report to scare me? After all, the Church is infamous for attacking those who criticize it. Was she sending it as a warning? To make me stop writing, to shut me up?
Of course it was intended to scare me, and to shut me up. Such behavior is consistent with my experience within the Church: For years I observed Scientologists, especially those in management, employing such tactics, creating a semihysterical “us versus them” tension to keep us (for then I was a Scientologist) in fear and in thrall.
And even though I was empathetic to Paloma’s need to employ every available tool to make her illness go away, I was shocked. She is smart and kind, and a writer herself; was she really willing to subject a fellow writer, and a friend, to such a thing?
But why be shocked? Paloma has been a Scientologist for forty years, weathering and justifying decades of attacks against Church practices. In Hubbard’s nomenclature, she was being “unreasonable,” which is, believe it or not, an accolade. When you are a devout Scientologist, no one is capable of “reasoning” you out of your firmly held beliefs (which are, of course, Hubbard’s). Being called “reasonable” does not, to a Scientologist, mean “having sound judgment, being fair and sensible”; rather, it’s the worst sort of pejorative: It means you are explaining things away, coming up with reasons you haven’t managed to get something done, justifying behavior.4 Paloma, being a good Scientologist, was being unreasonable about the possibility that anything negative might be published about her church.
And this decision—to file a Knowledge Report, and to send a copy (a warning) to me—is an example of the mind control the Church exercises: teaching its practitioners, as they accept and embrace its commonsensical and useful ideas, to accept and embrace its authoritarian and outrageous ones. Scientologists willingly and of their own accord place those blinding mechanisms around their intelligences so that they can continue to believe.
I know, because I was once so persuaded. With intention and purpose, I screwed those mechanisms into place, mechanisms that filter information, massage facts, and gerrymander perspective. And in spite of ferocious doubts, I kept them there a long time.
I slid the pages of the Knowledge Report back into the envelope and headed back up the driveway thinking of the many memoirs written by former Scientologists, filled with their dreadful stories, and of the nonfiction books and documentaries that substantiate these abuses. But for me, and in my book, beyond this incident—if you can call receiving a Knowledge Report an “incident”—there was no personal outrage or scandal to relate (except for how and why I came to stay in a cult for seven years). I was never forced to sleep in a brig or scrub a latrine with my toothbrush; I was never locked in a trailer playing musical chairs with my future attached to grabbing a seat. I lost dear friends when I finally left, but I didn’t have to abandon cherished family, leap an electric fence on a motorcycle, or execute a complicated escape plan, as others have had to do.5
Although I did lose things. Those years, for instance.
Which is how I thought of it, for a very long time.
However. Scientologists, to learn a particular skill, practice or “drill” that skill with a partner. If one does the drill incorrectly, the partner says, “Flunk.” And immediately, “Start.” Harsh as “flunk” may sound, there’s no intended animosity; it’s just a way of communicating that you’re doing it wrong. The first few times I experienced it, I was startled, shocked. It’s horrid to be told you’ve failed, and “flunk” begins with that f hiss and ends with that shocking k. But once I got over the jolt of it, I came to see its efficacy: you just get on with doing the thing you didn’t do correctly the first time.
Staying in Scientology as long as I did, I felt I’d “flunked” a huge chunk of my life. As I worked on this book, I realized that, somewhat to my surprise, that perspective was changing. Also that I was finding a possible “start” in examining those lost years and what, in fact, I might have gained from them. A hope grew that the book might bolster someone doubting her own involvement in the Church to find the courage to leave. Even, possibly, that it might offer a lens to those who felt they’d tossed a decade of their own into the dustbin—a drug problem, a destructive relationship—through which to see meaning and find purpose. Perhaps not in having made those choices in the first place, but in the life we have as a result. That is, having “flunked,” there is the option to “start.”
All this I thought about on that walk back from the mailbox. Then I settled in again at my desk, put the envelope in a drawer, and got back to work. I was, I realized somewhat grimly, writing a Knowledge Report of my own.
a note to the reader, and a bit abou
t the endnotes
In the early fifteenth century, a memoir was a “written record.” From the French memorie, it meant a “note, something to be kept in mind,” which makes me think of a to-do list, or the memos we write at the beginning of a day full of errands. The word descends from Latin’s memoria, “memory.” Only in the late 1600s did memoir take on its current meaning: a person’s written account of her life.
Such an account relies, of course, on memory. Memories can be vivid and precise, or they can be vague; they may change in the telling, or over the years as new information is assimilated; they can emphasize some things and neglect others. We have only to ask family members about last year’s Thanksgiving to find a multitude of accounts.
I relied on memory as I wrote this book. Also my journals and research. While of course I can’t recall entire conversations word for word, I do remember the spirit of them, where they took place, and certain lines of dialogue, around which I’ve built scenes. I consulted diaries and datebooks to reconstruct a timeline. Some people who knew me well during the years recounted here will be surprised that they are nowhere in these pages; others may be startled to find themselves represented. While I’ve changed some names and identifying places and characteristics, especially of friends and acquaintances from my Scientology years, I’ve stayed true to those people, and to those encounters.
As I’ve strived to tell things as truly as I can, I’ve also done my best to present L. Ron Hubbard’s “religious technology” as it was laid out at the time I was involved with the Church, from 1982 to 1989. Since the ascension, in 1987, of David Miscavige as head of the Church of Scientology, many changes have been implemented, including the editing and republishing of Hubbard’s materials. This may mean that my experience of a particular Scientology course or doctrine does not match its current iteration. When I use a Scientology phrase, quote from Hubbard’s writing, or refer to Church doctrine, you will find, in the endnotes, a reference to the book, tape, policy letter, bulletin, or article where the particular quotation or idea would have been found during the time I was a Scientologist. Many of these citations are from the Dianetics and Scientology Technical Dictionary.6 I also cite current official Scientology websites or sources, where Hubbard’s original text has often been updated or edited.