by Sands Hall
“You’re not sick, honey,” she said. “Rise above it. Get up and get dressed. You’ve got ten minutes to eat your egg and get out the door.”
This was Christian Science at work. And though I wouldn’t know it for decades, it’s pretty much how a Scientologist would have dealt with the situation. These ideas took firm hold. Long before I began to study Hubbard’s writings, a friend told me I was the last person in the world she’d call if she were feeling ill. “You just ask, ‘What’s really going on?’” she said. “I have respect for that way of thinking, but sometimes someone’s just sick! You don’t have to make the sick person feel worse!”
I was sad not to be the first friend she’d call were she in trouble. Nevertheless, I couldn’t shake a certainty imbedded with the same adamancy that an egg is the best form of protein: Ill in body is ill in mind. And eventually I’d find my way to a religion that completely supported the idea that if something bad happens, you’ve created it; you’ve “pulled it in.”
Mom grew up in California’s Sacramento Delta, where her father raised orchards of peach and pear on enough land to house a literal village of Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino workers. She remembers visiting them: the cooking fires and vast iron woks, the rising aromas and the ability to feed dozens from a single pot—inspirations that stayed with her all her life. No matter how many might show up for dinner: “Throw in a packet of frozen peas,” she’d whisper to me, “and get another loaf of French bread out of the freezer.”
All of her childhood, her mother was ill with rheumatic fever. The week leading up to Mom’s fifth birthday, the huge house was hushed, all play curtailed. On the day she turned five, there was of course no party. That afternoon her father came to find her to give her a present: a silk-lined box containing a choker of large round crystal beads.
“He must have just grabbed something out of my mother’s jewelry box,” Mom told me. “Even then I knew it was inappropriate for a child. It made me understand how sad he must be. It also made me understand she was dead.”
Still, for years, way into college, she wondered if a practical joke was being played on her. Any day, she half believed, half hoped, her mother would return, and they’d all have a good laugh about how fooled she’d been.
Only once do I remember seeing her weep. Even in 2008, as her beloved husband, to whom she’d been married for sixty-three happy years, took his last breath, tears filled her eyes, but did not fall. I think she’d learned, that day she turned five, that it would do no good, and she did not allow herself to start down a path that would tear her heart open.
In a way, Dad, too, lost his parents when he was young: they divorced, bitterly. He spent part of those childhood years in San Diego with his father, and part with his mother Jessie in Hawaii. This may have been a reason he could seem cold at times, or might explain the rage that now and again surged through him, when he’d make rash decisions or say or do startlingly cruel things. He told far fewer stories than our mother did of his childhood. One of the few I remember is of the day he found a coin—“two bits”—on the coffee table. He ran out to buy candy and a magazine, Boy’s Life, and when he returned, found his mother weeping. She’d planned to use that quarter to buy their dinner.
It may have been this, as well as the news available in a newspaper on any given day, that made Mom sometimes say, “If God exists, why is he such a bastard?” And Dad would nod. Sometimes they laughed. Sometimes they didn’t.
“If God exists, why is he such a bastard?” Every time I heard this, I was struck by the simultaneity of possible meanings: God did not exist, which seemed in line with what I thought my parents believed. On the other hand, he might, which was confusing. And if he did, he had it out for the world he’d created.
training routines
All evening, I continued to hope that Skip would walk through the door. He’d been on course only a few nights—he’d started the week before, escorted into the course room by Ed, the Center’s executive director.
“Skip is here to begin his first service,” Ed had said, with a flourish of his hand, as if he’d conjured Skip out of a hat.
Skip was in his late twenties, fit and tan, with a lovely smile. But his eyes skittered, as if he was looking for something he couldn’t find. I chalked it up to his being nervous about starting a Scientology course. People often were.
“After talking about it a bit,” Ed said, “Skip and I think Success Through Communication is just the course he needs!”
I smiled, slightly ashamed by the charade Ed and I were playing. Success Through Communication was almost always the introductory course recommended to anyone compelled/encouraged to give Scientology a try. Five years before, newly married, it had been the course I’d finally been persuaded to take—and what it covered intrigued me, one could even say hooked me, as it was designed to do. The “comm course” dances between the pragmatic—that communicating effectively requires certain steps and that those steps can be learned—and the spiritual: that one may have a body, but one is a spirit, and that here, too, there are steps to take toward, well, being an ever-more-effective spirit. It took me a long time to understand that the communication skills the course teaches (which are real, and useful) pull one inexorably into the specifics of auditing, and thus, of Scientology.
Skip carried his shiny course pack, which Ed would have given him when he paid for the course. Even on this October evening he wore shorts, T-shirt, flip-flops. I got him signed in, went over the course room basics, and watched him open his course pack, before going to check on the other students.
A Scientology course room consists of at least two separate rooms: one used for quiet study, and another, called the “practical” room, for those parts of a course that require talking or practicing/drilling. A Course Supervisor is not there to teach. Hubbard’s materials do that. Rather, moving back and forth between the rooms, I was to ensure that students understood what they were reading (or, in the case of tapes, listening to), and if they didn’t, to help them find where they’d encountered a “Barrier to Study” and to get them over it.
Skip signaled to me that he’d completed the first section in his booklet. This meant that he was ready to be checked out on his understanding of the Cycle of Communication.
As Hubbard did with many of life’s most obvious and common activities, he took a look at what’s involved in communication and broke it down into its component parts. This “cycle” is straightforward enough: you say or ask something, the other person responds, you acknowledge the response; for example:
Joe: Hey, Sue, shut the garage door when you leave, will you?
Sue: Sure.
Joe: Thanks.
When I took this course myself and studied the cycle for the first time, I’d found it to be so obvious as to be almost laughable.
Yet I’d also felt a curious stirring, an inward squint of interest. It caused me to consider various moments in my life when misunderstandings had arisen over that final bit of the cycle, the “acknowledgment”—shortened by Scientologists to “ack.” Silence can be used as a weapon, and interpreted in a number of ways. If Joe doesn’t say “Thanks,” Sue could hear “How many times do I have to tell you!” It was easy to imagine the resentment or even argument that might ensue without Joe’s ack.
It was glaringly obvious. And yet, like much I was to encounter in Scientology, the obvious thing was often ignored, or simply not employed.
I asked a student, Jen, who’d completed this same course, to check Skip’s understanding. She started by requesting that he demonstrate—“demo”—the comm cycle.
He seized the concept of demoing right away, as students tended to do.
“Well,” he said, lifting a battery from the pile of items on the table. “This is Pete.” He rustled around a bit more and selected a little metal thimble abandoned from a Monopoly game. “This is Suzie,” he said, stowing it on the tip o
f his pinky.
Jen nodded. “Good.”
He wiggled the thimble. “Hey, Pete,” he made it say in a high voice, “Get milk!”
He wiggled the battery. “Will do, Suzie,” he said in a low voice. He looked up.
“And?” Jen said.
Skip frowned. “Pete said, ‘Will do.’ He acknowledged Suzie, like the bulletin says.”
“Flunk,” Jen said, as kindly as she could.
Skip looked startled. “What?”
“You need to read the bulletin again.”
“Why? Oh! Right! Now Suzie has to acknowledge Pete.” He wiggled the battery. “Thanks, Pete!” he said.
Jen opened Skip’s course pack and pointed to the page in question. “That’s right,” she said. “Suzie’s ack completes the cycle. But you need to reread the bulletin anyway, and make sure there isn’t anything you don’t understand.”
Skip rolled his eyes. He reread the page in about five seconds and passed the drill. He initialed that step as done on his check sheet and moved on to the next item, which was to read about the first training routine of the Communication Cycle, called OT TR0: Operating Thetan Training Routine Zero.
operating thetan training Routine Zero.
Those words, and its acronym, OT TR0, are packed with information.
Hubbard launched much of Scientology from Saint Hill Manor in England, and his work includes various Britishisms. He dates his writings in the British way, using day/month/year: Hubbard Communication Office Policy Letters and Bulletins (HCOPLs and HCOBs, respectively) are dated 15 Apr 1983, rather than the American month/day/year: April 15, 1983. He also begins various counts with zero rather than one; thus, the first Training Routine is 0.
Training Routines, or TRs, are designed to take students through “laid out practical steps gradient by gradient, to teach a student to apply with certainty what he has learned.”16
And thetan is Scientology’s word for “spirit” or “soul”: “the awareness of awareness unit.”17 The word was coined by Hubbard using the Greek word theta, which, according to him, means “thought or life or spirit.”
And the all-important Operating Thetan—OT—is “willing and knowing cause over life, thought, matter, energy, space and time.”18
For Scientologists, to be an Operating Thetan is the ultimate goal. However, it’s a state with many demarcations, and those yearning to be OT move, for years, along what’s known as the Bridge to Total Freedom. An OT III, significant stage though that is to achieve, has quite a distance to travel before becoming OT VI; even an OT VIII understands there’s a lot of territory to traverse before she’s totally “at cause.” But one starts with OT TR0.
So in order to understand even the name of this first drill, there are a number of dense concepts with which a student has to grapple. This may be why, in the current iteration of the course, this Training Routine is called TR0 Be There.19 However, since I studied these materials as Hubbard originally titled and described them, that’s how I’ll relate them.
The directions for OT TR0 are: “Student and coach sit facing each other with eyes closed.”20
That’s it. That is what the drill trains two people to do: to sit facing each other with their eyes closed.
Except, of course, it’s a lot. Some have likened it to meditating, except that you’re not focusing on breath or a mantra—you’re staying conscious of what’s going on in the room around you, particularly of the person sitting opposite. Over the years, I’d come to think of it as training senses other than sight in being aware. You are readying yourself for communication, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be speech that arrives, or that is sent.
I asked Kolya, who’d completed a number of courses, including the comm course, to drill the TR with Skip. They settled into two chairs, facing each other.
“Start,” Kolya said to Skip; he was “coach.” They closed their eyes.
But Skip fidgeted. Kolya opened his eyes and said, “Flunk.”
Skip made a face. “Why do you say that! Flunk! It’s a terrible word.”
I’d thought exactly the same thing the first time the word was aimed at me. “Flunk” begins with the faintly ominous f and ends with that harsh k. And it means you failed! But years ago, during my own first night on this same course, I’d heard the Course Supervisor say it often: whenever someone wiggled or giggled. And she’d said it with no inflection, no judgment, no harshness; it just meant “do it again, do it better.”
I’d come to appreciate the idea: Flunk. Start. Flunk. Start. My brother had once quoted Samuel Beckett saying something similar: “Fail again. Fail better.”21
Almost, I could hear his voice: deep, comforting. We were both living in New York then, and one day, having lost out on a yearned-for role in a play, I’d gone to him weeping. He took a deep drag from his cigarette, his brown eyes deeply kind.
“‘Ever tried. Ever failed,’” he said, speaking through the smoke curling out of his mouth. “Remember what Beckett says: ‘No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’”
I shook my head to fling my brother out of it. Still: Fail again. Fail better.
I told Kolya to go back to his own study and sat down opposite Skip.
“I know what you mean,” I told him. “But it’s just a way of saying something’s not quite right and to try it again. You understand the drill, right?” I picked up his pack, which he’d stashed next to his chair. “Anything you don’t understand?”
“Yeah, yeah, I get it. It’s just . . .” He pushed his hair back from his face with both hands. “About a month ago, I did this retreat on Kauai, about confronting your fears? And supposedly mastering them? We did a lot of stuff, a lot of stuff, a lot of weird ‘mind over matter’ stuff.” He began to scrub his head, making his hair stick up in tufts. His breath came in spurts, as if he’d just run up seven flights of stairs. “I don’t know, ever since then I’ve got these weird visions in my head. I can’t sit still. The world just pitches around.”
He poured out more details about the seminar and its leader, but even though my sympathies were deeply aroused, it had been drilled into me that when I was in the course room, I was “on post.” I could be kind, of course, but I wasn’t to listen to a student’s problems; that was for the Ethics Officer, or an auditor. I acknowledged Skip, checked his understanding of the drill, and asked Jen to do it with him. She took her place in the chair opposite, watched Skip close his eyes.
“Start,” she said, and closed her own.
Skip’s body tilted, straightened, tilted, as if he were on a roller-coaster ride. A few moments later, Jen’s did the same. They looked like dogs chasing rabbits in their sleep, little aborted movements that were strangely terrifying.
Jen opened her eyes and looked at me with disbelief. “Umm, flunk?” she said, and I nodded and told her to go back to her own study. Feeling asinine, I checked Skip’s understanding of every word in the drill. Once again I asked Jen to twin. Once again they lasted about sixty seconds. I gave Skip one of Hubbard’s bulletins to read and went and knocked on Ed’s office door.
“Yup!” he said.
Ed was a man I’d never taken to, although I grudgingly admired him. He seemed to me one-quarter redneck and three-quarters rogue, the roguish part undeniably charming. He was brash, a quality that could also count as directness. He seemed to care a bit too much about wearing hip clothes and using language he thought was savvy and cool, but even as I disdained what I saw as a strange eagerness, I saw how this quality might help attract upstat kinds of people to the Center. I told him what was going on.
“How about you do the drill with him?” he said. “I’ll watch the course room.”
As I sat opposite Skip, he leaned forward and, keeping his voice low, said, “All of us, that weekend? And there were about a hundred? We had to do a firewalk, we had to walk across burning coals. Twenty feet.” Hi
s face flushed a terrible red. “Twelve hundred degrees,” he said. “You can feel the heat forty feet away.”
I didn’t ask the obvious question.
“I did it.” His cheeks lost color, so that the skin of his face was now a splotchy red and white. His forehead shone with perspiration. “I hardly remember. It was a blur. It didn’t hurt. The guru guy told us to say ‘cool moss, cool moss,’ and to keep our eyes on something in the distance, whatever we did to not look down! I got across. But ever since I haven’t been able to sleep. I can’t sit still. I can’t do much of anything!” His voice broke. “That’s why I’m here. A person told me that maybe Scientology could help.”
I knew I should say, of course it can. But my mind scanned how I’d found my own way to the Church: how I’d homed in on it, the avoidances and refusals, the plunges and graspings, the flickering doubt always present between epiphanies—which rising portcullis I slammed back down.
“Let’s try again,” I said.
We closed our eyes, and I said, “Start.”
I need to reiterate that “all” that’s required in this training routine is to sit opposite another person, both of you with your eyes closed. It’s part of the Cycle of Communication (and, as I had come to see, an essential part of an auditor’s training) because a person needs to be present to receive a communication, just as a person needs to be present to begin one. It seemed to me, although it had taken me a while to grasp this, that part of what the “routine” was “training” you to do was to consciously and continuously and kind of hugely include the other person. Not just what he might be saying. Not even how he might be saying it. A larger sense of that person—another spiritual path might call it an “aura.” As with a number of Scientological ideas, once I understood their purpose, it seemed an excellent skill to have.