Flunk. Start.

by Sands Hall

  Jamie floated his spoon above the remains of eggs benedict on his plate. “Here’s you, the awareness unit—that is, the soul, the thetan—looking at those pictures. You are looking at memories stored in your Analytical Mind”—he tapped the plate—“the ones that you’re clear about. But you can’t be quite so clear about ones you react to. You react maybe without knowing why you’re reacting, or why the reaction is, perhaps, so big.”

  As he rummaged the spoon around in a smear of egg yolk, there was a comfortable growl of laughter at this representation of the Reactive Mind. I appreciated the “show, don’t tell” nature of the demonstration—it was a writer’s phrase I’d heard all my life, and in my mind, Scientology gained points for utilizing this wisdom.

  Tucking the spoon under the plate, Jamie lifted it slightly, to more laughter—the spirit-spoon inhabiting the plate-body. He broke a crumb apart to show how auditing allows you to examine a buried memory that is working on you in unknown ways.

  Barb hastened to add that it wasn’t that auditing makes you forget. Gesturing at Jamie’s plate, she said that all those “memory crumbs” were still there, just no longer clumped together, because the memory was no longer unexamined. Auditing, she said, moves the memory from the Reactive Mind to the Analytical Mind, so there’s no longer a reaction when that button is pressed.

  “That’s where the idea of Clear comes from,” she said. “All the buttons on the adding machine have to be ‘cleared’ if the computation is to be correct.”

  This analogy to a machine, especially an old-fashioned one, was disappointing. I wanted to be clear like a mountain stream. But I thought about Milton holding the actor’s jaw and asking those gentle questions. So far, none of this seemed outrageous.

  “You see,” Barb said, “the thetan looks at the memories. Good and bad. But the mind doesn’t always process them correctly, and that’s got to be cleared up. That’s where auditing comes in. And sometimes—here’s the really cool thing—you remember incidents that couldn’t have happened this lifetime!”

  I nodded, thrilled. I’d always wondered about past lifetimes, why some historical periods seem so much more familiar and vivid than others.

  “That’s because there are all these other lives you’ve lived. And you—the you of you, the thetan—carries those memories! Which is where Scientology comes in.”

  She began to laugh. “You know that phrase ‘Life’s a bitch, and then you die’? Well, for us, it’s ‘Life’s a bitch, and then you live forever’!”

  This was greeted by roars of laughter. I laughed, too.

  i excused myself to go to the bathroom, feeling a roil of conflicting emotions that would characterize my relationship to Scientology for years to come: wanting to leave, to get back to life as I knew it, no matter how mysterious and confusing, while, simultaneously, being drawn to the certainty it offered. The happiness it seemed to promise.

  When I returned to the table, they were talking about something called the Dynamics. There appeared to be eight of them, and they were about survival.29

  “But more than just survival! About living well!” Jamie smiled up at me.

  I didn’t sit back down. I was trying to find a moment to ask if we could leave. I would have him drop me at my apartment and we would say goodbye, The End.

  The First Dynamic seemed to have to do with your relationship to yourself: as simple as hygiene, or what you choose to wear, your education, certainly your spiritual path.

  “And then there’s the Second Dynamic,” Jamie said. “That’s the one you have with your family, and of course with your spouse and your children.”

  I slid back into my chair. We carefully didn’t meet each other’s eyes. He moved his spoon to be with the knife and fork: family. The group watched with grins on their faces.

  Someone else described the Third Dynamic: survival through various groups you’re part of, relationships you have with friends and also through work. “Such as fellow Scientologists,” someone offered. I did my best not to wince.

  “Lots of groups,” Jamie said, quickly. “For some of us, the group known as Jazz Musicians. For Sands, the group might be Actors.”

  I nodded, relieved. “I see. Like the Democrats.”

  An uncomfortable silence descended.

  “We don’t get into politics much,” Jamie said. “There’s too much other work to be done.” At what must have been my puzzled face, he added, “On the planet. There’s really insidious stuff going on. That’s why we’re all on the Bridge—the Bridge to Total Freedom! Because then we can save the planet.”

  It seemed kind of arrogant, that they thought they were capable of saving the planet (whatever that meant), although I was touched that they wanted to.

  They began to gather purses and jackets, and there was a general exodus. Several remained in the parking lot, talking and smoking. I stood in their midst, as if I were one of them. Which I was not! Yet we’d been talking about important things! Issues of art! And life. And purpose. Except for the lack of white wine that should go with such conversations, this could have been a lunch around my parents’ table. And here was this handsome, talented, respected man by my side. Who just then took my hand, holding it as we waved goodbye and walked across the parking lot. After a moment, I curled my fingers into his.

  As we drove, the air between us fluttered, full of promise, and no little terror.

  “So you got as far as the Third Dynamic,” I said, to say something. “What’s the Fourth?”

  “Survival as a species.” He grinned. “So you like the Dynamics?”

  “I like how they order things. Sometimes life feels awfully chaotic.”

  “You’ll find a lot of order in Scientology.” He described the other Dynamics. They appeared to cover everything from self to family to nature to the physical universe to spirit to infinity. “Some might call that god, but we don’t, usually. ‘The allness of all,’” he quoted.

  I was absolutely fascinated, even as I feared this might be exactly the way one got dragged into the dread cult. Who hadn’t heard of the lawsuits, power mongering, bullying, financial excesses?

  But on the other hand! The organization! It was so orderly! Everything could be broken down into its component parts and explained.

  Also, just because you got involved with someone who belonged to a particular religion didn’t mean you had to get involved too. One might say one was Christian, or Jewish, or Buddhist, or, I supposed, even a Scientologist—was it a religion?—but it didn’t take over one’s life. Especially not a Hall’s life.

  My understanding of the possible role of religion, especially in regards to marriage, was not just blithe. It was fantastically ignorant.

  that’s source!

  Jamie’s absolute faith in what he called the “Tech” troubled me. Yet his explanations of Scientology notions were compelling. And doubts got swept under the rug when we kissed.

  One afternoon, as we were having tea at the round wooden table in his kitchen, he said, “It’s very important that you understand the whole overt/withhold phenomenon.” He placed the emphasis on the first syllable: overt.

  “Do you mean overt, like something that’s really obvious?”

  “Nope. Not an adjective. A noun.” (This kind of clarity of language, common to Scientologists, I found very appealing.) He fetched a thick red book. On the cover, its title was embossed in gold: Dianetics and Scientology Technical Dictionary. “I shouldn’t be explaining these things to you,” he said. “That can lead to misunderstoods, and even to squirreling.”

  “Squirreling?”

  He flipped pages. “Squirrel,” he read. “‘Those who engage in actions altering Scientology, and offbeat practices.’30 Because the Tech is so powerful, and people see that it is, it’s possible to take pieces of it and use them for your own purposes. Werner Erhard, for example. He took a few Scientology courses,
read a ton of Hubbard’s books, and squirreled all that into those self-help seminars he runs, ‘est.’ Because it’s the Tech, it works, but because it’s not the whole Tech, it can be damaging. That’s squirreling. The way to keep that from happening, the way to keep Scientology working, is to always go to Source.”

  “Source?”

  “What Hubbard says. He’s Source.” He placed the open volume before me, and leafed to the page that held the words overt act.

  Overt act 1. An overt act isn’t just injuring someone or something; an overt act is an act of omission or commission which does the least good for the least number of dynamics or the most harm to the greatest number of dynamics. (HCOPL 1 Nov 1970 III) 2. An intentionally committed harmful act committed in an effort to solve a problem. (SH Spec 44, 6410C27) 3. That thing which you do that you aren’t willing to have happen to you. (ISH AAA 10, 6009C14)

  Jamie pointed. “If you want to find the policy letter or bulletin or tape these quotes are taken from, inside these parentheses is the information you need. For instance, ‘HCOPL’ means the Hubbard Communications Office Policy Letter you can refer to. ‘SH Spec’ are the tapes he recorded at Saint Hill, the big Org in England, and the numbers are where in the tape you can find that quote.”

  I stared. “This must have taken so much work!”

  He nodded. “If you aren’t able to define words—LRH covers this in the Study Tech materials—you have misunderstoods, and those can lead to overts and even blowing. This way, see, if you define a word, and it’s still not clear, you can go to where Hubbard used it and read it in context. You can always go to Source.” He pushed away from the table and headed up the stairs. “Let me show you something. Come on.”

  After a moment, I followed. Source! It sounded so totalitarian! Or so ultra-religious. Weird, in any case. My stomach churned.

  The second floor, in addition to the living room and bedroom, held his study. One shelf was loaded with a row of huge red books. Another shelf held a row of equally large green ones. There were at least a dozen volumes in each set, beautifully bound.

  “The red ones are the Tech vols,” Jamie said, reaching for one. “Everything LRH wrote about auditing. Also Study Tech, lots of stuff.” The pages were legal-sized, which meant the volume was long as well as thick. “See, it’s all HCOPLs or HCOBs—policy letters or bulletins. That’s Source!”

  I didn’t want to touch it. The whole thing was so unsettling—and so intriguing.

  But they looked really well bound. “They must cost the earth,” I said.

  He nodded, running a finger along the spines of the green books. “These vols have everything to do with admin, about starting and running an organization—I mean, look how Scientology is thriving and expanding all over the planet! So these are essential as I build my music school. I just bought them. And yes,” he said proudly. “They cost a lot.”

  I followed him back down the stairs.

  “So,” he said, “overts! We don’t want those coming between us. Because that creates what’s called a withhold.” He read from the Tech Dictionary: “A withhold is ‘an unspoken, unannounced transgression against a moral code by which the person was bound.’31 See,” he said, “a withhold makes you pull away. Where there was high affinity, there’s now going to be zilch, or sudden unexplained resentment.”

  I nodded. “You think you can’t tell the person what you’ve done. And maybe that leads to even more transgressions—I mean, overts?”

  “Well done!” He looked pleased. “Then things go downhill. You feel you can’t talk to him anymore, you begin to justify the original overt, you even feel it’s his fault. That’s called a ‘motivator’—you come up with a ‘reason’ you ‘had’ to commit that overt. It can even lead to blowing—you feel so much guilt, you just leave! So it’s always important to examine, when you feel like you need to get out of something—a relationship, a job, whatever—what you might have done to create that feeling.”

  My head was spinning. “Wow,” I said.

  “It’s all about ethics. Ethics is very, very important.”

  indeed, i began to realize that ethics, and ethical behavior, were an enormous aspect of Church doctrine. Even as I appreciated the order it imposed, I found it worrisome how often people in Scientology were “out-ethics.” One morning I watched as Jamie dressed entirely in black, down to shiny and uncomfortable leather shoes.

  “Do you have a business meeting or something?” I asked, incredulous. I’d never seen him out of his Chinese cloth shoes, much less in a suit.

  As he perched a foot on the edge of a chair to tie the laces, he told me that one of his teachers in his music school had gone “out-ethics.”

  “What did he do?”

  “You don’t need to know.” He rustled around in a drawer for a tie. A tie! “Since right now it’s only me running my Org, I hold every post. Today I have to be the Ethics Officer. Dave has committed some overts, and he’s got some motivators going. My dressing all in black will get my attitude about it across, don’t you think?”

  I did think.

  As I also saw that one could go “out-ethics” easily. Transgressions abounded. But not just transgressions. If something went wrong—you broke a favorite bowl, you snapped a string on your guitar, you cracked your car’s engine block—you’d done something to “create” it. If you looked deeply enough, what that was could be found.

  This was familiar territory. I’d been brought up with this idea. You just had to look for the metaphor. A few months earlier—prior to meeting Jamie or hearing anything about Scientology—I’d still been seeing Roger from time to time, and one day I lost the key to my house. As I phoned a locksmith, I knew exactly what it meant: I needed to “change my locks,” to be resolute about breaking things off with him. The cracked engine block came about because I’d allowed my parents to loan me a car when I should have purchased one for myself. I broke the bowl because I shouldn’t have had ice cream. The snapped string was more complicated, but I managed to figure it out: I was working on a song I’d written about Roger even though I was now seeing Jamie; the shocking twang of that string was a warning.

  So Scientology’s notions landed on well-tilled soil. But I couldn’t fathom Jamie’s certainty that it was “the only way.” One morning, as he was extolling this aspect of Hubbard’s accomplishments, I laughed.

  He rolled out of the sheets and sat on the edge of the bed, his back to me.

  “Jamie,” I said. “Religions always say theirs is the ‘only way.’ It’s a ridiculous claim.”

  He turned, his face marred with fury. “L. Ron Hubbard has It. All. Figured. Out.” His movements fierce, he stood, shoved his legs into his pants, buttoned and zipped.

  “I’m sorry, Jamie. I didn’t mean to insult you, if that’s what I did. I’m sorry.”

  “You don’t get it. Just wait until you’re OT. Then you’ll see the mess this planet’s in! And how Hubbard’s the only one, with the only way, to get us out of here.”

  He left the bedroom. I heard the jingle of keys and the thud of the front door. He’d rented an office for his music school, and I knew that’s where he was headed.

  I wrote an irate note and headed home. I was done. Forget it! He was loony-tooney.

  But as I started my car, music from a cassette he’d given me, a beautiful melody he’d composed on the piano, soared through the speakers. As I drove home, lyrics began to form.

  She’s

  free from her cocoon

  changing with the moon

  shining like the sun

  Finally

  you’ve found her

  the one

  but don’t hold on

  don’t crush her wings

  Butterfly

  Perfect! “Butterfly” would be my way of telling him we were done. Butterfly/Goodbye!

  But even as I worked on l
yrics about “letting go,” I thought about how we could do this. We could be a songwriting team!

  I called him. His surliness abated under my barrage of apologies. Later that week, I sang him the song. It was clear he’d no idea the lyrics were intended to be about us. As we worked on fitting the words more precisely to the music, the attraction was heartily there again.

  “You know,” Jamie said, “we should get married.”

  I kept my eyes lowered. But as we kept working, strengthening a word, adjusting the length of a note, our life unrolled before me. With my words and his music, we’d compose award-winning songs. We’d perform together. We’d have a band—we’d tour the world! We’d change the world! We’d sing for peace and . . . well, all kinds of good things. We’d have a marriage full of creativity and friends and wine and travel and candlelight and love!

  I took in the curve of his jaw, the fingers that had learned to play me well. About half an hour later, I said, “Maybe we should do that thing you mentioned.”

  He nodded. “Okay.”

  i’m not sure how I broke it to my parents that I planned to marry a Scientologist. I imagine I presented Jamie’s bona fides: He’s a jazz musician! He’s friends with Chick Corea! He runs a music school, he owns a home in the Hollywood Hills . . . I do remember that I tried a diversionary tactic by bringing in Dianetics.

  “Dianetics?” Mother’s voice had risen a full octave by the last syllable. “Sands, in the fifties, that book was a cocktail party joke!”

  Oh, ummm.

  “People sat around and did that silly exercise of asking for an ‘earlier, similar incident.’ ‘Earlier, sillier,’ is more like it. We howled with laughter at the things that got invented.”

  “Well . . .”

  “Now don’t go making a big mistake. You have a whole life ahead of you.”

  “But I love him, Mom.”

  “I just don’t know how we could have a Scientologist to dinner.”