by Sands Hall
His eyes were tired but kind. “No. I mean, what are the barriers to study?”
“Lack of mass,” I said. “Umm. Not understanding a word. I don’t remember the third one, but that is not what this is about.”
“Flunk,” he said, without a trace of harshness. “Study the bulletin, Sands.”
Throbbing with resentment, I read it again.
“Lack of mass” I understood. I even appreciated how it might indeed keep one from studying effectively.
The next barrier was “too steep a gradient”: If a student is forced into undertaking a new action without having understood the previous action, confusion results.
I tapped pen against page, remembering when I’d been introduced to algebra in the eighth grade. I’d adored it. Its combination of mystery and clean lines enthralled me. But at some point I stopped understanding what was scribbled on the blackboard; suddenly I got low scores on my homework. I remember this happening in less than a week.
Hubbard describes the physiological reactions of “too steep a gradient” as “a sort of confusion or reelingness . . .” Staring out the window into the explosion of overgrown shrubbery surrounding Celebrity Center, I remembered how swiftly I’d become convinced that, concerning anything to do with numbers, I was a numbskull. But maybe it was just that the teacher had moved too quickly through the subject.
To solve it, Hubbard suggests, just cut back to a simpler level. Again, how obvious! And I had not “skipped a gradient”!
I told Tim so.
“Let’s take it one thing at a time,” he said. “What sentence were you just reading?”
“It’s not that I don’t understand it! I just don’t agree with it.”
“What happens when you go past a misunderstood word?”
“I’m not misunderstanding any words!” I said. “Supposedly I’m a Potential Trouble Source, and supposedly my parents are Suppressive People.”
“Sands,” Tim said, and he gave a little sigh. “It’s not too much to say that all of it, every sorrow in this world, comes down to a misunderstood word.” We stared at each other. I imagined fights between spouses, statues being toppled, gulags, war. It suddenly seemed quite possible. “Now,” he said, “you need to study that bulletin, and before you proceed further, you must be thoroughly checked out on it. I want you to pay particular attention to the third barrier to study. Am I clear?”
His eyes were still tired, still kind, and utterly implacable.
among the many concerns Hubbard addressed, in the stream of bulletins and policy letters issued from his typewriter in the Hubbard Communications Office or transcribed from recordings of his lectures, were those regarding being a student. There he was, laying out matters to do with mind, spirit, ethics, admin—subjects that have to be understood in order to be applied—and people weren’t getting it. I can imagine him heaving an exasperated but rather pleased sigh, then rolling up his sleeves to address the “hat” a student needed to wear to be effective. That’s the name of a required course: Student Hat.
All this is known as Study Tech. As I began to work with its principles, I found it deeply satisfying—in fact, galvanizing. This was especially true of Hubbard’s explanation of the “misunderstood word,” the third and most prevalent of his barriers to study. He suggests that going past a word you don’t understand may keep you from understanding an entire subject, can even cause you to abandon a study altogether. And his notions around “clearing” words is a substantial part of what bound me to the religion for years.
At the time, I thought of words, when I thought about them at all, as a way to communicate. I remember, when I was about four, sounding out the word L-I-F-E on the cover of that magazine as I seized an understanding that the magazine’s purpose was to present life and, simultaneously, became aware of the miraculous thing called reading. And I’d loved my little twenty-six-page collection of homonyms. But using a dictionary to look up words had never been a particular focus in our household. If I came across a word in my reading I didn’t understand, I either skipped over it or went to my dad.
“How’s it used?” he’d ask. I’d read him the sentence, and he’d define it.
When I wanted to know how to spell a word, however, parents and even teachers employed a frustrating tactic: “Look it up.”
This well-intentioned effort caused me to avoid dictionaries, even to actively dislike them. They were cumbersome volumes where the pages were thin and the print small, where you looked in vain, until you were ready to weep, for pneumonia, or psychology, or even something as simple as acword, aukwurd, awkword, awkward. Symbols and abbreviations—pl, <, LL, ë, intr—only added to the confusion. For almost three decades, while I read avidly, I largely defined words in and by context.
But in a Scientology course room, you are required to “clear” words and concepts you don’t understand or—and this was for me the startling and fun part—think you understand. Anything that might muddy the waters of your spiritual and emotional and literary understanding, you clear. Not only that, you examine its derivation, its etymology.
“Have you ever come to the bottom of a page only to realize you didn’t remember what you had just read?” Hubbard asks. “That is the phenomenon of a misunderstood word, and one will always be found just before the material became blank in your mind.”
This was an experience I recognized. As was Hubbard’s warning that you’ll find yourself starting to yawn if you go past a word or concept you don’t understand. I thought of the many times I’d gotten dozy while reading something like Pagels’s Gnostic Gospels: how I’d flip back until I found a sentence I remembered having read, start from that place, read on, nod off again . . . eventually sliding the book under the bed, resolving to try again later.
“Going past a word or symbol for which one does not have a proper definition gives one a distinctly blank or washed-out feeling,” Hubbard writes, adding that this barrier “establishes aptitude or lack of aptitude,” and is “the prime factor involved with stupidity.”
All this began to make grand, wonderful, important sense. It fueled my growing belief that all Hubbard wanted, what everything in his religion was devised to do, was to lift mankind out of degradation and ignorance, and onto a higher plane—into a better life.
the true sense of the word
Having passed the spot-check for Barriers to Study, I read what makes a person a Potential Trouble Source. The primary thing? Overts! Of course! I thought of my endless car trouble during the affair with Roger. I’d been sleeping with a married man! Lost keys? Dead battery? They made complete metaphorical sense.
This emphasis on overts, particularly for a psyche such as mine, which, by nature or nurture, was primed for blame-taking, allowed Scientology’s cult-claws to sink in deeply. My epiphanies were all about being “better.” Clearly I am not the only person kept in thrall by this tactic, but the employment of such an insidious and purposeful psychology—the knowledge it demonstrates, that most people want to be good, and that that desire for goodness, for being “correct,” for doing what’s right (even in opposition to other deeply held beliefs) will keep a vast population in line—appalls me now. I see that it borrows techniques from authoritarianism, and demonstrates a gleeful understanding and purposeful employment of groupthink. But at the time, it simply made sense: I had done something wrong. That was the answer to, the reason for, all my tribulations.
So I was PTS because of overts. But what about the idea that a Potential Trouble Source must be connected to a Suppressive Person—also known as an “antisocial personality”? Not one of the attributes connected to SPs described my parents. Certain that I understood the bulletin, I carried my course pack over to Joann for a spot check. She was “fast flow,” and Tim had asked her to check me out on bulletins as I finished them.
Joann placed a finger on a word. “What’s the definition of ‘personality’?”
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“What? How’s it used?
“Flunk.” She pointed to the sentence.
The antisocial personality cannot finish a cycle of action . . . becomes surrounded by incomplete projects.
“Wait,” I said, even as Joann shook her head. “Personality,” I stuttered. “It’s what makes a person who he is, it’s the part of his character that defines his, umm, person.”
“We shouldn’t define a word using part of the word.” She shrugged apologetically. “Flunk. You need to look it up, restudy the bulletin.”
So I restudied. I defined all the uses of the word, and its etymology, considerably struck by the idea that the root of person descends to us from an Etruscan word for “mask,” which makes lovely sense. But how could this description—“surrounded by incomplete projects”—describe my mother, who did everything from create marvelous dresses out of ethnic material to print her own photographs in her own darkroom (full of instruments purchased by and in a space created by my supposedly suppressive father)? How could this apply to him, at the time the author of—which meant he’d completed—two dozen novels? Who’d hammered together much of the house in Squaw Valley? Who was a brilliant teacher of writing? I could hardly imagine the number of “cycles of action” that had been completed as he helped his many students toward their degrees. Suppressive? I looked up the word in the Tech Dictionary:
To squash, to sit on, to make smaller, to refuse to let reach, to make uncertain about his reaching, to render or lessen in any way possible by any means possible, to the harm of the individual and for the fancied protection of the suppressor.51
I could see this described the feelings my parents sometimes caused in me, but they did not “squash,” or “sit on,” or “refuse to let reach” on purpose. In any case, how would doing so “protect” them? From what? They just didn’t want me to be a Scientologist.
Which of course is the most important definition of a Suppressive Person. I’m sure by this time I’d heard the word tautology, but even as I grappled with the twists of Scientological logic, I didn’t grasp that I was studying, as the American Heritage puts it, “a series of self-reinforcing statements that cannot be disproved because the statements depend on the assumption that they are already correct.”
In any case, as far as the Church was concerned, I was connected to an SP, to two of them in fact, and I was PTS. Even without its Scientology overtones, the phrase “potential trouble source” was apt. I was trouble. The certainty I craved would arrive—and then, chimera-like, would disappear, leaving me edgy, weepy, wanting to go live a normal life. And just hours later, I’d be on course, defining long lists of words, in love with what I was doing.
It’s hard, now, to recall whether that swooping, plummeting, exhilarating, exhausting rollercoaster ride was attached to the religion, to my marriage, or if it was simply my nature. Or if it was the depression into which I’d plunged after confronting the terrible understanding that my brother was not coming back, which had initiated that flight to Los Angeles in the first place. But as I leaf through the journals that record these swings, I see that I did not, at this point, question what I was learning. All that seemed valuable. What caused me anguish was that this knowledge, this study, was attached to being a Scientologist. Was there no other way to gain this information, to have—for this is what I found in those hours at those sunlit tables—so much scholarly and spiritual fun? As I defined words, made lists of others whose meanings I wanted to confirm, I began to truly love what I was doing. I see now that what I loved was the act of studying. Also, that I loved what I was studying, which was not Scientology as much as it was ideas—especially regarding religion and spirituality—and, above all, words themselves.
and my brother? He and Mary and little O4 were still living in Squaw Valley, in the Annex, the house below our parents’. Mary was pregnant again. However, not long after a daughter was born, Mary headed back east and initiated divorce proceedings. Mom and Dad hired a lawyer, but Mary’s mounted quite a case against Oak’s suitability as a father, and he was denied all but the most draconian visiting rights. He hardly ever saw his children again.
At which point, Mom and Dad made Oak an offer: If he could get into graduate school, they’d fund tuition and an apartment.
This is an excellent example of the denial that during these years ran rampant through the family, and certainly a misapprehension of the extent of Oak’s brain damage, but at the time it made sense. It was a way for him to “start,” after having flunked so badly.
And so he applied for a PhD in English at the University of California, Davis. With his bachelor’s in drama from UC Irvine, his master’s in fiction from Brown, his stint as artistic director of the Lexington Conservatory Theatre, and the productions of his own plays there and in Manhattan, his credentials were significant. He must have had to write an essay, at least a statement of intent, but he seems to have done it well enough that he was accepted into the graduate program. (I loved this bit of synchronicity: I was studying; he was studying!)
However, no matter how brilliant Oak may have been able to appear on paper, he was unable to find his way across the campus to a classroom, much less comprehend a syllabus. So he wandered Davis, read avidly—as he always had and always would—and never went to class. He ran into Robin, whom he’d met at the Squaw Conference before his accident, and moved in with her. Robin’s sense of humor, her insouciant way of being in the world, suited him perfectly, and she gave him much needed ballast and security. But even though Robin would take care of Oak, providing love and support for the next decade, our parents never seemed to understand her vital contributions to his healing brain, and his life.
while oak was in Davis, ignoring class schedules, I was at Celebrity Center, adhering to mine. Jamie still worked all night and never took a weekend. We fought about it, but we managed to find affinity in the pleasure I was taking in being on course. Before getting married, we’d had a talk about my acting career—he wanted me to agree to take no work that would involve nudity, which I found laughable and off-putting in equal measure. I dismissed the entire conversation, and anything else it might have represented, as if it had never happened. He also did not want me to continue working as a waitress, perhaps because that’s how we’d met and he worried it could happen again, with someone else. Instead, I taught small acting classes and a seminar on Shakespeare in our living room. Now and again I landed acting work. My agent encouraged me to go out for commercials, but I resisted; I didn’t want to bite down on a piece of Trident gum in front of millions. However, the money could be really good, and I was eventually persuaded to try. I cut and permed my hair, trying to look like the girl next door, and did land a big one: Hertz. I was delighted when I found out it would air only in Europe.
But most afternoons I studied. I was persuaded by what LRH had to say about mind and spirit and their connections, and spent a lot of time delving into other forms of spirituality while clearing my ideas about this one. I was engaged by his ideas about ethics, and about the ways in which memory acts on us, and how past negative actions may be responsible for present problems. I might have gleaned this by studying Tibetan Buddhism and Jungian philosophy, while reading about Christianity and psychology, but I began to feel that Hubbard had put all that together, in a most compelling way.
Of my own accord I signed up for the next course, Student Hat, which provided hours of word-filled rhapsodic engagement, without having to think too closely about my parents’ potentially suppressive natures, about my brother, about my supposed career—not even about what I was doing with these months of my life. I may have been in the Condition of Confusion regarding my marriage, and wavered in and out of Doubt regarding Scientology (even as I sat in one of its course rooms five days a week), but as a student, my Condition was not Normal, not Affluence—it was Power. I’d found something at which I excelled: study. I sat at one of those big tables, surrounded by dictionaries, s
tudying bulletins, listening to taped lectures, reading books (all by Hubbard), happily descending into word chains when I didn’t understand, or had the faintest doubt about whether I understood, any word or phrase in a definition. Sometimes this required outside readings, and I especially enjoyed using the (out-of-date) encyclopedia, as well as various manuals available on the course room’s shelves. Some of those word chains, like a good Monopoly game, went on for days.
what was so different from that childhood resentment about being forced to use a dictionary? For one thing, and it’s huge, I wasn’t being “sent” to the dictionary to find out how to spell a word, which often felt like punishment for not knowing, and led me to pretend I knew things when I didn’t. For another—and this was life changing—Hubbard’s precise formula for “clearing a word” meant that you had to engage with its etymology.
By the age of seven I’d understood, from my little collection of them, that a homonym is different than a synonym. I’d been taught to spell using phonetics, so I understood that words have parts. But I don’t think I knew that the prefixes hom and syn, even though they communicate the difference, existed prior to or beyond their English usage. I certainly didn’t know that attached to other suffixes, those prefixes created other words. I found this miraculous.
Yes, I’d been birthed into and educated within the aspirations of a literary family, I held a BA in drama (graduating magna cum laude, words that I understood meant I had majorly good grades but not the summa best grades), and I’d attended an advanced training program at a prestigious acting academy. I even understood, from my study of Shakespeare, that some of our words come from Saxon roots (mud, blood, words Macbeth might use), and others were Latinate (prodigal, obsequious, employed by a character like Polonius). I even understood that acropolis came from Greek and abacus from Arabic. But it had never particularly occurred to me that acro or polis might communicate something, that they came from somewhere. It was, I suppose, a version of the assumption that milk comes in bottles or butter in rectangles.