by Sands Hall
Sunny and I beamed at each other and ran down the stairs to the Examiner.
“Your needle is floating,” he said.
Sunny wrote up the session, and then we scampered back to the course room and settled in at the big oak tables to study the next bulletin, clear the next word, demo the next concept, on the way to being “qualified” Scientologists.
I began to envision that in each of these moments I was picking off a bit of caked mud that over the course of my lifetime—lifetimes—had adhered to my once bright and could-be-again shining psyche. Which began to make the thought of being audited by a trained auditor, with an e-meter, almost attractive. I still found the idea scary. But what might it be like to have that leaping needle find the dirt caked to your psyche (which I pictured as a golden orb beneath all that murk). What might it be like to get rid of all that muddy charge, so you could F/N your way through life?
every few months my friend Marilyn and I met for lunch. We’d been in the acting company of the Colorado Shakespeare Festival during that cherished 1975 summer, and the following season we worked together again in Ashland. I loved those lunches, which usually included salad and white wine (I worked carefully around the twenty-four-hour rule). She was doing well in her career and often insisted on picking up the tab. She’d met a wonderful man and thought they might get married.
Over one of these lunches, I wept as I told her how deeply my parents disapproved of my study of Scientology.
“But why!” I remember her tone, and how, for the first time, I understood what authors of nineteenth-century novels meant when they used the verb “cried.” Marilyn wore hats that made her look as if she’d stepped out of a painting by Renoir or Sargent, and today’s was a cunning little piece of straw and ribbon, beneath which blond curls framed her face. “Why!” she cried. “Isn’t it just about you trying to be the best person you can be?”
I nodded, grateful for that perception. It was what I believed, what so many of us did; it was a large part of why we stayed—and why many still do. Hubbard’s purpose, his Technology, seemed so altruistic. He believed man was basically good! He had our best interests at heart! One had only to look at his many “how-tos”: from effective filing systems to methods for gauging emotional states (Tone Scale); from improving the relationship between body, mind, and spirit to the one with your spouse; from getting one’s stats up to getting one’s ethics in; from running an organization to making a good first impression (these last include using an effective unscented deodorant, getting to one’s feet upon first meeting someone, and making good eye contact). Many of Hubbard’s notions seem terribly obvious, but part of his particular genius was in understanding that such tabulation is wanted, even needed. That checklist about making a good first impression, for instance. It’s advice a parent gives a child, but for those who didn’t have such a parent, or such guidance, it might be satisfying to tick things off a list. Clean fingernails: check. Ready smile: check. Good eye contact: check.
These systems seemed interconnected. With Scientology’s help, one could rid oneself of memories and precepts and even mannerisms that might be holding one back, stride through the world with confidence, and surge on up the Bridge to an ever-expanding spiritual understanding—and, supposedly, happiness.
However, and curiously, I wasn’t in fact doing any surging. I loved being on course but was still wary of auditing, even though, so I understood, that’s where the real action took place. It was partly finances—auditing was expensive and I had no savings, and I refused to max out a credit card—but it was also a reluctance to become more deeply involved. Even as I persuaded myself of Scientology’s altruism, even as I believed (as at the time I did) that those on staff were being paid a decent wage, I wondered—worried—where all the money went. It didn’t manifest in improvements to Celebrity Center (though it certainly has since). Still, the idea that the Church was bilking people out of money seemed cynical—and to think so meant I had an overt. They were helping people out of unhappiness, out of unethical practices, out of misunderstood words. They were helping people go free (whatever that meant).
We all worked toward those aims. In the course room we were flunked (and we flunked others) for not checking out on a bulletin. No paraphrasing. Steady schedules. Inside and outside the course room we were productive, keeping our stats up. We were ethical, no overts to tangle up our psyches, to drop us down to lower Conditions. I felt as if I were part of a humming engine made up of kind souls, all of whom—from Registrar to janitor, fellow students to Case Supervisor—were devoted to this effort. I was particularly impressed with the Course Supervisor: Tim’s patience and tolerance moved me. He spent fourteen hours a day, seven days a week, in the course room, devoted to creating good Scientologists.
Nevertheless, I often found myself redefining religion. The word’s derivation, “bind back,” made me imagine a farmer working with vines, a gardener grafting the stock of one rose onto that of another.62 Looking around the increasingly beloved, shabby course room, where fellow students leafed through dictionaries, listened to tapes, played out demos, I understood that the etymology of religion describes its very arduousness.
I didn’t, then, know the joys of having a practice. Practice is a lovely word. One meaning is to work on getting better at an endeavor, as in practicing the guitar. Another is, simply, the endeavor itself—a doctor’s practice, a yoga practice. Practice offered contentment. It would take a while to understand that it was what I’d had meditating all those years, and in the hours when I was working on a new song. And it’s what I would have, eventually, as the practice grew stronger, in writing.
gah
Elsewhere in the course room, students were drilling the use of an e-meter. Was I going to do that? Examine my “case,” those charged-up places in my psyche? I was now familiar with the idea of engram, described by Hubbard in Dianetics as
a mental image picture which is a recording of a time of physical pain and unconsciousness.
It’s also “a definite and permanent trace left by the stimulus on the protoplasm of a tissue”:
[an engram] must, by definition, have impact or injury as part of its content. These engrams are a complete recording, down to the last accurate detail, of every perception present in a moment of partial or full unconsciousness.63
Hubbard coined the word—dia + netics = “through the mind”—and claims that engrams can be relieved by processing them. One person listens to another’s problem, asks about “earlier, similar incidents” until the earliest one is located, at which point the power contained in the “chain” of them supposedly disappears. According to Hubbard, the earliest incident might be found in the womb, e.g. (an example he uses often): a fetus is hurt when Pa makes love to Ma, which turns out to be the original pain attached to subsequent incidents. Or the original engram is attached to the mother trying to abort the fetus (another example Hubbard frequently cites) using a knitting needle or by jumping off a chair.
It made me think of a story my mother sometimes told about a night just before I was born. She and Dad were driving—to the hospital? home from a party?—and they passed a car accident. The few times Mom described it, the scene was weirdly vivid to me, full of details she did not necessarily include in her telling: a tangle of red brake lights and white headlights, one of the latter aimed in an impossible direction, up to the sky instead of straight ahead. No ambulance had yet arrived. People had pulled over to help or to gawk, and silhouettes of cars and bodies, flickering in what light there was, lined the road. Dad slowed, then slowed further, as they realized the reason for that mangle of steel and bodies, the reason for that headlight skewed at the sky: Two cars had crashed, head on. As they inched by, Mom covered her eyes. But not so that she wouldn’t see. She covered her eyes because she did not want me, the baby in her womb, to witness the carnage.
Hearing this story, I was touched by what a motherly act it was, protectin
g the forming mind of an unborn child.
But I’d also wondered: How could it be I wasn’t there—and of course I wasn’t; I wasn’t born—when all those details were so startlingly vivid?
In order to help the pc find those engrams, the hidden mental-image pictures attached to them, and to clear them, Hubbard collaborated on the development of the electropsychometer, the e-meter.64 The analogy to the “clear” button on an adding machine now made sense. Again, from Dianetics:
Before a computer can be used to solve a problem, it must be cleared of old problems, old data and conclusions. Otherwise, it will add the old conclusions into the new one and produce an invalid answer . . .
Many people who practiced Dianetics had real gains. Quite a number attested to Clear (a state in which, Hubbard writes, one has “no vicious reactive mind and can operate at total mental capacity”).65 Clear is perceived as an ongoing state; once you attest to Clear, you don’t slip back to being “unclear.” Nevertheless, life will offer up new problems to solve and new miseries to be grappled with, and even people who’d gone Clear wanted more auditing. In addition, quite a number of practitioners didn’t find relief when they located that first incident, not even if they found it in the womb. Some found themselves coming up with incidents that took place in previous lifetimes.
Even in the midst of a growing excitement about these ideas, I was conscious that they might be cleverly implanted. When, in the course room, you overhear an e-meter drill that asks someone to say how many epochs ago, to the power of ten, an incident happened, you can’t help but wonder if you’ve had millions of lifetimes, and if one can, indeed, carry knowledge from one lifetime to another. It isn’t that outrageous an idea. Many Eastern religions believe in reincarnation. If you count the actual number of bodies + souls on the planet, probably more people believe in the idea than don’t. But it also began to dawn on me that that was an awful lot of lifetimes through which to process earlier, similar incidents. Could one ever really be Clear? Wouldn’t there always be something?
Still, the idea that with or without a body—and between bodies—the thetan, the “you that is you,” might carry images from previous lifetimes to the one you’re living now, and that by exploring ancient anguishes, one might make sense of current troubles, was deeply appealing.
one night, in the midst of my travails with Jamie, I had such an experience. Over dinner with a Scientologist friend, Jen, I confided my sorrow regarding his chronic lateness, how he was never home for dinner, my yearning for the kind of marriage I simply didn’t have.
I began to weep, and after offering various bits of advice, none of which comforted me, Jen asked, “Is there an earlier, similar incident?” She slipped the question easily into our conversation. Even as I realized this was Dianetic processing, another episode with a previous boyfriend came immediately to mind. I told her about it, but was still emotional (or, as Hubbard calls it, “misemotional”). She asked the question several more times, which led to other memories. Suddenly I found myself crying even harder and shaking my head at something I called “impossible.”
“Tell me,” Jen said.
It took a while for her to convince me to share the memory that was now as real to me as the dinner we’d just finished eating, but eventually I offered it up.
I shivered on a dark road in what I thought might be Ireland, clutching a shawl around myself against a biting wind, waiting for my husband, who was, as he always was, at the village pub.
My cognition, as Jen talked me through this memory, was that I needed to stop weeping and wailing. I needed to do something.
Which of course applied to my relationship with Jamie. Jamie, like the Irish husband, might come grumpily home for the night. But he wasn’t going to stay home, or create a home, not in the reliable way I craved and felt I deserved.
That conversation helped me sort out something I clearly needed to do: Sixteen months after our wedding, in early 1984, Jamie and I agreed to divorce.
As these things go, it was a friendly one. However, in working through its details, even as I severed ties with the man who’d introduced me to the Church, I wove myself further into it.
There is no doubt that the memory of that Irish marriage, waiting for the boorish drunk who never came home, abetted the decision. Had I concocted a fiction (the root of that word is “to form”) that paralleled my current situation and allowed me to face the truth that I could not—would not—be married to a man who was never home? Perhaps. Yet the memory of the wind cutting through that shawl, how it froze the tears against my face, the utter anguish and helplessness I felt as I stood in the darkness on that high bleak road is still as physically present as yesterday’s efforts to prune a rosebush. It was uncovered during what seemed like simply a deep conversation with a compassionate friend. Above all, in the process of examining it, I’d been able to finally come to a necessary decision.
I saw, more and more, what Jamie meant when he said, “Scientology works.” And yet. And yet. There were always misgivings. Something about it felt wrong. But maybe it was just my overts. What I’d done, not done. There was always something.
i didn’t want to tell my parents I was divorcing Jamie.
Because they’d expect it would mean I’d also be leaving Scientology.
And I found I didn’t want to.
Especially in the delight I’d been finding in study, I’d glued myself to it. How could I possibly explain the pleasures of a spiritual path to those who felt that adherence to any religion was suspect? In any case, to them, Scientology wasn’t a religion. It was a cult.
But that spring, on their way back to Squaw Valley from a visit to see friends in the Southwest, my parents’ travel plans included a layover at the Los Angeles airport. They proposed that I meet them there for a glass of wine.
Driving to the airport, I held close, as if it were an amulet in a pocket, what it was I had to tell them. Even then I think I glimpsed that the upcoming conversation would be an important battle regarding my sense of self.
As I found parking, a plane roared into the sky, lifting hundreds of lives to other places, as it had just dropped hundreds of lives into this one. Airports, like train and bus stations, are spots where transitions take place. It seemed to me most appropriate that this conversation would occur in this space between spaces.
As I locked the car, watching the plane’s contrail dissipate, I pondered the contradiction (turning over in my mind that word’s components, as I’d started to do: contra, “against” + dicere, “speech”) of my parents’ affection for the symbols of religion and their disdain for the practice of it. The images of Virgin Mary and Buddha, the collection of silver crosses dangling around my mother’s neck, the spirit house from India filled with Native American fetishes and Mexican milagros. Or how, during that family trip to Europe, Dad had pointed out the escaping spirit in the painting of the deceased man, and how they’d introduced me to the joy of churches: their high or painted ceilings, the muttered prayers, the aroma of beeswax. And while it was true my father had jerked me from my childhood knees in that Mexico City cathedral, it was he who’d taken me to that cathedral in the first place. It was he who’d written that check so we could receive mantras from the Maharishi. Wasn’t this something, on some level, that we shared?
The cathedrals of Scientology were called Orgs. The scripture I studied was called Tech. When I felt I’d transgressed, I did not go to confession, I wrote up Conditions formulas. There was no way I was going to convince them Scientology was a religion. But—and I took a deep breath as I stepped into the freezing conditioned air of that mighty airport—perhaps it was possible, if we really had the Affinity I thought we did, and we used the Communication skills so prized in the family, I could persuade them to at least appreciate my Reality, and we could achieve Understanding. Even if all we did was agree, and I prayed we could do so agreeably, to disagree.
I w
as so naïve.
i found my way to their gate, as in the eighties one could still do, and greeted them as they came off the plane. Their cherished faces beamed at me. I had to shift my eyes from the love and even pride that radiated there.
It was early afternoon, and Dad steered us to the airport’s Mexican restaurant. They ordered glasses of the house white. I ordered tea. It was Saturday and I wouldn’t be on course the next day, so I could have had wine, but I wanted to keep my head.
We talked of their trip; they’d been visiting a writer in Santa Fe. We talked of the play I was rehearsing, which would open in about a month. We talked of Tad (more and more, he was, again, Tad) still living in Davis with Robin.
“He’s not attending classes,” Mom said. “I wish he’d just come home, or find someone else.”
But Robin is taking care of him, I didn’t say. I didn’t want to argue. I needed every bit of their affinity to accept the reality that I was about to communicate.
“That accident,” my father said. He said it with vast bitterness, and it struck me that there were circles under his eyes I’d never seen before. It wasn’t just age. They looked almost as if he’d been slugged, the pouches almost black. He made a terrible face. “Lobotomized himself.” He looked at his watch and ordered another glass of wine.
It was time. I gripped that imaginary amulet in my pocket and took a deep breath.
“I’m divorcing Jamie.”
Pleasure flickered across their faces.
“But,” I said, “I’m not leaving Scientology.”
They looked at each other. “So the Evil Empire’s got you,” Dad said.
I held on to the edge of the table. “I know you think it’s a cult—”