by Sands Hall
the doors of the world stand ready to part
and your path lies beyond, into flight
He’d explored a number of Eastern religions before throwing in his lot with Scientology, and his interpretation of OT seemed Buddhist to me: an alignment closer to Siddhartha than L. Ron.66 He longed for that connection with everything above everything.
Out here we’re driving the 101 Highway
heading toward the Mountains of Mars.
There’s a place up ahead where the doors are ajar—
Will you stride all alone to the stars?
One night into a relationship that would last five years, and which when it ended I’d mourn for another five, I nailed what I found entrancing, as well as the dilemma that, in spite of an engulfing love, we’d be unable to solve.
i’d swallowed jamie’s injunction that I not return to waitressing as if it were a piece of Hubbard policy, and even after we parted company, I sought other sources of income. But I was broke most of the time. And then Vano—Michael VanLandingham, once executive director of the Lexington Conservatory Theatre—moved to LA. Vano was working for a film production company, angling toward becoming a producer himself. He asked to read what I was writing and praised a short screenplay I’d adapted from a story. He suggested I become a story editor, that grandiose term for the gofers who drive from production company to production company, picking up scripts, books, articles, essays, even newspaper headlines, which they read and précis in search of material that might make a breakout movie. Once I factored in the driving, the reading, and developing the synopses, the pay was dismal, but it involved reading and writing, and I could do it on my own time. Desktop computers were just beginning to replace typewriters, and Vano loaned, then gave me, my first one. To some degree, it felt as if in Vano I had a bit of my brother again.
As, financially, I lurched along, the husband of my friend Marilyn (“Isn’t it about making you the best person you can be?”) offered me a job. He was building what would become a hugely successful agency, representing writers and directors, and he needed a temporary secretary. I was entirely wrong for the job, but in his generous way, he kept me on for months, and was kind about giving me time off for the occasional audition. As summer approached, and with it the Community of Writers, he might, if asked, have even given me those weeks. But I’d come to hate the prickly quality of time spent in Mom and Dad’s company, and the job gave me a pretext. So even though Hall children were expected to show up and help with the Conference, for two years in a row, I skipped it.
This meant that for two years I also didn’t see my family. Tad was living with Robin in various Midwest locales. I’d attended Brett’s graduation from UCLA, but stayed barely aware of her subsequent move to San Francisco. Tracy, still in Grand Junction, had two sons whom I’d hardly ever seen, and had expanded a house I’d never once visited.
It didn’t occur to me that I was doing exactly what the Church encouraged. Slowly but surely, I was disconnecting.
skye and constance expanded my circle of Scientology friends, each of them smart and funny and kind; ours was a cherished and tightly knit group. All were on course and, in addition to various day jobs, were pursuing careers as artists. Constance was acting. Martin and Sallie ran a recording studio. Roo was a stunning vocalist. Paloma, a highly trained auditor, was a writing coach. My beloved course twin, Sunny, was building dual careers as a jazz vocalist and voice teacher. Delph and Wyatt were at the time the only parents in our close circle (the rest of us, although we were in our thirties, appeared to be fairly clueless that time might run out on that enterprise; I think this was attached to the idea that hindrances offered by the physical world—such as aging eggs—did not apply to Scientologists). Wyatt played sax in a popular band; Delph, a fine artist, took those skills with her when she hosted parties and made meals. Once, when I was exclaiming yet again over one of her dishes, she leaned in, eyes twinkling, and said, “Sands. Here’s the secret. Ready?”
I nodded, intrigued. She’d been studying Scientology for years. Maybe in addition to other matters, there were keys to cooking to be found there.
“Butter!”
These friends made Scientology fun. We talked about it at parties and over coffee; we used its precepts to sustain our friendships, to help each other solve problems and heartbreaks, and to assist each other toward our goals.
And most of these friends were at least Clear, if not on their OT levels. In addition to doing well in their careers, they seemed to weather quite well, without being robotic, problems that could be upsetting or even devastating: an audition that didn’t go well, a breakup with a boyfriend. They might get angry or cry; it wasn’t that their emotions were suppressed. But they knew they could process it, by themselves or with an auditor or with a friend trained in Scientology: put the experience where it needed to be and move on.
I observed, however (snottily), that OT though some of them were, the material world sometimes got in their way. They had engine trouble. They came down with colds. They had marital difficulties. Quite often they weren’t attaining their stated goals. Skye, for instance. As an OT III, why didn’t he have the rock-star career he longed for?
Skye explained that the state of OT couldn’t be attained quickly. Like playing the violin or becoming a ballerina, it required time and practice and focus. “It might not even happen this lifetime,” he said. “Look how many lifetimes it took us to get into this mess.”
He was talking about OT’s confidential materials, which, I gathered, revealed that Earth was some kind of penal colony. Sure, I thought. And Earth is also heaven. It’s all here, right now. But my OT friends sadly shook their heads at the notion. That was clearly not the case. Earth was not just a prison; it was hell. And only through Scientology could we effect an escape.
Indeed, it was becoming ever more obvious that even though a Clear no longer has a Reactive Mind, it (the non-gendered thetan) still has a billion lifetimes in which “charged” experiences remain uninspected. These memories lie on the Whole Track, defined as “the moment-to-moment record of a person’s existence in this universe in picture and impression form.”67 Like a movie, in other words, which could be slowed down and inspected. This reminded me forcibly of the realization I’d had long before—one that had seemed almost as if I were recollecting something once learned—while vacuuming the carpet in the Squaw Valley house: that life was a series of images we could scroll through like a reel of celluloid. Except Hubbard’s version included riding in spaceships and blowing up planets.
So if an OT didn’t manifest OT abilities, the reason was obvious: It still had case to work through. Looking at the Bridge from that point of view, it didn’t look like a bridge, or even a ladder. It looked like an endless runway from which the plane would never lift. How was it possible to defuse the horrors and sorrows accrued over billions of lifetimes? I understood that you didn’t have to look at every single incident to be clear of them; you just no longer had a reaction when those buttons were pushed. But in a billion lives, wouldn’t there be a lot of unexamined buttons?
So even though I was putting money “on account” toward a block of professional auditing (at the time, a twelve-and-a-half-hour “intensive” cost $2,500), I continued to be reluctant. Maybe because what little I did hear about the upper levels seemed bizarre. Something about psychiatrists having lured us to Earth, that idea of a penal colony, that Wall of Fire, and something about having been stuffed in volcanoes?! And blown up?!?
I wasn’t supposed to know.
Also, it’s clear to me now, I didn’t want to know.
my next course, Method One, offered a comforting degree of the familiar, studying (twinning with Sunny), and the intriguing: auditing. We’d also be introduced to the e-meter.
This meant that Sunny and I had to understand watts and volts. Mini-studies like these cause the shelves of Scientology course rooms to hold an ecle
ctic collection of manuals, how-to books, various kinds of dictionaries, and at least one set of encyclopedias (at Celebrity Center in the eighties, woefully out of date). Most books I consulted regarding electricity used the analogy of a faucet with spigots, and of course I had to explore electric: “derived from amber, as by rubbing,” from the Greek electron: “amber.”
When Sunny and I felt we had a handle on it, we began our e-meter drills. A piece of wood about a yard long and eight inches high was placed on the table between us, as would be the case when we actually took each other into session. The board is there so that while pc and auditor can see each other’s faces, the pc won’t be distracted by anything the auditor might be doing, which includes adjusting various knobs, all while noting the questions she’s asking, the behavior of the needle, and the pc’s responses.
We studied how to plug in the cans to the meter and how to make sure they would “read” properly. Using a large doll or a teddy bear as the “pc,” inventing silly but fun scenarios, we drilled how to make sure the pc doesn’t have a “present time problem”: a fight with her husband, an overdrawn account, an overt she’s sitting on, “any worry that keeps a pc out of session, which problem must exist in present time, in the real universe.”68 Called “Rudiments,” these also include making sure the pc’s had enough sleep and enough food and that she’s not too hot or too cold (indicated through the skin, which touches the cans and is therefore responsible for the meter’s reaction).69 Hands might also be sweaty, or dry, which can be solved by using a bit of lotion. In a bulletin, Hubbard refers to Vaseline’s Intensive Care, and Proctor & Gamble can thank him for steady sales. As Hubbard mentions the product specifically, many Scientologists consider it “standard”; no other lotion will do.
Those bottles of yellow lotion, stashed around the course room, caused my thoughts to flicker to my brother and how clueless I’d been, before his accident, about the meaning of that phrase: “intensive care.” How truly strange, I’d muse, to name a lotion after a room full of wires and blood and woe. And then I’d shake him out of my brain.
It’s difficult to imagine, and unbearable to recall, not only that I so thoroughly kept my thoughts from him, but that I never got in touch. It took decades to understand how my rush to Scientology was, in part, a way to make sure I wouldn’t damage him (as Mary’s mother had warned). Above all, it was to fill the hole created by the loss of his huge and vital presence, and, odd method though it was, to find the identity he had for so long provided.
sunny and i read theory and demoed and drilled and flunked and started and read and demoed and drilled again. We learned to record the sessions on legal-size paper folded in half, lengthwise, providing a long, narrow surface, so as one writes, one’s hand doesn’t have to travel across an entire page. We learned to work the various dials with one hand while noting the time, questions, needle action, and answers with the other—we also learned the shorthand for recording these. I was reminded of learning to start a standard shift car on a slope: how what at first seemed an impossible combination of feet and gears and clutch and brake and accelerator became movements I could accomplish without thinking. While I never became that adept at using the e-meter, it did become easier.
And then, one day, it was time for one of us to take the other into session.
And what we did in those Method One sessions was to clear words.70 For someone like me—in love with study, wary of the e-meter—it was the perfect introduction. These days, it’s easy to find articles on the Internet that prove that the e-meter is nothing but a piece of Wizard of Oz gimmickry. But in my own experience, especially clearing words, the meter seemed almost clairvoyant, and working with it was often thrilling. I could feel, inside my body, what the needle on the meter would be registering. The rising anxiety when I didn’t understand a definition, the need to define another word in the process of clearing the first one, and, especially with abstractions, the grapple with comprehension. I could feel the increased puzzlement (charge) that would be making the needle rise and rise, and I knew that Sunny would be adjusting various knobs to keep the needle on the dial. And then, as definitions were found, derivations explored, words used in sentences, as we made our way back to the original word that started the chain, I could literally feel that anxiety blow away, replaced by understanding and a swooning sort of delight.
When it was my turn to audit Sunny, I witnessed these manifestations: the “mass” that accumulated as the word under examination became complicated with other words or concepts. And when the word was fully cleared, the realization reached, I saw what was called a “blow down”: the needle moving so fast—dropping, as charge dispersed—that it was hard to adjust the knob fast enough to keep it on the dial.
Turn and turn about, we took each other into session. When our needles floated, we’d head to the Examiner, and whichever of us had been the auditor would write up the session and place it in the other’s folder, which then went to the Case Supervisor, who’d review the session. He might note where the auditor had handled something poorly (flunk); this would mean a bulletin needed to be restudied, or a drill practiced—which, as twins, we’d do with each other—before going into session again (start). Or the Case Supervisor would indicate that we’d done a good job: VWD. Very Well Done.
We lived for those scrawled VWDs.
At some point, Sunny landed a singing gig that took her out of town for an extended period. I continued on with a new twin, Mark. Our sessions didn’t have the same magic, but they were still useful and fun. I’d had the realization—cognition, epiphany—that I guessed was the End Phenomenon, the E/P, of the auditing process at least a dozen times before I finally offered it up. I knew that once I said it aloud, I would be done with the course, and I didn’t want to be. But one day, after a marvelous trek through the deserts of ancient Palestine, clearing the word Israel, I could no longer hold it in.71 When Mark told me, “Your needle is floating,” I said what I’d known for weeks: “If you have a dictionary—dictionaries, encyclopedia, books, manuals—and you know how to clear a word, you can figure out anything. You can learn, and therefore do, anything you put your mind to.”
I now know this is something one should get from a basic liberal arts education, but I didn’t know it then, and it hadn’t been the product of my own education. The Examiner confirmed the F/N, and I’d indeed had the End Phenomenon. Mark received a VWD. A few days later, he offered up a similar cognition. We were done with Method One.
even in the midst of this largely satisfying time, however, doubts arose. Often I was outraged, outraged, that one could only study Scientology in a Scientology course room. Other religions had books you could read; you didn’t have to be a Buddhist to understand its precepts; you didn’t have to be baptized to learn about the Trinity or to explore the metaphors attached to Jesus’ death and resurrection. Of course one could buy Hubbard’s books—but the study of the Tech had to be done under the auspices of Scientology. That was Keeping Scientology Working!
But then the other part of my brain would mutter that if you were a practicing Buddhist, there were texts to read and various forms of meditation to practice; if a Catholic, you not only studied the religion’s precepts but engaged in its forms and traditions. Was there really such a difference? If you were committed? And also, there were so many forms Buddhism had taken over the centuries—was one better than another? How could you possibly know? And Catholicism’s excesses had spawned Protestantism—and there are a multitude of ways to be a Protestant, not to mention ways to worship Christ/be a Christian. Whereas LRH was all about making sure Standard Tech stayed Standard. That there was and always would be only one Scientology.
So why, then, did I feel myself so held in thrall? So stuck?
These feelings might be stirred by a commercial featuring the Parthenon, a phone call from my sister Tracy in which she described a camping trip, a brochure announcing that summer’s Community of Writers. At these mome
nts, the decent-seeming bread of my days became so much cardboard. I should be writing a book, acting in a play, creating an album of my songs, having intellectually stimulating discussions (all with attendant travel and wine and parties), and to hell with examining, every minute, how my soul was doing. To hell with the horrid sensibility, which kept rising, that I had handed over the reins of my life.
Here arose a different sense of “Flunk. Start.” Doesn’t everyone at some point, I’d ponder, doubt what they’re doing with their life? Isn’t that doubt just a moraine everyone has to cross from time to time? Wasn’t this a common existential mantra: Why am I doing what I’m doing? Should I be doing something else? I’d talk myself around the edges of this while continuing to do what I was doing; eventually there would be reasons, and on I’d lurch. In this case it wasn’t a sense of doing something incorrectly that was the flunk and the intention to redo it correctly that was the start. Rather, it was that I might as well stay on the road I was walking; to leave it would force me to start over so completely that it was literally unimaginable. So I talked myself not so much into “start,” but into “keeping on.”
Also (I further persuaded myself), a religion that insists one know the true sense of the word must honor the value of the word—mustn’t it? We weren’t just allowed to look at other books and articles—even (supposedly) those that disparaged the Church—we were supposed to. “What is true for you is what you have observed yourself,” begins one of Hubbard’s most quoted maxims. “And when you have lost that, you have lost everything.”72
So he says. Yet, in fact, we were discouraged, deeply, from such scrutiny. Such books, articles, television investigations were, we understood, full of nothing but lies and distortion, Black PR created by Suppressive Persons whose sole and evil purpose was to squash Scientology and all the good it was capable of doing. Reading or watching any of it would be “enturbulating” (Hubbard’s descriptive word that means “cause to be turbulent or agitated and disturbed”).73 I was not the only one who’d mentally quote what is true for you is true for you, a truncated version used by many, as I jerked my eyes away from a banner headline of an essay about the Church. I’d learned that even reading the opening sentence would send me into a spin.