by Sands Hall
How could Loyal Officers #1 and #2 be suppressive? People murmured. Very quietly. Were the Broekers, after decades of being Hubbard’s most loyal friends (if Hubbard had friends), somehow responsible for his death? Yet hadn’t we been told that he’d purposefully “dropped this body”? That he’d been “at cause” and had “simply moved on to his next level”?
Then the rumors changed. Annie had been sent to the dread Rehabilitation Project Force, Scientology’s gulag.87 And Pat—of course a member of the Sea Org—had left the church. He’d left the Church!
Squatting next to my tent, poking a fork into the collection of vegetables cooking over the single-burner stove, I thought about Scientology’s upper levels. Yes, the OT materials were supposedly confidential, but maybe those bits of information were leaked purposefully, to create intrigue. Something about a despotic ruler (whose very name could cause psychosis), who, billions of years ago, had shipped “humanoids” to planet Earth. That much appeared to be covered in Hubbard’s sci-fi novels. But then there were other rumors. This fellow (Xenu—I’d heard the name, and as far as I knew, hadn’t gone psychotic) stuffed them (us?) in volcanoes (??) and blew them up with an H-bomb (!?!). Was that the Wall of Fire one confronted when one became OT III? I’d vaguely gathered that those quadrillion particles of blown-up humanoids attached themselves to other quadrillion particles of blown up humanoids—at the cellular level, where engrams are supposed to lodge. Was the idea that we might confuse others’ engrams with our own, or even take them on as our own? Was that the rest of the Bridge to Total Freedom? With all those cellular selves mixed together, how could you ever figure out your own true self?
Or was that the lesson—some lovely Eastern notion that we’re ultimately all one? But that didn’t feel like Hubbard one bit.
I sat at a picnic table with my supper as the sun descended, pulling on a down vest against the shadows creeping across the canyon’s vast floor. That we’d been marooned here, on this penal colony, was connected to psychiatry. Psychiatrists were the ultimate evil (another instance where the tenets of my upbringing intersected with those of Scientology). Once psychiatrists got hold of you, Hubbard said, they’d persuade you that you needed therapy forever, and you’d never break free. But wasn’t that exactly like the Bridge to Total Freedom, which more and more didn’t look like a bridge at all, but, rather, a road to nowhere in particular? Was Hubbard just doing what he said bad people did: accusing others of what they, themselves, are guilty of, in order to obfuscate what’s really going on?
Carrying toothbrush and towel, I headed to the primitive Park Service bathroom. In any case, I’d heard enough to know that psychiatrists had condemned us to live in this terrible place, Earth, hamsters on what I saw as a flaming wheel. Scientology was the only way to break free. And once free, so I gathered, we could join the squadrons of OTs whizzing (body-less) around the universe introducing the Tech to other planets. The Freedom Police, I had oxymoronically named this collection of beings, imagining them slamming molecule-less batons into disembodied gloves.
I zipped myself into my sleeping bag. I didn’t want to leave Skye, and my friends, and the pleasures of study. But Hubbard seemed to have sabotaged the sensible and useful aspects of Scientology with this loony sci-fi storyline. Had he just decided his religion had to have a creation myth, the way it needed a cross?
i wonder now if the rumors of those purges, the weirdness going on at the upper echelons of the Church, affected my experience of Chaco. Because even in broad daylight, the cañon seemed spiked with evil, fraught with the odd, the violent, the eerie. Perhaps being in that desolate place, scrambling around in the hot, dry air, was why, for the first time, I let myself examine those bits and pieces I’d picked up about the upper OT levels. At night I felt as if spirits, ones that did not wish anyone well, hovered around my tent. As I zipped the flap closed against these imagined intruders, which I did even though I loved being able to see the moon and stars, I thought about the Mayan civilization, whose ruins lay far south. That culture, deep in Mexico, had peaked in 900 c.e. A hundred years later, the historical record of the Anasazi begins. Pondering the Mayans’ violent sacrifices, I wondered if any of that—like the seashells and feathers of tropical birds that had been found in Anasazi ruins—could have made its way across the thousands of miles separating the two cultures.
So maybe, as I scribbled in a note to Vano, Driver crashes the semi, Eva in the front seat beside him, in some magical zone near Chaco Canyon they have no idea they’ve entered. Whisked back to the 1300s, as thousands of Anasazi pilgrims are converging, Driver and Eva are swept up in the tumble of the faithful, as they are then caught up in various rituals, which only they can see are spurious bits of religiosity. Driver, tapped by a head shaman, finds the Native American part of him intrigued. But Eva manages to persuade him that mixed in with Anasazi wisdom are terribly unsavory elements, and that they should leave. Somehow they manage to break free of the alluring Anasazi zone, taking what’s useful and leaving behind the weird. Eva finds herself pregnant with Driver’s baby. Now a family, they start a new life.
The connections are obvious to me now. But at the time I didn’t see how completely this reflected my confusion and yearnings regarding Skye and Scientology.
As I ventured further and further afield, into territory rarely visited by the average tourist, I pondered religion and its “binding” nature. So many religions, all convinced theirs is the only way. Why this need for larger meaning? I believed absolutely that something inhabited the body—soul, spirit, thetan—and that death came about because of the departure of that thing (expire’s roots are “out” + “spirit”). But belief systems only come about due to just that: belief. Faith. Well, and practice. Study. You have to do the thing, know the tenets; above all, you have believe in them. Catholicism, yoga, Transcendental Meditation, Buddhism, Scientology.
Clambering into dozens of cliff dwellings, places extremely difficult to access without the help of ladders or hard-to-discern footholds pecked into stone, I thought about how many people, within so many religions, were bound—had agreed to be bound—by, say, the idea of a pantheon of gods. By the idea of a single god. The idea of a savior. Of Nirvana. Of a Bridge to Total Freedom.
In spite of the intellectual, empirical world in which I’d been raised, which dismissed, even denigrated much to do with spiritual yearning, I’d always been attracted to ideas about mind and soul; one of the reasons I kept on keeping on with Scientology was that it seemed to encompass various systems that had long appealed to me. There were Eastern concepts of karma, including Hinduism’s ideas regarding reincarnation and Buddhism’s lack of a god to worship. My mother’s Christian Science was represented: spirit could rise above and control body. Hubbard didn’t mention love, which seemed essential to Christianity, but then, LRH belonged to a generation that didn’t talk much about such things. Still, if one looked for it, it was there. Between the vaulting authority embodied by Standard Tech, the caretaking (mothering) involved in auditing, and the epiphanies to be had when applying ethics (confession, if you will), I could envision the stern Old Testament God and his Christian intermediaries, Mary and Jesus. Over the years, I’d sat in dozens of churches and cathedrals, breathing in forms of Christianity along with the aroma of incense and beeswax, trying to comprehend all the blood that had been spilled in the insistence that theirs (so many theirs) was the only God, their way the only way. One of the things I appreciated about Scientology was that even though one was supposed to believe it was the only way, no one—so far, anyway—had gone to war over it.
Out of breath from my scramble up a particularly steep cliff face, I looked down and across the sere landscape stretching into the far distance. That the Anasazi had moved into these cliffs toward the end of their time in the Four Corners, just before they disappeared, made it seem as if they’d been afraid of something. Protecting themselves from something. What—who—had made them do that? The Anci
ent Ones? Or the Ancient Enemies? And if they were enemies, why? What had they done? And what was going on at the upper levels of the Church?
I thought about Skye a lot. I thought about Max less and less.
I was unaware of how obsessed I’d become with an ancient religion while being so ambivalent about my own.
back at tracy’s house, lying in bed, I tried to imagine Max beside me, tried to envision the lovely life we’d lead, as he twined mandolin notes around the songs I’d pluck from my guitar. I hugged it to me as if it were a vast amount of fabric, what you might find in a wedding dress or an enormous tablecloth. But more and more the image felt like a tarp that’s been left too long in the rain and sun, shredding even as I tried to salvage it. I wanted to be grateful for the catalyst I’d hoped he’d be, “saving” me from Scientology, but I had to face that while we’d been concocting all these fine plans, I was with Skye and Max was married, with a daughter. I was full of overts. I could hardly bear to look at it.
I began to face how horrid it must be for Skye, alone in the house. He’d asked me not to be in touch, so as not to open the wound caused by my leaving, and so had no idea whether I was or was not creating life with another man. When Max wrote a lovely letter exactly a month after I’d put the moratorium in place, I demurred. A few weeks later, I wrote to Skye, apologizing. The Conditions haunted me. Enemy? Treason? How would I ever make up the damage done?
He wrote back, cautious. Scientology was a constant in his life. That wasn’t going to change, and wasn’t that friction making me unhappy? Yet how could he tell the woman he loved that she should leave what, as far as he was concerned, was the only way? The familiar chasm began to yawn.
I loved where I was and what I was doing, but I couldn’t live with my sister the rest of my life. I missed my friends. I missed Skye. I told him I was coming back.
I can’t bear to relive the convoluted reasoning I used to justify this decision.
Flunk.
but there was a start, of sorts. Skye was east with his family, and after a brief, terrible Christmas with my parents—I still remember Mom’s cry, “You’d escaped!”—I headed to LA and, waiting for Skye’s return, looked into graduate programs. I managed to meet the application deadlines for Stanford and Iowa.
I did not return to the Center. Instead, I went back to waitressing. It felt good to step away from such deep engagement with the Church. At least I’d accomplished that, I told myself, quietly. While I doubted I’d be accepted into a graduate program, I held that hope there like a flickering candle. It would provide distance. And after that . . . ?
I arrived back in LA just in time for Vano’s memorial service. I hadn’t known he’d died. Almost I didn’t attend, and I did arrive late. Maybe because his death was too much of a reminder of Oak’s almost death. Vano had been good to me, and I wished I could have done more for him. As soon as the memorial was over, I fled.
Skye returned. And there we were, once again holding fast to each other in the night. His dreams for Stryder had faded. He was pouring all that passion into a novel. He wrote every day, hard and fast, on an electric typewriter. And at long last, I found a way to be helpful: as an editor. Years of scribbling in journals, listening to panels at the Conference, poring over New Yorkers—dazzled and inspired by the writing in those glossy pages—paid off when I looked at the work of others.
My own novel disintegrated. My research had led me to a dreadful comprehension regarding the Ancient Ones, the reason for those cliff dwellings, why the ancestors of the Pueblo had been known as “enemies”: High-ranking priests of the Anasazi had become a ruling class, wielding vast power and creating widespread fear. They began to eat the others. Perhaps, in the enormous kivas of Chaco Canyon, the cannibalism was even ritualized. They boiled brains in the victims’ own skulls and slurped them down.
First the People took to the cliffs. And then they simply dis-appeared.
It did not occur to me that this phenomenon—members of a religion eating their own—might be happening in my own church.
for the most part, the shallow Scientology waters in which I waded reflected little of the frantic movement deep in the organization. While I knew that Miscavige had created something called Religious Technology Services, and that he’d appointed himself Chairman of the Board, I only vaguely understood that the RTS had oversight regarding everything to do with Scientology. (Not until I was checking citations for this book did I realize that includes the republishing, and thus the ownership of copyright, of all of Hubbard’s writings.)
But there were, nevertheless, rumors of purges, of people being “declared” as Suppressive or sent to the dread Rehabilitation Project Force. Or now and again a story about someone trying to escape, and being caught and brought back into the Church.
I did my best not to think about it. It was easy to do. There was no Internet. As sealed off as the Church kept itself, it was almost impossible to know what was going on. If a reporter did manage to dig in—and at the time there were award-winning exposés in the Los Angeles Times and on Dateline—avoiding them was just a matter of turning a page or changing the channel. Every now and then I felt a rumble of some terrible truth about myself, as if a massive semi were passing by, shaking my windows and even my boiler room.
However, those months with Tracy and her family, the steady writing, the solo adventures into Anasazi country, seemed to have restored something important. I worked on my music. I kept to a writing schedule and rethought the novel. I’d keep the Southwest. But there’d be no time travel, which had been Vano’s idea. If Eva—renamed Maud—found her way to the Anasazi, she’d determine what they had to teach her about herself and her quest, now.
that spiritual stuff does matter
Auditing sessions begin by the auditor running “Rudiments”: determining if you’ve had enough food and rest and that you’re not otherwise distracted.88 It’s hard to concentrate on the auditor’s questions if you want to weep over the fight you just had with your husband, impossible for an auditor to correctly read what’s going on with the meter if you’ve stolen money from your business. Sometimes talking through these problems won’t result in a floating needle, and the auditor may need to ask about earlier, similar incidents. Sometimes such chains can take up an entire session.
One day, back in session with Paloma, it became clear that a vast sorrow was attached to one of these rudiments; it wouldn’t clear up. Once again I was crying about never being good enough, about having so much “case,” about the lost years of my life. The crying got worse. We could not sort through it. Paloma reached for a different sheet. She checked the meter and met my eyes.
“Has someone given you a wrong indication?”
I thought about the fight about “rider” versus “writer” that I’d supposedly had with the thetan who in this lifetime was my father. I started wailing.
Paloma, watching the meter, said, “What’s that?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“There,” she said, as the meter’s needle clearly ticked in some way. I shook my head, intrigued in spite of myself. “There,” she said again, and repeated the question, “Has someone given you a wrong indication?”
A thought zipped through me.
“Yes, that,” she said. “What is that?”
I shook my head. “It’s ridiculous!”
“Tell me.” Keeping an eye on me, one on the meter, she was writing fast.
“I . . .”
But it was preposterous.
She smiled. Her dear freckled face, the red hair pulled back from it. “You can say anything, Sands. You know that.”
I nodded. Of course. But not this.
She waited, eyes alert and focused and infinitely gentle.
“I’m Clear,” I said.
She wrote, adjusted the meter. Her TRs were excellent. She did not agree. She did not disagree. She did
not find it preposterous. She simply waited for what else I had to say.
“I have been for years—”
I couldn’t say the next part. But she kept that steady gaze.
My body began to tingle, wave after wave surging through my veins, and I knew I was “blowing down.”89 A blowdown is often visceral, and this day it was exceptionally so: The top of my head prickled, as if energy were rising through the hair follicles; my scalp felt as if it might detach from my skull and rise beyond the ceiling. My skin seemed to pulse with heat. It was as if decades’ worth of electrical charge was radiating through every pore.
“That’s it,” she said. “Yes, here we go, here we go.” She adjusted the meter, adjusted it again.
“It was last lifetime,” I said.
I thought about that twelve-year-old girl who’d flunked me in the AO’s course room, who’d been a Course Supervisor last lifetime and who’d picked up those duties again as soon as she was able. About the British couple talking to me about past lifetimes, who’d swung off the bus in East Grinstead, perhaps bound for Saint Hill. Was I just making this up? Was this just some absurd, desperate effort to be something I felt I needed to be?
Paloma waited, steady as an ocean liner forging through high waves.
My body continued to feel as if it were radiating light. Images and memories flickered, ones I’d thought about but never put together. A couch in a Hollywood bungalow. The spindly legs of a Danish-style coffee table. Mangled wreckage. A single skewed headlight, lighting up a field to the side of a road. The sad epiphany, had so long ago while vacuuming the carpet in the Squaw Valley living room, that all of one’s life could be likened to a spool of celluloid, how I’d stood there remembering that idea as if someone had told me of it.
“I went Clear on Dianetics,” I managed to sputter out.
“Go on.”
The story spilled out: After Dianetics was published, in 1950, I’d done a lot of Book One processes with a friend in the living room of a bungalow in West Hollywood. I’d attested to Clear in March of 1952. (I was aware of swiftly doing the math: I was, after all, born in April of 1952. It was possible.) Not long after, on a rainy night, I got into a car with a couple of friends and on a road near San Diego was killed in a head-on collision. I detached from my body—went exterior—and floated up above the wreckage, quite frantic to be back on Earth and not leave, not now, when I was just getting used to the idea of no longer having my Reactive Mind. From my location above the highway, I saw that in one of the cars, inching by the red lights and strewn bodies, was a couple. The man was driving. The woman, who was covering her eyes with both hands, was pregnant.