by Sands Hall
36.mest. Tech Dictionary: 1. a coined word, meaning matter, energy, space and time, the physical universe. All physical phenomena may be considered as energy operating in space and time. The movement of matter or energy in time is the measure of space. All things are mest except theta. (Abil 114-A)
37.arc. Tech Dictionary: 1) LRH Def. Notes.
See also Scientology Glossary: “a word coined from the initial letters of affinity, reality, and communication.”
38.arc break. Tech Dictionary: 1) LRH Def. Notes.
A comb, perhaps a cat
39.See Broxan, Nadine. “For Mrs. Cruise, Perhaps a Cat.” November 12, 2006: p. 9. www.nytimes.com/2006/11/12/fashion/weddings/12field.html?mcubz=0 (accessed July 31, 2017).
40.case. Scientology Glossary: “a general term for a person being treated or helped. It is also used to mean the entire accumulation of upsets, pain, failures, etc., residing in the preclear’s reactive mind.”
41.cognition. Tech Dictionary: 3) “Something a pc suddenly understands or feels. ‘Well, what do you know about that.’” (HCOB 25 Feb 1960)
Flunk. Start.
42.TR0 Bullbait. “Communication.” www.scientologycourses.org/courses-view/communication/step/16.html (accessed July 31, 2017).
43.reg: regging: registrar: Basic Dictionary of Dianetics and Scientology: In Scientology, the person who signs people up for Scientology services.
44.“And its dreams are dreamed by artists.” www.whatisscientology.org/html/Part06/Chp21/pg0388.html (accessed July 31, 2017).
You could take a look at Doubt
45.conditions (ethics). Tech Dictionary: BTB 12 Apr 1972R.
See also “Improving Conditions of Life.” www.scientologyhandbook.org/conditions/SH10_1.HTM (accessed July 31, 2017).
46.Hubbard, L. Ron. Introduction to Scientology Ethics. Subsequent quotes regarding the Conditions are from this book.
47.disconnection. “There is no Scientology Disconnection policy that requires Church members to disconnect from anyone,” the Church’s website states. “Attitudes and Practices.” www.scientology.org/faq/scientology-attitudes-and-practices/what-is-disconnection.html (accessed July 31, 2017).
However, among other contradictions, Hubbard writes, “To fail or refuse to disconnect from a suppressive person . . . is supportive of the suppressive—in itself a suppressive act. And so it must be labeled” (HCOB 10 Sept 1983).
See Mark Rinder’s blog for a helpful discussion of this: “Disconnection.” Something Can Be Done About It. June 8, 2016. www.mikerindersblog.org/scientology-disconnection (accessed July 31, 2017).
In addition, Leah Remini thoroughly examines disconnection in her series Scientology and the Aftermath, which Lindsay Denniger explores in her post “What Is Disconnection in Scientology?” on Bustle. February 28, 2017. www.bustle.com/articles/197533-what-is-disconnection-in-scientology-leah-reminis-docuseries-explores-how-it-can-change-a-family-forever (accessed July 31, 2017). Remini’s program won a 2017 Emmy for Outstanding Informational Series.
the ethics officer
48.PTS. Tech Dictionary: 2) SH Spec 63, 6506C08.
every sorrow in this world comes down to a misunderstood word
49.Barriers to Study. “The Technology of Study.” www.scientologyhandbook.org/study/sh1_1.htm (accessed July 31, 2017).
All quotations to do with study are taken from this source.
See also “Study Technology—Study Tech.” www.studytechnology.org/index.html (accessed July 31, 2017).
50.Hubbard, L. Ron. Introduction to Scientology Ethics. All quotes regarding PTS/SP are taken from this book.
See also, “Overcoming the Ups and Downs of Life.” www.scientologyhandbook.org/suppression/sh11_1.htm (accessed July 31, 2017).
the true sense of the word
51.suppress. Tech Dictionary: SH Spec 84, 6612c13.
Sunny
52.indicators. Tech Dictionary: HCOB 20 Feb 1970.
53.floating needle. Scientology Glossary.
54.See Jenna Miscavige Hill’s Beyond Belief: My Secret Life in Scientology and My Harrowing Escape. The niece of David Miscavige, Jenna was encouraged to join the Sea Org at a very young age; her story is compelling and deeply troubling. In partnership with Kendra Wiseman and Astra Woodcraft (both also raised as Scientologists), Hill cofounded www.exscientologykids.com, which provides a forum for people who have left the church as well as for those still within Scientology who are looking for information.
55.Tony Ortega presents a copy of the letter that canceled the one-hour-a-day family time on his blog, The Underground Bunker. August 27, 2014. tonyortega.org/2014/08/27/the-document-when-scientology-canceled-family-time (accessed July 31, 2017).
56.Flag Order 2 April 1991 “Children, Sea Org Members and Sea Org Orgs.”
57.The Underground Bunker. Ortega, Tony. Septempter 3, 2014. tonyortega.org/2014/09/03/sea-org-document-dare-to-have-children-you-get-sent-to-scientologys-version-of-siberia/ (accessed September 12, 2017).
58.See Leah Remini’s Scientology and the Aftermath, Episode 5. A&E. 2016.
59.See Note 54.
60.See Lawrence Wright’s Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief. Also the blogs of Tony Ortega: The Underground Bunker; Marty Rathbun: Moving On Up a Little Higher; and Mark Rinder: Something Can Be Done About It.
61.exscientologykids.com: The website’s administrators are Jenna Miscavige Hill, niece of David Miscavige and author of Beyond Belief: My Secret Life in Scientology and My Harrowing Escape, and Astra Woodcraft, who joined the Sea Org at a young age and left when the Church pressured her to have an abortion (accessed September 12, 2017).
62.Religare, “to bind back,” is what many dictionaries offer as the root of the word religion. Sarah F. Hoyt suggests that religare was the etymology St. Augustine favored, but that Cicero suggested that the word had, instead, to do with relegare: “to go through, or go over again, in reading, speech or thought”—as indeed one does when one studies a religion. Hoyt, SF. “The Etymology of Religion.” Journal of the American Oriental Society. Vol. 32, No. 2, 2012 (p. 126). www.jstor.org/stable/3087765 (accessed July 31, 2017).
Gah
63.engram. Tech Dictionary: 1) HCOB 23 Apr 1969.
Scientology Glossary: “a recording made by the reactive mind when a person is ‘unconscious.’ An engram is not a memory—it is a particular type of mental image picture which is a complete recording, down to the last accurate detail, of every perception present in a moment of partial or full ‘unconsciousness.’”
64.The “electropsychometer” appears to have been originally designed by Volney Mathison. But Mathison and Hubbard quarreled, apparently about the use to which the meter would be put, and Hubbard put the idea to one side. But by the late fifties, LRH had developed his own version of the e-meter, patented in 1966 as a “Device for Measuring and Indicating Changes in the Resistance of a Human Body.” “The Story of the E-Meter Part I.” (n.a.) Scientology Books and Media. June 21, 2014. scicrit.wordpress.com/2014/06/21/the-story-of-the-e-meter-pt-1-the-inventor (accessed July 31, 2017).
65.Clear. Tech Dictionary: 5) HCOB 2 Apr 1965.
Scientology Glossary. “. . . is a person who no longer has his own reactive mind and therefore suffers none of the ill effects that the reactive mind can cause. The Clear has no engrams which, when restimulated, throw out the correctness of his computations by entering hidden and false data.”
What is true for you is true for you
66.Buddhism teaches that “attachment” or “obsessive desire” is the source of all suffering. Scientology, on the other hand, encourages what Hubbard calls “havingness.” A high degree of havingness is a clear sign of a successful Scientologist. This might mean a mansion in the Hollywood Hills with a great view, or an excellent career. Havingness is more t
han a synonym for affluence, however. One of Hubbard’s definitions in the Tech Dictionary is “the result of creation” (SH Spec 19 6106C23), and the Scientology Glossary defines it as “the concept of being able to reach. By havingness we mean owning, possessing, being capable of commanding, taking charge of objects, energies and spaces.” Buddhists learn a great deal about humility, about overcoming ego, and indeed, a very lack of self; Scientologists are engaged with self, to be, to do, to have across all the Dynamics.
67.whole track. Tech Dictionary: HCOB 9 Feb 1966.
See also Scientology Glossary, time track: “the consecutive record of mental image pictures which accumulates through a person’s life. It is a very accurate record of a person’s past. As a rough analogy, the time track could be likened to a motion-picture film—if that film were three-dimensional, had fifty-seven perceptions and could fully react upon the observer.”
68.present time problem. Tech Dictionary: 4) PAB 142.
69.rudiments. Tech Dictionary: “the reason you use and clean rudiments is to get the pc in session so you can have the pc 1) in communication with the auditor and 2) interested in his own case.” (HCOB 19 May 1961)
70.word clearing method one. Tech Dictionary: 1) “by meter in session. A full assessment of many, many subjects is done. The auditor then takes each reading subject and clears the chain back to earlier words and or words in earlier subjects until he gets an F/N. (HCOB 24 Jun 1971). 3) The result of a properly done Method One word clearing is the recovery of one’s education.” (Aud 87ASNO)
71.Israel. One day, when Mark and I were (once again) clearing religion, I realized that Israel appeared to be the name of someone in the Bible. Who was that? And why had his name been given to a nation?
For years I’d marveled at the postage stamp–sized piece of land out of which has arisen three world religions—Judaism, Christianity, Islam—as well as a whole lot of war, and that the worst kinds of violence, destruction, and torture have been and still are wielded in the name of an abstraction central to those religions: god. But it had never occurred to me that the name of that piece of land might mean something, might come from somewhere. I was, in fact, a bit horrified that it had never occurred to me to wonder about this.
Mark hefted the dictionary open so I could read about Israel: not only the definition of the country, but the definition attached to someone named Jacob.
Israel: “The descendants of Jacob: The Hebrew people, regarded as (according to Judaism) the chosen people of God by the covenant of Jacob.”
I told Mark we needed to take a look at covenant and at Jacob.
He’d been raised in a churchgoing household, so he knew the story of Jacob wrestling with the angel and renaming himself, but I did not. I cleared Judaism and then found the shining fish that is at the root of Israel, the Latinized form of the Hebrew Yisra’el:
yisra: “he who fights or contends with” + el: “a deity.”
Thus, Israel: “He who contends with God”—as Jacob wrestled with that angel.
But it’s also translated as “God has striven” or “God has saved.” (In other, later, dictionaries I found that Is + Ra is presented as a conjoining of the Egyptian deities Isis and Ra, which would not only considerably predate the Jacob story but could indicate an altogether different notion of an androgynous god, rather than the masculine one shared by those three religions that erupted out of Israel.)
At about this point I realized that even in the roots of words a point of view could be discerned, as “He who contends with God” means something considerably different from “God has saved.” (Similarly, a root that combines “contending” + “God” is quite removed from one that proposes that Is + Ra + el is an androgynous deity.) I sat in wonderment, contemplating the idea that a nation that called itself a name that, translated, means “contending with God” might have something to do with the violence that for well over two thousand years has emanated from that tiny piece of land tucked at the top of Egypt.
It occurred to me that He who contends with God also has to do with the Jewish tradition of questioning, of which, by then, I was aware.
Mark and I clambered back up the word chain, clarifying how the Catholic religion requisitioned that word—catholic means all-embracing, or universal—by replacing its lowercase c with a capital one, reminding myself what it was that Protestants were protesting, and pausing again at the root of religion, that sense of binding. Then we blinked at each other, stunned by that marvelous trek through the deserts of ancient Palestine.
“Your needle is floating,” he said.
72.personal integrity. “Basic Principles of Scientology.” www.scientology.org/what-is-scientology/basic-principles-of-scientology/personal-integrity.html (accessed July 31, 2017).
73.enturbulate. Tech Dictionary: Scn AD.
74.Ortega, Tony. “The Saga of David Mayo.” The Underground Bun-ker. April 13, 2013. tonyortega.org/2013/04/13/the-saga-of-david-mayo-scientologys-banished-tech-wizard (accessed July 31, 2017).
He has simply moved on to his next level
75.Third Party Law. Tech Dictionary: “the law would seem to be: a third party must be present and unknown in every quarrel for a conflict to exist.” (HCOB 26 Dec 1968)
76.Miscavige’s speech following Hubbard’s death, January 27, 1986. Video: vimeo.com/12375370. Commentary and partial transcript: Ortega, Tony. “30 Years Ago Today.” The Underground Bunker. January 30, 2017. tonyortega.org/2016/01/27/30-years-ago-today-l-ron-hubbard-discarded-the-body-he-had-used-in-this-lifetime/comment-page-1 (accessed July 31, 2017).
Also interesting: video and transcript of Pat Broeker discussing LRH’s “final” level (when Hubbard supposedly purposefully “dropped his body”), including notation of the physical discomfort Broeker appears to feel as he describes these matters: Lerma, Arnaldo Pagliarini. (n.d.) www.lermanet.com/exit/death-transcript.htm (accessed July 31, 2017).
77.exterior/exteriorization. Scientology Glossary: “the state of the thetan being outside his body with or without full perception, but still able to control and handle the body. When a person goes exterior, he achieves a certainty that he is himself and not his body.”
78.While Hubbard generally dated his policy letters and bulletins in the British way (date/month/year), he sometimes measured time as beginning with the publication of his book Dianetics. Thus he used A.D., After Dianetics, as the beginning of a new time, as Anno Domini or Common Era establishes a new era beginning with the birth of Christ.
79.Tech Dictionary. 3) HCOB 3 July 1959.
80.Beckett, Samuel. Waiting for Godot. Grove Press. New York, NY. 1954. Excerpts from Waiting for Godot, copyright © 1954 by Grove Press, Inc; copyright © renewed 1982 by Samuel Beckett. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. Any third-party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited.
Because, you know, you did just turn thirty-six
81.Rehabilitation Project Force (rpf): “The RPF is based upon one of the oldest and most fundamental concepts in religion—a religious retreat in the form of a cloister focusing on intensive spiritual introspection and study and balanced by some form of physical labor.” “What Is the Rehabilitation Project Force?” www.scientologynews.org/faq/what-is-the-rehabilitation-project-force.html (accessed July 31, 2017).
82.rundown. Tech Dictionary: “a series of steps which are auditing actions and processes designed to handle a specific aspect of a case and which have a known end phenomena.” (LRH Def. Notes)
Scientology Glossary: “a series of related actions in Scientology which culminate in a specific end result.”
83.karma. American Heritage: The total effect of one’s actions and conduct during the successive phases of one’s existence, regarded as determining one’s destiny. From the Sanskrit for “deed, action that has consequences.”
84.Quad Flows. Tech Dictionary: “F-1 is fl
ow one, something happening to self. F-2 is flow two, doing something to another. F-3 is flow three, others doing something to others. F-0 is flow zero, self doing something to self.” (HCOB 4 Apr 1971-1R)
85.HCOB 23 Jan 1974RB revised 25 Apr 1991, “The Introspection Rundown.”
Binding back
86.Childs, Joe, and Thomas C. Tobin. “Two Detectives Describe Their Two-Decade Pursuit of an Exiled Scientology Leader.” September 29, 2012. www.tampabay.com/news/scientology/two-detectives-describe-their-two-decade-pursuit-of-an-exiled-scientology/1254129 (accessed July 31, 2017).
87.Ortega, Tony. “Death of a Scientologist.” January 30, 2012. www.villagevoice.com/2012/01/30/death-of-a-scientologist-why-annie-broeker-famous-in-the-church-had-to-die-in-secret (accessed July 31, 2017).
That spiritual stuff does matter
88.See Note 69.
89.blowdown. Tech Dictionary: “a period of relief and cognition to a pc while it is occurring and for a moment after it stops. When the auditor has to move the tone arm from right to left to keep the needle on the dial . . . then a blowdown is occurring.” (HCOB 3 Aug 1965)
Spit happens
90.The definition of profound is “penetrating beyond what is superficial or obvious,” from Lat. profundus: pro, “before” + fundus, “bottom.” I find this derivation intriguing—“before the bottom”—as it seems to echo the sense of the underworld I was occupying at the time; the idea, perhaps, that it is darkest before the dawn, that one has such insights and epiphanies on the way to being able to rise again—to return. The idea of “we,” of “us,” replacing, or, rather, replenishing “I” is definitely one of the boons I found down there in the darkness.