Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief(7)
In 1976, at the Manor Hotel, Haggis went “Clear.” It is the base camp for those who hope to ascend to the upper peaks of Scientology. The concept comes from Dianetics. A person who becomes Clear is “adaptable to and able to change his environment,” Hubbard writes. “His ethical and moral standards are high, his ability to seek and experience pleasure is great. His personality is heightened and he is creative and constructive.” Among other qualities, the Clear has a flawless memory and the capacity to perform mental tasks at unprecedented rates of speed; he is less susceptible to disease; and he is free of neuroses, compulsions, repressions, and psychosomatic illnesses. Hubbard sums up: “The dianetic clear is to a current normal individual as the current normal is to the severely insane.”
Haggis was Clear #5925. “It was not life-changing,” he admits. “It wasn’t like, ‘Oh my God, I can fly!’ ” At every level of advancement, he was encouraged to write a “success story” saying how effective his training had been. He had read many such stories by other Scientologists, and they felt overly effusive, geared toward getting through the gatekeepers so that the students could move on to the next level.
THE BRIDGE TO TOTAL FREEDOM is a journey that goes on and on (although confoundingly, in the Scientology metaphor, one moves “higher and higher”—up the Bridge rather than across it). Haggis quickly advanced through the upper levels. He was becoming an “Operating Thetan,” which the church defines as one who “can handle things and exist without physical support and assistance.” An editorial in a 1958 issue of the Scientology magazine Ability notes that “neither Buddha nor Jesus Christ were OTs according to the evidence. They were just a shade above Clear.”
When Haggis joined the church, there were seven levels of Operating Thetans. According to church documents that have been leaked online, Hubbard’s handwritten instructions for Operating Thetan Level One list thirteen mental exercises that attune practitioners to their relationship with others. The directives for OT I are so open-ended it could be difficult to know whether they have been satisfactorily accomplished. “Note several large and several small male bodies until you have a cognition,” for instance. Or, “Seat yourself unobtrusively where you can observe a number of people. Spot things and people you are not. Do to cognition.” The point is to familiarize oneself with one’s environment from the perspective of being Clear.
In the second level, OT II, Scientologists attempt to delete past-life “implants” that hinder progress in one’s current existence. This is accomplished through exercises and visualizations that explore oppositional forces: “Laughter comes from the rear half and calm from the front half simultaneously. Then they reverse. It gives one a sensation of total disagreement. The trick is to conceive of both at the same time. This tends to knock one out.”
Each new level of achievement marked the entrance to a more select spiritual fraternity. Haggis didn’t have a strong reaction to the material, but then, he wasn’t expecting anything too profound. Everyone knew that the big revelations resided in OT III.
Hubbard called this level the Wall of Fire.
“The material involved in this sector is so vicious, that it is carefully arranged to kill anyone if he discovers the exact truth of it,” he wrote in 1967. “So in January and February of this year I became very ill, almost lost this body, and somehow or another brought it off, and obtained the material, and was able to live through it. I am very sure that I was the first one that ever did live through any attempt to attain that material.”
[page]In the late seventies, the OT mysteries were still unknown, except to the elect. There was no Internet, and Scientology’s confidential scriptures had never been published or produced in court. Scientologists looked toward the moment of initiation into OT III with extreme curiosity and excitement. The candidate had to be invited into this next level—Scientologists were cautioned that the material could cause harm or even death to those who were unprepared to receive it. The enforced secrecy added to the mystique and the giddy air of adventure.
One could look back at this crucial moment and examine the pros and cons of Haggis’s decision to stay in Scientology. The fact that people often sneered at the church didn’t deter him; on the contrary, he reveled in being a member of a stigmatized minority—it made him feel at one with other marginalized groups. The main drawback to belief was his own skeptical nature; he was a proud contrarian, and it would never have occurred to him to join the Baptist church, for instance, or to return to Catholicism; he simply wasn’t interested. Intellectually, faith didn’t call to him. Scientology, on the other hand, was exotic and tantalizing. The weirdness of some of the doctrines was hard to fathom, but there was no doubt in Haggis’s mind that he had gained some practical benefits from his several years of auditing and that his communication skills had improved through some of the coursework. None of that had required him to “believe” in Scientology, but the religion had proved itself in certain ways that mattered to him. The process of induction was so gradual that things that might have shocked him earlier were more acceptable by the time he came upon them. Whenever he ran into something on the Bridge to Total Freedom that he couldn’t fathom, he convinced himself that the next level would make everything understandable.
Scientology was a part of his community; it had taken root in Hollywood, just as Haggis had. His first writing jobs had come through Scientology connections. His wife was deeply involved in the church, as was his sister Kathy. His circle of friends was centered in the church. Haggis was deep enough into the process by now to understand implicitly that those relationships would be jeopardized if he chose to leave the church. Moreover, he had invested a considerable part of his income in the program. The incentive to believe was high.