Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief(8)
He was also looking forward to having the enhanced abilities that his fellow adherents on the Bridge were constantly talking about. Although Hubbard had explicitly told Operating Thetans not to use their powers for “parlor tricks,” there was a section of Advance!, a magazine for upper-level Scientologists, titled “OT Phenomena,” where members could report clairvoyant or paranormal experiences. Parking spaces magically made themselves available and waiters immediately noticed you. “I saw that my goldfish was all red and lumpy,” one Scientologist writes in Advance! “My husband, Rick, said that he’s had goldfish like that before and they don’t recover.” The correspondent relates that she used her abilities to “flow energy” into the fish “until a big burst of matter blew. I ended off. When I went home that night the fish was completely healed.” She concludes, “It was a big win for me, and the fish. It couldn’t have been done without the technology of L. Ron Hubbard.” Even if such effects were random and difficult to replicate, for those who experienced them life was suddenly full of unseen possibilities. There was a sense of having entered a sphere of transcendence, where minds communicate with each other across great distances, where wishes and intentions affect material objects or cause people to unconsciously obey telepathic orders, and where spirits from other ages or even other worlds make themselves known.
“A theta being is capable of emitting a considerable electronic flow,” Hubbard notes, “enough to give somebody a very bad shock, to put out his eyes or cut him in half.” Even ordinary actions pose unexpected dilemmas for the OT, Hubbard warns. “How do you answer the phone as an OT?” he asks in one of his lectures. “Supposing you get mad at somebody on the other end of the telephone. You go crunch! And that’s so much Bakelite. The thing either goes into a fog of dust in the middle of the air or drips over the floor.” To avoid crushing telephones with his unfathomable strength, the OT sets up an automatic action so he doesn’t have to pick the receiver up himself. “Telephone rings, it springs into the air, and he talks. In other words, through involuntary intention the telephone stands there in mid-air.” The promise of employing such powers was incredibly tantalizing.
Carrying an empty briefcase, Haggis went to the Advanced Organization building in Los Angeles, where the OT III material was held. A supervisor handed him a manila envelope. Haggis locked it in the briefcase, which was lashed to his arm. Then he entered a secure study room and bolted the door behind him. At last, he was able to examine the religion’s highest mysteries, revealed in a couple of pages of Hubbard’s handwritten scrawl. After a few minutes, Haggis returned to the supervisor.
“I don’t understand,” Haggis said.
“Do you know the words?”
“I know the words, I just don’t understand.”
“Go back and read it again,” the supervisor suggested.
Haggis did so. In a moment, he returned. “Is this a metaphor?” he asked.
“No,” the supervisor responded. “It is what it is. Do the actions that are required.”
Maybe it’s an insanity test, Haggis thought—if you believe it, you’re automatically kicked out. He considered that possibility. But when he read it again, he decided, “This is madness.”
* * *
1 It has since been spectacularly renovated and turned into Scientology’s premier Celebrity Centre.
2 Hubbard sometimes disparaged the term “lie detector” in connection with E-Meters. “In the first place they do not detect lies and in the second place the police have known too little about the human mind to know that their instrument was actually accurate to an amazing perfection. These instruments should be called ‘emotion detectors’ ” (Hubbard, “Electropsychometric Auditing Operator’s Manual,” 1952). According to David S. Touretsky, a research professor in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University (and a prominent Scientology critic), what are called “thoughts” are actually “fleeting patterns of chemical and electrical activity in our brains” that have no actual mass. “The meter is really more of a prop or talisman than a measuring instrument. Interpreting needle movements is like reading tea leaves. A good fortune teller picks up on lots of subliminal cues that let them ‘read’ their subject, while the tea leaves give the subject something to fixate on. And the subject is heavily invested in believing that the auditor and the meter are effective, so it’s a mutually reinforcing system.” The E-Meter measures skin resistance, like a lie detector. “Strong emotional reactions do cause changes in muscle tension or micro-tremors of the fingers will also cause changes in the current flowing to the meter, so it’s not purely measuring the physiological changes associated with skin resistance like a real lie detector would. (And real lie detectors also look at other variables, such as pulse and respiration rates.)” (David Touretsky, personal correspondence.)
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The many discrepancies between Hubbard’s legend and his life have overshadowed the fact that he genuinely was a fascinating man: an explorer, a best-selling author, and the founder of a worldwide religious movement. The tug-of-war between Scientologists and anti-Scientologists over Hubbard’s biography has created two swollen archetypes: the most important person who ever lived and the world’s greatest con man. Hubbard himself seemed to revolve on this same axis, constantly inflating his actual accomplishments in a manner that was rather easy for his critics to puncture. But to label him a pure fraud is to ignore the complex, charming, delusional, and visionary features of his character that made him so compelling to the many thousands who followed him and the millions who read his work. One would also have to ignore his life’s labor in creating the intricately detailed epistemology that has pulled so many into its net—including, most prominently, Hubbard himself.