Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief(82)

Anytime Haggis boggled at an illogical or fanciful piece of data, he was invariably reminded that it was his failure entirely. He had come into Scientology as an adult, so his experience outside the church still informed his judgments. When he stumbled on something in Scientology that he thought was ridiculous, he would make a mental detour around it, not wanting to spend the time and money to do the “repairs” that his supervisors would prescribe. Although he never lost his skepticism, his daughters were born into the religion. They were schooled in it from the beginning. Nearly everyone they knew was a Scientologist.

Each of the girls was a near clone of one of the parents. Alissa and Katy were Paul, pale and blond, but more sharp-featured, with dimpled noses and sculpted cheekbones. Lauren, the middle daughter, was Diane, inheriting her half-Greek mother’s olive skin and dark, Mediterranean eyes. The girls were bright, inquisitive, and cheerful by nature, but their parents’ divorce was an endless, churning, distracting, heartbreaking trauma, and it took a toll.

The girls went to Delphi Academy, a private school that uses Hubbard “study tech.” It is largely self-guided. According to Scientology pedagogy, there are three barriers that retard a student’s progress. The first is “Lack of Mass.” This principle was derived from Alfred Korzybski’s observation that the word and the object that it names are not the same thing. If the student is studying tractors, for instance, it is best to have a real tractor in front of him. The absence of the actual object is disorienting to the student. “It makes him feel physiologically condensed,” Hubbard writes. “Actually makes him feel squashed. Makes him feel bent, sort of spinny, sort of dead, bored, exasperated.” Photographs of the object can help, or motion pictures, as they are “a sort of promise of hope of the mass,” but they are not an adequate substitute for the tractor under study. The result for the student is that he becomes dizzy, he’ll have headaches, his stomach gets upset, his eyes will hurt, and “he’s going to wind up with a face that feels squashed.” Illness and even suicide may be the expected result. Hubbard’s study tech remedies the problem by using clay or Play-Doh for the student to make replicas of the object.

The second principle is “Too Steep a Gradient,” which Hubbard describes as the difficulty a student encounters when he makes a leap he’s not prepared for. “It is a sort of a confusion or a reelingness that goes with this one,” Hubbard writes. His solution is to go back to the point where the student fully understands the subject, then break the material into bite-size pieces.

The “Undefined Word”—the third and most important principle—occurs when the student tries to absorb material while bypassing the definition of the words employed. “THE ONLY REASON A PERSON GIVES UP A STUDY OR BECOMES CONFUSED OR UNABLE TO LEARN IS BECAUSE HE HAS GONE PAST A WORD THAT WAS NOT UNDERSTOOD,” Hubbard emphasizes in one of his chiding technical bulletins. “WORDS SOMETIMES HAVE DIFFERENT OR MORE THAN ONE MEANING.” A misunderstood word “gives one a distinctly blank feeling or a washed out feeling,” Hubbard writes. “A not-there feeling and a sort of an hysteria will follow in the back of that.” The solution is to have a large dictionary at hand, preferably one with lots of pictures in it. All Scientology texts contain glossaries for specialized Scientology terms. The need to understand the meaning of words, Hubbard writes, “is a sweepingly fantastic discovery in the field of education and don’t neglect it.”

These last two principles are fundamental to the induction of Scientology itself. Because the church asserts that everything Hubbard wrote or spoke is inarguably true, whatever you don’t understand or accept is your fault. The solution is to go back and study the words and approach the material in a more deliberate fashion. Eventually, you’ll get it. Then you can move on.

Lauren loved her teacher at Delphi, but the Hubbard method placed the responsibility of learning almost entirely on the student. For Lauren, her parents’ tumultuous divorce was a crushing distraction. It seemed to her that no one was paying attention to her, either at home or at school. She was illiterate until she was eleven. She couldn’t read or write her own name.

Second-generation Scientologists are typically far more at home with the language and culture of the church than their parents are. And yet they may find themselves a little lost when trying to deal with an uncomprehending society. The first time Alissa noticed that she was doing something different from most people was when she performed a Contact Assist. Scientology preaches that if you repeatedly touch a fresh wound to the object that caused the injury and silently concentrate, the pain lessens and the sense of trauma fades. If a Scientologist sees a person close his hand in a door, for instance, a church manual instructs the Scientologist to “have him go back and, with his injured hand, touch the exact spot on the same door, duplicating the same motions that occurred at the time of the injury.” There are other kinds of assists that will awaken an unconscious person, eliminate boils, reduce earaches and back pain, and make a drunk sober. Instead of crying when she hurt herself, Alissa would quietly redo the action over and over, until she had drained it of its sting. She noticed that non-Scientologists had no idea what she was doing. She was also surprised when she went to a friend’s house for dinner and the family said grace before the meal. It took her a second to realize what they were doing. In her opinion, God plays a negligible role in Scientology. “I mean, there’s a spot for it, but it’s sort of a blank spot.” So whenever her friends began to pray, “I would bow my head and let them have their ceremony.”