Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief Read Online Free PDF

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 iscapable 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 answerthe 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 springsinto 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 thebriefcase, 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.”
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    1 It has since been spectacularly renovated and turned into Scientology’s premierCelebrity Centre.
    2 Hubbard sometimes disparaged the term “lie detector” in connection withE-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 toDavid 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