Inside Scientology (12 page)

Finding a job designing posters and other promotional material for an organization in Los Angeles, Jeff moved to the Sierra Madre Canyon, an eclectic artists' refuge nestled in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains. Just a half-hour drive northeast from downtown L.A., the Canyon was home to hundreds of longhaired kids who'd migrated there during the mid-1960s—Jeff believed it to be one of the largest hippie outposts in the country after Haight-Ashbury. With its quirky bungalows and wooden footbridges, it was a rustic idyll and sanctuary for the drifters and dropouts of the greater Los Angeles area, and many more who'd come to party with their friends on the weekends.

But Jeff was bored. He was searching for something; he didn't know what. The Summer of Love had come and gone, along with its haze of promise. The war in Vietnam continued to kill thousands of young Americans. Many who made it back alive wore the dead-eyed stares of the walking wounded. Active in the anti-war movement, Jeff was haunted by the memory of one large demonstration outside the Los Angeles Convention Center, where he'd seen a twelve-year-old girl beaten up by the Los Angeles police. Drugs, Jeff knew, weren't the answer—a bad acid trip a few months earlier had cured him of that interest. He spent most of his spare time poring over books on meditation, yoga, cybernetics, hypnosis.

One Sunday afternoon in the fall of 1967, Jeff's roommate, Jerry Day, arrived home in a state of high fluster. "Wait until you hear about this," Jerry said, breathlessly.

Jeff yawned. "Hear about what?" he said.

"Scientology!" Jerry said.

"What's Scientology?"

Jerry took a deep breath and began to explain that he'd just met some guys, Scientologists from L.A., who'd been talking about a new "scientific form of spiritual enlightenment." They all seemed really into it—like
really,
Jerry said. They talked of Scientology as if it was a magical science that could help you—somehow—somehow—become a superman. Plus, there was some kind of past-life component that sounded really cool. "Don't you want to check it out?" Jerry asked.

Science, spiritual enlightenment, past lives—they all fit into Jeff's intellectual purview. "Sure, bring it on," he said. Later he would laugh at the memory. "We were all pretty crazy hippies back then," Jeff, now living in Portland, Oregon, told me not long ago. "We were pretty much up for anything."

The next night, Jeff and Jerry drove out of the Canyon and went down to Scientology's Los Angeles headquarters, the "Scientology Place," as they called it, which was located in a rambling Spanish-style house on Ninth Street, near MacArthur Park. A crowd of maybe one hundred or more had gathered around a fountain on the front lawn; others were packed into the lobby. They were of different ages and, to Jeff's great surprise, they were
talking to one another
—graying, middle-aged parents standing side by side with longhaired hippies, laughing, discussing philosophy, trading jokes, as if the generation gap had been closed.

A few minutes later, everyone filed into a lecture hall. Jerry and Jeff found seats near the back. At the front, a handsome young man with dark hair walked up to the lectern. A hush fell over the room. The young man could have been a movie star; he was that good-looking, Jeff thought. He also had an intense, unwavering stare that seemed to penetrate right through a person. And he was an electrifying speaker, presenting Scientology as a lifesaving new philosophy that freed the mind and the spirit. Even war, he said, could be prevented with the correct application of Scientology's principles.

About halfway through the lecture, the young man stopped to show a film that featured an interview with Scientology's founder, L. Ron Hubbard. Here was the same smiling, fatherly-looking man whom Jeff had seen depicted on posters that were plastered everywhere in the building; a large portrait of Hubbard also hung in the lobby. He looked nearly sixty, but Jeff thought he had a puckish mien. He wore a jaunty ascot, and his presentation was irreverent, even wildly anti-establishment. He seemed to speak the language of youth, not that of his own dusty generation. And, Jeff noted, he was not a member of some austere academic or philosophical establishment; he didn't even have a degree!
^*
Instead, his résumé listed his various exploits as an explorer, sailor, expedition leader, anthropologist, author, and all-around maverick. He was known as Ron.

After the film, the lecturer picked up where he had left off, explaining some core principles of Scientology. Society's reactive mind, he said, was to blame for all that was wrong in the world: the H-bomb, the Vietnam War, the plague of overpopulation and disease. When humans become free of the reactive mind and reach the state of Clear, they become smarter, saner, more dynamic, more
alive.
Surely, Jeff thought, this young speaker possessed those traits himself. And indeed, he said, "I'm Clear," and fixed every member of the audience with his magnetic gaze. "You can be too."

"I was hooked," said Jeff.

And so Jeff Hawkins, a shy, somewhat awkward young man usually dressed in jeans, sandals, a blue work shirt, and tinted granny glasses, got into Scientology, as did his friend Jerry and thousands of other young people all across the United States. For those like Jeff, who were smart, curious, and searching, Scientology provided its own form of rebellion, which was perfectly timed, as it turned out.

Had the sixties never happened—which is to say, had a tremendous number of young people not become convinced of the moral and spiritual bankruptcy of their parents, the church, the Republican Party, and other people and institutions collectively known as the establishment—Scientology might have gone the way of other fringe movements and died a quiet death. Instead, repositioned as a mystical quest rather than an alternative mental health therapy or religious movement, Scientology rode the countercultural wave, and by the late 1960s, a whole new generation of spiritual seekers had caught on to the renegade vision of L. Ron Hubbard.

"Wherever you go," wrote the journalist George Malko in his 1970 book
Scientology: The Now Religion,
"the Scientology word is being shouted at you from Day-Glo posters showing an exultantly leaping man, his very vibrancy dividing his body into a discord of parallel striations."
S
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declared the posters, tacked to the walls of New York City subway stations. On campuses, Scientology was marketed as a movement for Flower Children. One church official in New York, Bob Thomas, described Scientology to Malko as a "drugless psychedelic"
that offered young people a community and a new brand of hope.

"After drugs comes Scientology,"
said one series of church fliers posted in public urinals around the University of California, Berkeley. Other leaflets, handed out widely on street corners, urged young people to "be a member of Scientology. The world has waited thousands of years for a technology to change conditions for the better. Scientology is the answer."

In Kenmore Square or Washington Square, on Shattuck Avenue or Sunset Boulevard, in the Haight or Golden Gate Park, pretty young girls dressed in hot pants or mini-skirts, smiling radiantly as if they'd discovered a secret they were bursting to share, would approach young, mostly male college students or hippies and invite them to come with them. And, like lemmings, men would follow, said Nancy Many, who worked for the Scientology organization in Boston. It was unwritten policy that the church would deploy its most attractive staff to recruit people off the street. "No one had any idea where they were being taken," she said, chuckling, "but these girls were gorgeous and so the guys would go."

The girls would take the boys—or, alternately, though less frequently, a handsome young man might take a group of girls—to the local church of Scientology, which in those days was usually housed in a storefront or rundown office building, or, like the Los Angeles Org, in an old house. There, these potential recruits—"raw meat,"
as they were called—were delivered to someone like Many, who would seat them in a large auditorium with dozens, and at times hundreds, of other people, for an introductory lecture. By then, whoever had brought them in would have vanished back out onto the street to round up more prospects. Some of the new arrivals, detecting the bait and switch, would leave; others, intrigued, stayed.

The lectures could take various directions. Some, like the one Jeff and Jerry attended, were straightforward: an explanation of the reactive mind, a film, an invitation to become Clear. There was also the lecture-confessional. "I used to be a failure," the lecturer might begin. "I was a terrible father, a terrible husband, I was unhappy with my church, I had a dead-end job. And then I discovered Scientology."

"Beautiful," someone in the back of the room would murmur. Frequently it was another pretty girl. She was not, however, an audience member, but rather a Scientologist installed there to set the right tone.
The lecturer would go on to describe how incredibly, magically mind-blowing the experience of auditing had been; how he'd discovered a "new reality" based on "affinity" and communication. "Reality is agreement," he might explain, adding that Scientology meant "the study of truth" and that a key principle was to know "what's true for you." He had found his truth, and he was so sure this
was
the truth that after just a short time in Scientology, he'd left his wife, quit his job, and was now working full-time at the church. And now he wanted everyone in the audience to immediately find a registrar (that is, a church salesperson) and do as he had: join the Church of Scientology and "step into the exciting world of the totally free."

"That was our job," Many, a perky, dark-haired woman in her fifties, told me. She left Scientology in 1997 and now lives with her husband, Chris, in the San Fernando Valley. She had been a girl of nineteen when she joined the church in Boston and was soon charged with delivering some of the lectures to an audience that frequently seemed confused. "There would be all these college kids in there, and they'd look around as if to say, 'Where'd that chick go who brought us here? Where's the chick?'" Many laughed. "She was out doing her job, bringing in tons of people. Our job was to get them interested enough to go to a registrar, who would then sell them. But if we weren't getting them to the registrar, we got in trouble. You had to sell them something—even if it was just a book."

Selling religion was by no means unique to Scientology. The Hare Krishnas sold copies of the Bhagavad Gita; the followers of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon and his Unification Church sold flowers at airports as a way of meeting naive and impressionable young people. More recently, the Kabbalah Centre, which promotes a self-help-inspired form of Jewish mysticism that became popular in the late 1990s, has made handsome profits selling candles and beaded bracelets at such high-end retail establishments as Barneys New York.
But Scientology had a cooler, more mainstream appeal. "I never thought I was joining a religion," said Many, who was raised a Catholic. It was like yoga, in terms of its faddish popularity, but it was better than fuzzy Eastern philosophy: less "foreign," more fun. There was no dancing, chanting, or wearing of orange robes. No one was encouraged to abstain from sex, cigarettes, or alcohol, let alone shave their head. There was also no requirement to relinquish worldly possessions (nor to hand anything over to a guru).

Just as Mia Farrow and the Beatles embraced Transcendental Meditation, Scientology gained its own celebrity following: in the 1960s, Leonard Cohen, Cass Elliot, William'S. Burroughs,
and even Jim Morrison
("
Jim?!?
" some kids asked, and this rumor, which remains just a rumor, always seemed a bit too good to be true) were said to have dabbled in Scientology. Of the church's processes, Burroughs, who'd made it all the way to Clear, once said, "Scientology can do more in ten hours than psychoanalysis can do in ten years."
^*

A few darker exemplars existed as well. Charles Manson, for one, studied Scientology in prison in the early 1960s, years before committing the Tate-LaBianca murders, and would later go on to use some of its techniques on his followers.
But he was the exception. Scientology was geared not toward the dropouts and runaway youths who panhandled in the Haight or caught steamers to Morocco, but toward kids like Jeff Hawkins, who were idealistic and eager for social change, and who, as Jeff would say, were "looking for something that made sense."

And Scientology, it seemed to many young people, did. It was not a "cult" insofar as it did not require separation from mainstream society, nor from families—though it encouraged its acolytes to "disconnect" from those who were critical of Scientology. But it presented itself as a movement of people who were deeply engaged with the world. Parents were not necessarily the enemy; they were potential converts. The church encouraged its young members to connect with their families, devising special drills and other technology to help members repair fractured relationships and communicate their new beliefs. For those whose parents were hostile to Scientology, or to its costs—in 1968, as Jeff recalled, an introductory Scientology course package cost around $1,000; auditing, also sold in packages, began at roughly $175 for five hours—the church produced pamphlets and cassette tapes
^†
to better explain Scientology's beliefs and practices and to present Scientology in a positive light.