Inside Scientology (13 page)

Jeff had always been close to his mother, who approved of his interest in Scientology. When it came to the cost, he paid the fees; as a graphic designer, he had no problem affording them. Besides, as he saw it, the courses were educational. "These weren't someone's dusty old theories; they were 'technology,'" he said. "I thought what I was learning was science."

The first one Jeff took was called the Communications Course, which promised to help him become more comfortable in social situations. It consisted of a series of drills known as TRs, short for Training Routines, that students were told were used to train Scientology auditors. The drills were printed on white paper in red ink and bore the official-sounding title "Technical Bulletin." The first TR involved closing your eyes and sitting in a chair, sometimes for hours. The second drill involved sitting across from a partner for an hour or two and staring at the person, immobile. A third TR, known as "bull-bait," required students to tease, joke with, or otherwise try to distract their partner, who had to maintain a straight face. Jeff's partner was a pretty girl; to his surprise, he seemed to have no trouble talking to her after a few practice drills—he had even made her laugh.

But the most stunning result of the TRs was the sense of peace that washed over Jeff whenever he practiced them. It was meditative, and at times the feeling was so all-encompassing it seemed he had left his body. He told the course supervisor, who smiled. This was a common experience in Scientology, he said: it was called "exteriorization." As Jeff advanced and gained more awareness in Scientology, the supervisor said, he would be able to leave and return to his body at will.

"It all seemed so unreal—I was completely electrified," Jeff said. Back in the Sierra Madre Canyon, he began talking up Scientology to his girlfriend, Dixie. She was unimpressed. There was something weird about the people she met who were into Scientology, Dixie believed; they had an odd intensity, almost like religious fervor, but their god was neither a minister nor a guru, but a middle-aged science fiction writer. Though Scientology purported to promote total freedom, it was not free—virtually nothing, other than the introductory lecture, came without a price tag. And yet Jeff didn't even seem to see that part of it. "I think it's a cult," she told him.

"You don't know what you're talking about," he said. "It's about living up to your full potential."

It was also, he and many other sixties converts believed, on a mission to save the world. Not only did Scientology promise to get rid of war, but it had a written program to do so: "All we had to do was clear people of their reactive minds and they would become rational and ethical and sane, and see that war and violence were wrong," Jeff said. "To me, it sounded plausible. I couldn't just sit by and do nothing while the world went to hell."

If Dixie couldn't get behind that, then maybe the fault lay within her. One aspect of Scientology, which was not promoted until a person actually became a member, was the core belief that there were certain people in the world known as Suppressive Persons, or SPs. These were people who openly opposed Scientology—journalists, judges, politicians, tax collectors, psychiatrists—but they could also be hostile parents, or skeptical girlfriends. Maybe Dixie was one of
them,
several Scientologists suggested to Jeff; maybe she just didn't want him to get any better. Maybe she didn't want the
world
to get better. Maybe she was an SP.

Ultimately, Dixie gave Jeff an ultimatum: it was either her, she said in frustration, or Scientology. Jeff chose the latter. "It was just too important," he said.

By the early summer of 1968, many of the hippies in the Sierra Madre Canyon were into Scientology. Either that, or they were into hard drugs. It was a fractured, confusing, disheartening time: in April, Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated, followed two months later by Robert Kennedy. Riots had erupted in Watts, and then at the Chicago Democratic Convention. The anti-war protests, bloody and embattled, now seemed futile. Increasingly, many young searchers who'd drifted to the Canyon, particularly those just back from Vietnam, were using heroin. Shady characters followed them, hanging around on the fringes, dealing drugs. The scene in the Canyon became increasingly tense. After one young man was killed in a gunfight near his house, Jeff Hawkins decided it was time to move on.

But where should he go? The Vietnam War loomed. Jeff had already received a letter from his draft board, ordering him in for a pre-induction physical. He'd managed to get himself a psychiatric interview, and posing as "crazy"—something that only half-worked, he thought—was given a temporary deferment. But it was only temporary. He knew the army would eventually come for him.

To avoid this fate, one option was to become a Scientology minister and thus get a ministerial deferment. It was a bit of a ruse: being a Scientologist minister only meant that you
could
audit and perform Hubbard-approved birth and marriage ceremonies; actually doing ministerial duties was wholly voluntary. But the Scientology minister's course, which cost only around $15, was being sold to hundreds, if not thousands, of young men as a way to avoid the draft. Should he be ordained? Jeff considered it.

Then an even better option came along. Jeff was offered the chance to work for the Church of Scientology and leave the country entirely. The church published a number of magazines that Jeff thought were poorly designed. One day he approached a staff member at the Los Angeles Org and asked for a job. "I said something like 'Listen, I'm a graphic artist, do you need some help? Because I get your magazine and frankly it's a piece of shit.'"

The staffer, who seemed eager to have him join the team, took him into the back room and showed him a stack of amateurish-looking layouts. "These are all done at Saint Hill," he said. "We just fill in the information."

"I looked at them and thought, I could do better than this," Jeff said. But to do so, he'd have to move to England. "So I began to think about it." He'd decided to go ahead and get his minister's certificate—even if he left the country, it didn't mean he'd be able to escape the draft unless he became a minister. But no matter what, England would be a cool place to live for a while, he thought. To be at the center of Scientology, to join staff, which would elevate him above the level of a mere "public," or paying, church member; to use his artistic abilities to further the cause, and to be an ocean away from his draft board: who wouldn't want to go?

And so in June 1968, Jeff flew to England, excited to begin his new life at Scientology's worldwide headquarters at Saint Hill. Upon arriving, he was told that the church's promotions department had moved: the Publications Org, or Pubs, as it was called, was now located in Edinburgh, Scotland. Instead of settling into life at the manor, Jeff settled into a shabby, drafty, four-story building located "in an alley behind an alley." The place was filled with books, with a suite of editorial and design offices on the top floor. The hundred or so people on staff ranged in age from the early twenties to the midforties and had come to Edinburgh from America, England, Australia, and Scandinavia.

Scientology had taken off as a fad in the United States, and its popularity in the United Kingdom was nearly as high. At the close of 1967, the Church of Scientology in Great Britain reported it had made nearly $1 million that year
—not as much as the Catholic Church, surely, but more than many new religious movements. At Saint Hill, where students now flocked from all over the world, the weekly income often averaged around $80,000.
Working for Scientology, Jeff found out, was far different than simply doing Scientology. "We have a planet to clear," Jeff's supervisor told him on his first day on the job—a phrase he'd hear over and over again for many years to come. Staff members were paid £7 per week, which, amazingly, was enough for Jeff to rent a small flat with some friends, buy food and cigarettes, and still have a bit left over. He received most of his Scientology courses and auditing for free, but in return, he was expected to work every day and many nights, including weekends, with a day off only once every few weeks. "We don't keep a wog schedule here," the supervisor said.

Non-Scientologists were called wogs,
a term thrown around liberally among church staff: "wog ideas," "wog justice," and "wog science." Hubbard began to use this offensive British slang term
^*
in 1953 to denote any person who was not a Scientologist, in his estimation a "run-of-the-mill, garden-variety humanoid." For Jeff, who after the Kennedy assassinations and the conduct of the Vietnam War had, like many of his friends, bought into the idea of government conspiracies and other nefarious activities of "the establishment,"
wog
was just another word for a member of mainstream society under the thumb of the Man.

The wog world, Jeff learned, was an "enturbulated" place.
Enturbulated
was a word that Hubbard made up and defined as "agitated and disturbed."
There were many new words to learn in Scientology. Some were pure invention; and others were familiar but redefined by Hubbard.
Ethics,
for example, was a significant term in Scientology, perhaps the most significant. It was defined as "rationality toward the greatest good for the greatest number of dynamics."
As one of the first lessons in Scientology, Jeff had learned that there were eight dynamics of existence, starting with your relationship with yourself, and then progressing to your relationship with your family, social group, society, plants, animals, the larger physical world, and ultimately, with the Supreme Being, however you chose to define that.

An ethical Scientologist, and an ethical person, in Hubbard's view, was someone who had successful relationships on all dynamics. But the most important relationship was with the group, or the third dynamic, which was understood to be the Church of Scientology. Upstanding members who made gains in Scientology, furthering the group's overall goals, were considered "in-ethics": in line with organizational principles. Those who misbehaved in some way were "out-ethics": impediments, or even enemies, of the group, malfunctioning cogs in the Scientology machine.

Among Hubbard's outpouring of new technology in the mid- and late 1960s was something he called "ethics tech," which would become one of the most crucial elements of Scientology. Hubbard designed quasi-scientific formulas to measure a person's ethical level, which he called the "Conditions of Existence,"
with the constant goal being to "improve conditions" for oneself and the group.
^*

Years earlier, Hubbard had divided the world into two eras: the dull past (Before Dianetics) and AD (After Dianetics), the glorious, Technicolor world of Now. In that now—AD 18, or 1968—virtually anything that didn't directly relate to Scientology was considered suspect, if not overtly suppressive. It was crucial for the overall ethical condition of the group, Jeff understood, that nothing seep into its world that was "counter-intentioned," or based on a goal against the interests of Scientology. A related concept, "other intentionedness," refers to ideas or philosophies that have nothing to do with Scientology. To be either counter-intentioned or other-intentioned was considered "open-minded," which in Scientology, Jeff learned, was a bad thing.

And yet these issues didn't much affect Jeff's daily life. He had made tremendous gains in Scientology: in just a year or two of auditing and courses, he'd lost his adolescent shyness and become far more confident and outgoing. He could talk to anyone, including the most beautiful women, and he felt better about his work too. Everyone he knew in Edinburgh was a Scientologist, and everyone believed the same thing: no questions, no doubts.

Like him, most of Jeff's co-workers were longhaired kids in their twenties, many onetime student radicals who shared not only beliefs, but a lifestyle. No one cared who you slept with or what you did. After a long day it was typical for everyone to troop off to a movie or to a restaurant, where they would take over a group of tables and order multiple bottles of wine. One of the Scottish Scientologists on staff took it upon himself to take the group on long pub crawls along Edinburgh's Rose Street, with the mission of drinking a pint of beer at every bar they passed (usually, Jeff said, they'd make it only halfway before, too drunk to continue, they staggered home). Overall, it was like college, he thought—except without the drugs, and with extremely long hours and intensely demanding work.

A few months after Jeff's arrival, an alert was sounded throughout the Publications Org: all staff members were required to report for an emergency briefing. Jeff put down his drafting pencils and ran downstairs to the conference room, where a woman in heavy makeup, wearing a naval dress uniform, sat behind a desk. She waited until the room was full. Then she introduced herself as Warrant Officer Doreen Casey, the new commanding officer of the Publications Org.

Casey was a special emissary of L. Ron Hubbard, the Founder, as he was now known, who smiled down at his followers from portraits and photographs throughout the orgs. Where Hubbard was living, exactly, was a bit of a mystery. He had resigned as the executive director of the Church of Scientology in the fall of 1966,
announcing that he was going back to his first love: exploring. It was ridiculous, of course—everyone on the inside knew that the Old Man, as some staff members called him, retained control of Scientology; he continued to issue numerous policy letters and directives via Telex. But the trick, as he told his followers, was to stay below the radar so that
no one could see him.
He was "Fabian,"
as he called himself, a shape-shifter.

Rumors abounded within Scientology of Hubbard's whereabouts. He was in Africa, some said; others said he was sailing the high seas. In fact, both stories were true. Concerned for Scientology's security after the release of the Australian Board of Inquiry's "Anderson Report" in 1965—a document whose negative findings provided fodder for investigations into Scientology's activities in several other countries, including Great Britain—Hubbard had journeyed to the southern African nation of Rhodesia in April 1966, hoping to find a base for Scientology in a more remote location.
^*
He purchased a house in the capital city, Salisbury, and began to eye a resort hotel on Lake Kariba where—unbeknownst to the sellers—he hoped to start a new Scientology organization. To ingratiate himself with the Rhodesian prime minister, Ian Smith, Hubbard personally delivered two bottles of champagne to Smith's home, though as one former associate would recall, he was forced to leave the bottles with a butler when Smith wouldn't receive him.