Beyond Belief (23 page)

Of course, that was easier said than done. It was hard to simply put aside what had happened. I knew that it was best for me to separate myself from my emotions, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it completely. Rationally, I still found myself worrying for my mom and hoping that she was being taken care of—I couldn’t force myself to detach completely like a good Scientologist would. While I should have been able to block it all out, somehow the past always managed to force its way in. And it might have stayed that way had it not been for a bright spot that helped get me through this and refocus my energy on the Sea Org.

More than ever before, I found myself relying on the weekly graduation ceremonies at Flag to inspire me and keep my spirits high. Whereas, when I was younger, I was simply caught up in the spectacle of these events, I now found myself paying more attention to the words that were spoken and the stories of what Scientology could accomplish.

I was particularly drawn in by the wins that graduates would speak of every week. Wins were the big reveals, the prizes at the end that kept people coming back for more, and I was no different. These testimonials always demonstrated the power of Scientology, providing everyone with a clear sense of the potential that it could unlock. It was almost like I needed something to throw myself into at this vulnerable time, to get my mind off of things and focus on something positive. The wins came in all shapes and sizes. People would talk about how, at first, they were unsure if they could afford the fees for the courses, but, by the time they were done with the classes, they had turned their companies around and become so successful that they were now earning ten times their previous income. Other people would say that they were so
exterior
, meaning outside of their bodies, that when they got up after an auditing session, they’d realize their body was still in the chair. At one point, I witnessed actress Juliette Lewis sharing her wins after achieving the state of Clear, and although I don’t remember what she shared, the fact that celebrities like her endorsed Scientology impressed everyone, myself included.

No matter who it was sharing, though, the wins always got everyone motivated. The more wins you shared, the more you were telling other people that it worked for you, and the more invested you became, making it harder to turn back on that investment. It was hard to listen to these stirring, emotional stories of transformation and not feel that Scientology had the power to change lives and change the world.

Riding this wave of excitement, I started to take the auditing courses, for which I’d come to Flag. With me in CMO and in the course room was a girl my age, Luisa; we became fast friends. Her family was from Denmark, and while her dad had also been posted at Int, she had been raised in L.A., first at the PAC Ranch at the L.A. Cadet Org. Luisa was painfully shy but with a good sense of humor, and I could tell right away that she was trustworthy.

Luisa and I tried to be serious in the course room, but sometimes we’d let loose. We would often find ways to escape to the bathroom, where we’d have a toilet paper war between our two stalls. Other times, we’d chase each other up and down the stairs. We lived in the same dorm, so before bed or during meals, she’d tell me stories about growing up on the PAC Ranch, which made it seem that those Cadets did less work than we did. Still, listening to her stories, I learned that they too were treated badly, perhaps even worse than we had been at the Ranch.

The new course I was on was Professional TRs. The training routines I was going to be tackling now were the “Pro TRs,” and though there were some similarities with the TRs I’d done at the Ranch years earlier, these were much more rigorous. I needed to do them to become an auditor. After several days of reading the policies and theory behind the TRs, and watching films and listening to LRH lectures on tape, I moved on to the practical section of the course: the TRs themselves. From the start, they were grueling. I focused on just getting through them as best I could. The way out was the way through.

I had to be able to sit comfortably in a chair in front of another student for two straight hours without speaking, moving, twitching, coughing, or blinking excessively. Many people, including me, stayed on this training routine for weeks. At one point, I had been motionless for ninety minutes when a fly landed on my nose. I blew it away with my lips, which caused me to flunk, and I had to start over again. It was excruciating, several times bringing me to tears. I found it almost impossible not to move. My legs felt like they were going to walk away on their own, and it took everything I had to stay still.

The TR Bullbait was much worse than the kids’ version. We had to endure two hours of being yelled at, made fun of, and even sexually taunted. One of the supervisors specialized in creeping people out, saying suggestive things to which we weren’t allowed to react. A good friend of mine, who was also thirteen, was being bullbaited by a male student, who went on and on for hours about her blooming breasts being like tiny rosebuds. She had succeeded in not reacting, but the whole thing had disgusted me.

When we were done with the Pro TR course, we moved to the Upper Indoctrination TRs. Here we learned about Tone 40, which was a state of mind at which point you were absolutely 100 percent positive in your thought, with no room for opposition or anticipation. LRH believed that all humans could be put on a scale according to their emotional state. The Tone Scale began at –40, defined as total failure, at the bottom of the scale, and ended at +40, the serenity of beingness.

The tone scale applied to your tone of voice, delivery and emotional state. A Tone 40 delivery was so powerful and precise that the person getting the command would follow the order no matter what. My twin and I took turns practicing our Tone 40 deliveries in the routines that were laid out in LRH policies. We’d sit at a wall and say a command to our twin, who then had to follow that command. Each command was always followed by a thank-you.

“Look at that wall, thank you.”

“Walk over to that wall, thank you.”

“Touch that wall, thank you.”

“Turn around, thank you.”

It continued like this for hours.

The next exercise was geared toward helping us control the people we were auditing. As auditors, we would have to use any means necessary to prevent the pre-Clears from leaving a session before it was over. Our job was to keep them in place until we had given them permission to leave; this exercise taught us to do that both physically and verbally. I’d always heard that this was the most fun. You used the same patter: “Walk over to that wall, thank you.” This time, however, your twin would do everything physically possible to disobey, running away, pulling away, shouting, refusing to move, anything. You had to physically force them to follow your command in order to succeed.

I twinned with my burly friend Buster on some of these exercises. Because he was so large, it was more of a challenge. As it was with all others who did this routine, if I wanted him to look at the wall, I had to pry open his eyes and twist his head. Getting your coach over to the wall was the hardest part, since you had to drag, push, or even carry him. To top it off, you would be bullbaited the entire time, so you couldn’t laugh or get upset. You passed when you could get your twin to comply with the commands, regardless of any physical and verbal obstacles.

Next, we had to yell at square glass ashtrays at the top of our lungs. The idea was to train ourselves to express absolutely clear intentions, and by mastering this, we’d be able to guide our future pre-Clears to successfully confront things.

And it didn’t end there. Directing our intentions into particular parts of the ashtray, we’d ask our ashtray very specific questions. The belief was that whenever you asked a question, you had the intention of getting that question answered, as you should when you asked a question of a pre-Clear in session. The ashtray was required to be square; we were to direct questions into each of its four corners.

“Are you an ashtray?”

“Are you a corner?”

“Are you made of glass?”

The same principles that we were trying to learn and understand as auditors were the principles that prevented us from questioning these ridiculous tasks. We’d been trained to follow instructions, just as we were now learning how to make others follow ours.

Outlandish as all these tasks were, none of them ever struck me as odd, but remembering the scene now, they were. We’d stand there for hours, next to our twin, packed into a room full of other twins, each pair doing a different part of the course. Some would be barking orders to go to the wall, while others sat silently, as they stared deeply into each other’s eyes. In another part of the room, someone would be yelling insults as part of a Bullbait session, at the same time that someone a few feet away was screaming instructions to an ashtray.

All these courses were supposed to be about training auditors to be smooth with their communication and less distracting to pre-Clears in session, but the result was that it made all of us more robotic. It automated our responses, turning everything we said into a script. Furthermore, the exercises themselves encouraged us to see the people we were auditing not as people with feelings but as reactive minds that needed to be bent to the will of the auditing session for their own good. The dialogue was designed to dehumanize; the fact that we spent time practicing on an ashtray only emphasized that. The Tone 40 commands in particular were about getting people to follow orders without questioning.

With courses like these, it was often hard to tell what real progress looked like. Sometimes I’d work hard to follow the instructions but only have frustration to show for it; other times, I was rewarded with success. There wasn’t much consistency, and it could be difficult to get a definitive sense of what improvement was. Even if you were a natural at something, it seemed like they would keep you in place just to make you put in the time. Much of it seemed subject to the whims of the course supervisor, but no one thought much of it as long as we moved up in the TR levels.

The training was hard work, but being an auditor was a glorified position, and I wanted to prove that I could do it. In the back of my mind were Aunt Shelly’s words about the importance of being a good auditor. She’d always told me the best messengers were auditors, and while I was at Flag, she continued to encourage my training. I saw her every few months when she came to town; she would speak to me for at least an hour, always pushing me, saying I could do it, reminding me that auditors were the only ones who could save people.

When I wasn’t taking my auditor classes, I worked a few hours a day in the CMO department responsible for making sure people were ethical. People who worked in this department wielded a lot of power. They had the authority to be the enforcers, and they used their power to make sure people towed the line. Because I was training to do this job at CMO Int, this job was good practice, although I didn’t have to dole out punishments.

As it turned out, I knew my co-workers, Olivia and Julia, through Valeska. Because of her, I had been friendly with them even though they were at least three years older than I, and was glad they were in CMO and in my department, because now I could fraternize with them without getting in trouble. They were both really nice and very pretty. Apparently, my uncle had been impressed with their abilities and had promoted them both.

One of my duties was to give the mail that had been sent from relatives of people in the CMO to Olivia and Julia, who served as the screeners. In CMO, they had passed around a slip that we were required to sign, allowing our mail to be opened and inspected. Every piece of mail had to be read before it was distributed. If there was any sign of anti-Scientology sentiment, the letter was not passed on.

J
UST AS
I
WAS SETTLING INTO A ROUTINE WITH MY AUDITOR TRAINING
at Flag, the fact that I had not completed all the prerequisites to be a Sea Org trainee began to nag at me. Though I’d raised the issue with Tom when I’d first arrived at Flag that I hadn’t done the Sea Org’s boot camp (known as EPF), he had told me not to worry. I tried to put it out of my mind, but I felt like I was just a Cadet dressed up as a Sea Org member, and I wanted to be a real member.

Concerned, I wrote a letter to Aunt Shelly. In the letter, I told her I hadn’t done the EPF and thought I should have. A week or so later, I was called to the office of Mr. Sue Gentry, the head RTC Rep at Flag. When I arrived, she handed me a letter Aunt Shelly had written me. In it, she scolded me about not wanting to do the boot camp, saying that everyone had to do EPF, even senior executives, and I was no exception. Clearly, she had misread my letter to her and thought that I was trying to get out of my obligation rather than trying to fulfill it.

Apparently, Aunt Shelly had instructed Mr. Gentry to make sure my complaining was addressed, so Mr. Gentry said I was going to do a little cleanup. I was nervous when another RTC Rep, Mr. Wilson, came in and told me we were going to have a session immediately.

He began with the two standard questions, was I tired and was I hungry? I was prepared for what always came next, the booming Tone 40 command, “This is the session!” Instead, I heard him say, “I am not auditing you.” My stomach dropped. This indicated that I was not receiving auditing, but rather a security check: in other words, a confessional. Unlike auditing sessions, your confessions were not confidential and could be used against you for disciplinary actions.

My confessional stretched out over several weeks. I was asked everything from had I stolen anything, to had I done anything unethical on the Second Dynamic, to had I done anything I didn’t want my parents to find out about. The interrogation procedure still relied on the needle readings of the E-Meter. If my E-Meter didn’t show a floating needle, my auditor asked variations of the question until the needle gave either a negative or an affirmative. The E-Meter’s answer always trumped your own. If the meter said “yes,” the answer was yes, even if yours had been “no.” If your needle was dirty, it meant you hadn’t revealed everything. On every transgression you gave up, you had to tell when and where, an extremely detailed what, how you justified it, and who almost found out. As with auditing sessions, each security check session ended with a trip to the Examiner. If your needle didn’t float, you would be required to go right back into session to find out what was missed.