Inside Scientology (10 page)

After a year of investigation, the CIA had discovered no hard evidence of wrongdoing. Scientologists nonetheless felt under siege. Hubbard began spending an increasing amount of time in England, where both the HASI and the Hubbard Communications Office, the issuer of myriad memos and policies to organizations worldwide, were now based. In 1959, he decided to move there permanently and purchased a 225-year-old estate in the Sussex countryside known as the Saint Hill Manor. A weathered Georgian mansion with eleven bedrooms and an indoor swimming pool, it sat on fifty-five acres amid rolling hills and flowering rhododendrons. This, Hubbard decided, would be Scientology's new home.

Located just outside the tiny town of East Grinstead, Saint Hill was the former residence of the Maharaja of Jaipur. In a note published in the journal of the Explorer's Club, of which Hubbard was a member, the founder of Scientology said he had "sort of won" the estate in a poker game. In fact, the house had been up for sale for almost a decade before Hubbard abruptly purchased it for the fire-sale price of £14,000 (about $70,000). The people of East Grinstead had no idea that the founder of a religious movement had moved into their village. Most newspapers, in fact, ignored Hubbard's association with Scientology and described "Dr. L. Ron Hubbard" as a celebrated American scientist and humanitarian, who had moved with his wife and their four young children from America to conduct, among other things, horticultural experiments.

At Saint Hill, Hubbard was industrious and almost manically busy, spending his days conducting research, training and coaching new auditors, and lecturing several times a week. Hubbard also ran all of Scientology's organizations, which by the early 1960s were located in a dozen cities in the United States and in Canada, Mexico, and South America, as well as throughout Europe and in countries such as South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and Rhodesia. "This was a guy working eighteen hours a day, seven days a week for years on end," said Alan Walter, who was one of a number of young people interested in Hubbard's theories who made the pilgrimage to Saint Hill. "Definitely not the Lord of the Manor."

Contrary to Scientology's later claims, L. Ron Hubbard did not single-handedly come up with all of Scientology's techniques. He was helped by scores of special assistants like Walter, who came to Saint Hill to attend the Special Briefing Course, in which the work, to a large degree, revolved around the creation of new processes or auditing techniques. "You had professors, doctors, paupers, multimillionaires—you name it," said Walter. "They were your students, your fellow classmates, your coaches. So the mixture of knowledge was enormous. There were a hundred students on the course at any given time at Saint Hill—the top processors from all over the world."

About half of these elite auditors were sponsored by a Scientology organization; the rest paid their own way. Walter, an Australian businessman and former professional Australian-rules soccer player, was part of the latter category. "I was between jobs and I didn't quite know what I was going to do with myself, which was a perfect way to go study something," said Walter. "I had no agenda other than to get knowledge."

Most of the students were seduced by Hubbard's charisma, though many remained skeptical of the leader's credentials. "We all saw him as a bullshit artist because you'd have to be forty people to have lived what he said he did," said Walter. Hubbard claimed to be a doctor of philosophy, having earned a degree from Sequoia University. "Everybody knew that had come out of a diploma mill. But that was accepted. Don't forget, we'd come out of the 1950s when everything was thought to be a façade. Just about everyone was pretending to be someone they weren't."

Hubbard's academic bona fides may have been suspect, but his focus on the technology and its results struck Walter as admirable. The criterion for success was easy to judge: a person's life improved after auditing. If auditing worked, "the guy became more alert, more aware, and life became easier. If he didn't, it was back to the drawing board."

A Scientology process, as it developed, was a formulaic type of therapy—Walter called it "structured therapy." A common "identity process," for example, might ask a subject to list all of his or her qualities to find out what aspects of the self the person might keep hidden. One item might have particular "charge," indicated by a jump of the needle on the E-meter, which would suggest to the auditor that a problem had been located. At that point, the auditor would dig deeper. "The idea was to find out what games you were playing without even realizing it, and what might be motivating you to act in certain ways," Walter said. Upon recognizing these hidden motivations or "games," the person would generally feel tremendous relief, followed by a sense of heightened self-knowledge and, ultimately, freedom. "The idea," he said, "was to come out of a session with all this awareness that you were a spiritual being."

New techniques were constantly being devised and refined by trial and error, with Hubbard serving as coach. "Hubbard would arrive early in the morning and pin the process up on the door, and then we'd come in and copy it down and run it on each other," said Walter. The teams kept track of everything that happened during these sessions and then submitted their notes for Hubbard's review. Each evening, Hubbard read these notes, made revisions, and then posted a new set of processes for the next morning. This is how, between 1962 and 1964, many of Scientology's core auditing procedures and many of its theoretical precepts were developed.

Walter was in awe of Hubbard's raw ability to dissect problems, and people. "He could tear you apart if he wanted to—just rip you to shreds, and then put you back together again." Having played sports his whole life, Walter saw that kind of process as proof of Hubbard's commitment to helping his students improve, and he gladly allowed himself to serve as test subject. "I loved it, and I got tremendous gains from that kind of coaching."

But as time went on, Walter's mind was slowly reshaped, though he wouldn't realize it for many years. Later he'd understand that this as a byproduct of other, less positive effects of Scientology's auditing processes and especially its particular use of language. Hubbard's word for
spirit,
for example, was
theta.
No one spoke of
love
in Scientology; they had
affinity.
The word
auditing
no longer referred to a task that accountants performed but instead meant "to listen and compute" in accordance with the
standard,
a word that seemed to denote the accepted application of Hubbard's technology. But commenting on the precise definition of
standard,
Walter said, "Who knows what that meant? It meant whatever he wanted it to mean," and this malleable use of words served as an effective instrument of control.

Before long, the accepted definitions for ordinary words had vanished, replaced with new meanings that separated Scientology from other subjects and Scientologists from other people. "It's very, very subtle stuff, changing words and giving them a whole different meaning—it creates an artificial reality," said Walter. "What happens is this new linguistic system undermines your ability to even monitor your own thoughts because nothing means what it used to mean. I couldn't believe that I could get taken over like that. I was the most independent-minded idiot that ever walked the planet. But that's what happened."

By the early 1960s, a close cadre of true believers surrounded L. Ron Hubbard. Most were young—Alan Walter was twenty-five—and convinced that Scientology would "unlock the truth and knowledge of our spiritual, mental, and human potential," as Walter put it.

But those who'd known Hubbard since the 1950s, and had once believed this as well, were no longer so sure. By the time he moved to Saint Hill, most of Hubbard's early acolytes had departed, disillusioned with Hubbard's leadership and also, in some cases, with the substance of Scientology itself. Helen O'Brien, for example, once among Hubbard's closest confidantes, had begun seeing the "holes appear in [the soap] bubble,"
as she phrased it, as far back as 1952. Scientology, though rooted in the same principles as Dianetics, was not like the previous movement. "The tremendous appeal of Dianetics came from Hubbard's apparent certainty that you could easily clear yourself in present time of the heritage of woe from past misadventures,"
she wrote in
Dianetics in Limbo.
But Hubbard no longer seemed interested in that. He was focused on spiritual awareness, constantly revising his theories on how better to attain it. He now spoke at length about imagination—something Hubbard had once tagged a "lie factory" for its inherent untrustworthiness. He introduced a technique called "creative processing," whereby he encouraged adherents to "mock up," or make up, scenarios and cast themselves in various roles. The switch from factual recall to imaginative invention struck O'Brien as almost a betrayal of the movement's core values. Before long, "the joy and frankness" that had imbued every Scientology lecture "shifted to pontification,"
she said. The therapies, which had once involved significant give-and-take between auditor and preclear, now seemed like "highly mechanistic verbal performances."

Then there was the matter of L. Ron Hubbard himself. Though he was charming in the presence of paying customers, a "weird foxiness" made him impossible to work for. "As soon as we became responsible for Hubbard's interests, a projection of hostility began, and he doubted and double-crossed us, and sniped at us without pause,"
O'Brien wrote. By October 1953, the work environment had become so toxic that she and her husband, John, resigned from the Hubbard Association of Scientologists and closed the Philadelphia operation.

Hubbard seemed to accept O'Brien's departure. He was far less charitable when it came to others. This was particularly true with regard to his son Nibs, Hubbard's eldest child. A distant father even with his most recent brood, Hubbard had almost completely absented himself from the lives of Nibs and his sister, Katherine. They had grown up with their mother and grandparents in Bremerton, Washington, with only a scant idea of what their father was doing. But when
Dianetics
was published, L. Ron Hubbard became a celebrity. And Nibs, a red-haired, husky young man who had long sought a relationship with his father, saw his chance. Upon turning eighteen, in 1952, he made his way to Phoenix, intent on becoming a Scientologist.

Hubbard welcomed this new association with his son. Within a few years, Nibs became an auditor—"one of the best auditors in the business,"
as Hubbard described him—and the executive director of the Church of Scientology in Washington, D.C. Then, in November 1959, Nibs abruptly left Scientology, claiming that he could no longer afford to support his family on his meager income. Viewing his son's defection as yet one more act of treachery, Hubbard immediately drafted a letter instructing his executives to ban Nibs from Scientology and withdraw his credentials if he tried to practice Scientology independently.

Hubbard stopped short of writing to the FBI about Nibs and his transgressions (something he might have done just a few years earlier). Instead, he made an example of Nibs, showing his flock the precise consequences of stepping out of line. Hubbard declared to his followers that Nibs had "unconfessed overts," or hidden crimes, which had caused him to leave. Hubbard would soon see all such departures from his movement as stemming from unspoken transgressions, an idea that became deeply entrenched in Scientology theory and philosophy. To this day, anyone who leaves Scientology is instantly viewed as guilty of a crime. But in 1959, this idea was new, and a telling indicator of the extent to which Hubbard's own psychology was driving his new movement.

To handle perceived traitors, Hubbard devised a new form of auditing called a "security check." This was interrogation by another name, with the E-meter serving as a helpful tool. Security checking gave tremendous power to auditors; Hubbard thought of them as "detectives" and charged them with uncovering unspoken thoughts, called "withholds" in his ever-evolving language. Under this examination, to which everyone in Hubbard's world—including household staff, students, and auditors—would eventually be subjected, a battery of questions probed both public and private aspects of personal history. Had the subject committed robbery or murder? What sexual proclivities and perversions
^*
characterized his or her behavior? Had he or she ever been a member of the Communist Party, or been sent to the Church of Scientology as a saboteur? Had the person ever harbored a critical thought about L. Ron Hubbard?

The smallest misstep, such as a minor critique of the movement or a slight doubt as to its authority, was enough to warrant punishment, making the security check a particularly effective method of thought reform. "A Scientologist is heavily indoctrinated into the idea that if he finds himself being critical of Hubbard or the Church or its executives, then the very fact of his being critical is proof positive of the fact that he himself is harboring undisclosed dirty deeds,"
according to the former Scientologist Bent Corydon, who wrote
L. Ron Hubbard: Madman or Messiah?,
an intensely critical book about the founder of Scientology. "When somebody can look into your thoughts, giving you no option for privacy of consideration and opinion, some devastating things occur," Corydon stated. "This is especially so if you are (or consider that you are) dependent upon the approval of that somebody or group for your continued well-being and very survival as a spiritual being."

Numerous new philosophies were born and sold during the mid-twentieth century in the United States, many of them led by charismatic leaders who promised scientifically guaranteed remedies for everything from sickness to unemployment. With the exception of a few—Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, the Reverend Billy Graham—most of those prophets have long since been forgotten, along with their techniques. So why did L. Ron Hubbard's creed continue to exist, and to grow, well into the 1960s and beyond? Perhaps the easiest answer would be the singular force that was L. Ron Hubbard himself.