On a recent trip to Germany, I was walking around the beautiful city of Hamburg, when I happened upon the local Scientology church. I was approached by a friendly, English-speaking guy who invited me in to the building for a “chat”. Since I had seen most of the city already, and had a few hours to spare, I went in.
Hamburg Church Of Scientology
After a few questions about my religious beliefs etc (I stayed as neutral as possible), I was ushered downstairs into a impressive private cinema, which I had all to myself. There I watched two Scientology induction films. The first was about a young American football player who, after suffering an (evidently psychosomatic) back injury, is given an array of useless treatments by nasty doctors and a hilarious, scenery-chewing evil psychiatrist. Eventually, when he hits rock bottom, he discovers “Dianetics” by L. Ron Hubbard, and promptly makes a miraculous recovery. He struts out of the hospital, past the seething doctors and psychiatrist. Scientology saves the day.
Dianetics
The second film was an induction for Scientology newbies regarding the organisation’s structure. The production values were high, but featured that unique brand of sloppy editing in corporate presentations that has people either waiting far too long to do something, or doing it twice. It concluded with the blow-dried presenter speaking directly to the viewer, saying something like:
“You could walk out that door right now and never think of Scientology again. It would be incredibly stupid of you, but you could do it”…. “It’s your choice: An eternity of freezing agony, or total bliss.”
I was astonished by the nerve of these statements. This was Book of Revelations stuff. However, I maintained calm as I left the cinema and spoke further with my designated acolyte / interviewer. Funnily enough, the next group to go the cinema were a bunch of teenagers, obviously there for shits and giggles, who had to be kicked out, laughing their heads off. As my interviewer sat back down with me after performing this duty, he said, in English, “Jesus Christ!!”. I remember thinking, “Shouldn’t that be ‘L. Ron’?”
The interview continued, and though I was freaked out by what I had just seen, I still wanted to be “audited”. For those of you who don’t know, this is purportedly a “personality test” in which the Church detects which parts of your being are flawed and can be improved by induction proper.
Before being allowed to do this, however, I had to watch another film, this time an introduction to the auditing process. I don’t think that this film is usually shown to people who want to participate. The reason I say this is simply because the concepts outlined in it were absolutely bizarre and certainly off-putting to any reasonable individual. Personally, I was most confused by the video’s theory that unconsciousness or intense emotion were the states in which people were most likely to absorb information.
Reactive Mind
For example, if someone was involved in a car crash, and was unconscious in the ambulance on the way to the hospital, there should be no negative pronouncements – and preferably, no speech in general – by anyone else in the ambulance. The injured party, though unconscious, is acutely aware of their surroundings, and any information relayed here could affect them negatively for life. The same goes for anyone who has suffered a lesser injury, like a fall off a bike (and not necessarily been knocked unconscious). Everyone around must stay quiet.
What knocked me out of my seat altogether, however, was the scene in which a woman giving birth was surrounded by doctors who held fingers to their lips and said “Shhhhh!” – so as not to unintentionally place negative thoughts in the baby’s mind which would generate future neuroses. It seemed moot to point out that the infant brain’s as-yet undeveloped linguistic centre would be unable to recognise any structured language ( I wondered if I’d ever encountered anything else that supported the Scientologists’ bizarre pre-lingual theory, and I realised that I had: the film “Look Who’s Talking“…. starring über-ologists John Travolta and Kirstie Alley…! ).
I was informed that I would have to return the following day to have my audit performed. I thought, well, I’ve come this far. So return I did. I was introduced to an older lady with an hilarious name who would be my auditor. We took a lift to one of the building’s upper levels, stepped into a sterile office, and began. She decided, for reasons unknown to me, that I wouldn’t need to be hooked up to the infamous E-Meter machine, and we started into it.
E-Meter
The audit, such as it was, consisted of a huge range of questions, each of which had to be answered three times, and each of which had a particular emotion or tactile sensation attached to it. For example, I would be asked, “Can you think of a time when you felt angry?”, and the prescribed sensation would be “Light or Heavy”. So, you answered the question, explaining the memory in detail, and then had to say whether the scene “felt” light or heavy. Then, she would ask, “When was another time you felt angry?”, and finally, “When was the first time you felt angry”, each one a full scene description with the Light / Heavy parameters.
And yes, it was every bit as boring as it sounds. At the beginning, I sincerely tried to give honest answers, wanting to actually see proper results of this “personality test”. But after about 45 minutes of these triple – barrel questions, with seemingly non-sequitur addenda to every single one (Was the memory light, heavy, black, red, big, small, fast, slow etc), I found myself making up stories just to answer the questions as quickly as possible.
But even at that, I couldn’t seem to make any headway. At around the 1& 1/2 hour mark, I asked how much longer the session was going to take. At this, my auditor became quite concerned, saying that being in a hurry was not a psychic state conducive to accurate results. It seemed that the audit was going to take as long as it had to. I relented and continued. But after 2 hours I couldn’t take any more. I told her that I had another engagement (which she wanted to know all about) and simply had to leave.
I promised that I would return the following day (I did not return). And to be honest, the only reason I think they let me leave without a big scene was because I had expressed genuine interest in the religion, and seemed to have been fascinated by the audit. Still, I left the building and felt relieved.
Time Magazine Scientology
Thinking back on the audit, I noticed at least one huge fallacy in their beliefs. These are people who famously abhor psychiatry and psychotherapy as a means of personal growth, disregarding utterly the huge medical advances accomplished in these fields. And yet, in the audit itself, they used methods that pertain almost directly to psychotherapy.
For example, the whole idea of getting someone to recall vividly a memory, and it’s associated sensations, is a very powerful psychotherapeutic technique. NLP (Neurolinguistic Programming), one of newest branches of psychotherapy, uses it extensively, and is based on the idea of bringing the client into different “states”. The goal is to train people to access them at will, thereby allowing them to bypass anxious or depressive states.
The Scientology audit uses these exact same principles, but instead of moving towards a pure goal of personal development, the intent here is to get the client to associate the powerful experience of re-living memories to the auditor, and to the religion. This generates the false belief that the auditor has somehow accessed your deepest personal issues, the same issues that the religion can help fix (for a fee). The fact is that the auditor has done nothing more then encourage a self-induced semi-hypnotic state. They are covertly using the very same psychotherapeutic principles that the religion fervently claims to have debunked.
Indeed, the Scientologists’ dismissal of psychotherapy as a means of self-development is actually a typical cult tactic – the isolation of the individual. Just as Charles Manson kept orphans in a shack in Death Valley and Jim Jones took his subjects out of the US and into Guyana, Scientology must keep people isolated from, and resentful of, outside influences. They breed the idea that noone else can help you but “us”, that your mind and soul will be lost without “us”. (In fact, in researching this article, I learned that Charles Manson himself actually read and taught principles of Scientology).
David Miscavige
So yes, the whole auditing experience was bizarre, and quite unsettling. But I think what is so frightening about Scientology, to me at least, is not strictly the cultish nature of the religion, but the slick way that it’s presented. They sell this thing like it’s the new must-have product. And they do so using the worst type of corporate techniques; cheesy 3D graphics, suited guys, Stepford girls, and horrible, horrible editing, animation, posters, voiceovers etc. This is a business, pure and simple. There is not an ounce of the sincerity, tact or true compassion that people actually need when they find themselves in an existential crisis and searching for spiritual guidance.
Scientology is the ultimate form of bully-boy advertising:
“Buy this product…or your soul will perish!”
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Note: There is a ton of information available on the Internet about how Scientology is a highly dangerous organization, and how they exert massive pressure on anyone who speaks out against them, especially people who have left the religion. Here’s a selection of my favourite videos on the subject:
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“The Bridge” is an great low-budget movie that is highly critical of Scientology. Directed by the then 18-year-old Brett Hanover, the Church of Scientology tried to bury it. It’s fascinating in particular for it’s striking use of official Scientology videos within the narrative. Here’s the full movie on Google Video:
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In 2007, an episode of the BBC’s documentary series Panorama focused on the reality of the Church of Scientology. The investigator, John Sweeney was harassed at every turn as he tried to speak to interviewees who had left the church, and witnessed first-hand the brutal character assassination in which the church regularly engages. The documentary concludes with the now-infamous scene in which Sweeney loses his temper with the Church Rep who has been intimidating him.
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Jason Beghe, an accomplished actor, spent years dedicating his life to Scientology and rose to the higher levels of the religion’s hierarchy before becoming disillusioned and quitting it. In this interview, he talks about how he came to the realisation that the teachings were “retarded” and that he had invested years of his life in something “empty”. An intelligent and articulate man, Beghe’s discussion of Scientology from the inside is fascinating.
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And of course, how could I leave out the overview of the religion’s mythos as portrayed by the always-brilliant South Park?
Shaun O Connor 