My First Scientology Audit

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?

How To Slow Down Time And Live Longer

In his article in New Dawn magazine, Steve Taylor outlines the human experience of how, bizarrely, time seems to pass more quickly as you get older.

We all know the anecdotal evidence; As we age, the birthdays come around faster every year, Christmas seems to blindside us altogether. But there is much more to verify this as a concrete phenomenon. For example, scientists have long been aware of the psychological effect known as ‘forward telescoping’, or “our tendency to think that past events have happened more recently than they actually have.”

This occurs with alarming consistency; when questioned on the chronological proximity of a memorable event, say,the death of a public figure or a major international incident, people generally tend to consistently underestimate the length of time involved. Not only that, but the greater the age of the individual, the greater that underestimation tends to be. Put simply, the older you are, the more likely you are to think that events distant in the past have happened more recently.

The opposite seems to be true of children and younger people in general. The example Taylor uses is that of a restless child stuck in a car on a long journey – the trip will seem to them like a massive, neverending expedition. The space between each “Are we there yet?”, while mere minutes to the parents, seem like wide temporal gaps to the youngsters, who judge it as a perfectly reasonable interim after which to pose the question yet again.

There are multiple theories that attempt to explain this phenomenon. The first involves the human metabolism: A child’s body operates at a much faster rate than an adult’s in terms of blood flow, heart rate, expansion etc. The theory asserts that this directly affects the child’s perception of the world; the child’s metabolism is moving like a cheetah, and the mind is analogous. So if what happens around the kid is anything less than whizz-bang, then boredom sets in and time seems to move more slowly than usual.

The second theory appears more feasible to me at least, and yet not incompatible with the first. This one focuses purely on the psyche and says that how the perceive the passage of time is directly related to how much information we are experiencing at any given time. As Taylor says, “The speed of time seems to be largely determined by how much information our minds absorb and process – the more information there is, the slower time goes.” He refers to an experiment in which students were played two pieces of music; one, a sparse Brian Eno composition, the other a frenetic Rachmaninov arrangement. Asked to guess the running times, the students overestimated the length of both – the Eno by 32 seconds, the Rach by over a minute.

The conclusion would seem to be that when we take in more information, time slows down. Our cognitive processes seem to pull back and allow the data to wash over them, absorbing it. And yet, the neurons are firing like crazy, generating new associations, assimilating the new information. It seems as if this joyous participation with the universe, this tiny step closer to oneness, can slow down time itself.

You might say, “Ok, but that’s not really altering time, is it? Folks around you aren’t going to start walking in slow motion or running at 10x normal speed.” But think about it for a second. How is it that we experience time? We, as humans, only ever experience the here and now. Ideas of the “past” and the “future” are nothing more than constructs and exist nowhere outside of mental abstractions. Much of the science of Buddhism is based around ridding oneself of those tangential thoughts and simply living in the moment (but, of course, that’s a lot harder than it sounds).

So if we think of “time” as nothing more than a way to describe our moment-to-moment existence, then what have we? Well, if we can alter the feeling of how much time has passed between one glance at your watch and the next (the connection to the construct), then, we have altered our moment-to-moment existence, right? And, by that rationale, we have altered time. You don’t need to get into wild notions of Matrix motions; you have the full ability to slow down time, in a perfectly literal sense.

As already mentioned, this should ideally be done by the absorption of information. That sounds awfully dry; what I mean is the act of throwing yourself into the world around you; literature, media, politics, film, psychology, sex, music, society, everything. Sometimes, you get bit by the creative bug and become a filter for this information, pulling data out, connecting it, making fun new things just like you did with Lego and Plah-Doh when you were a kid (Keep the Play-Doh of the sex, though. Just a suggestion.). If we can fill our little worlds up with these things, then time slows down. Life becomes a matter of urgency; there is no time to waste when there’s so much going on, and it’s essential to squeeze the juice out of every last minute.

The effect can also be pharmacologically induced. For example, the psychedelic experience (LSD, Mushrooms) has often been compared to feeling the wonderment of infancy again. One tripper states, “My trip on mushrooms is simply indescribable. The only way I can relate it to people who haven’t done it is that I felt like a child again. Everything was new, beautiful and had some deep and significant meaning.” Indeed, the psychedelic experience seems to be an intense compression of experience; diving through vast volumes of information, whether good or bad. It opens up the creative pathways of the mind, blows out the accumulated cobwebs of cynicism and allows one to interact as excitedly with the world as one did before the jaded mores of state education took root. The only problem is that, if you don’t feel comfortable with this experiential compression, it can quickly become terrifying beyond reason. Suddenly, the information makes no sense, the thoughts become pure staccato, and the feeling of connectedness is reversed to a feeling of utter isolation – a bad trip.

(Just as a side note, I recently watched the original version of The Hitcher, a superb 1986 thriller about a killer, played by Rutger Hauer, chasing a young man, C. Thomas Howell, across the highways of Arizona. In the director’s commentary, Robert Harmon says that what Hauer is doing is educating the protagonist; in that in this single 48-hour stretch of total horror, he is putting the kid through more than most people will even experience in their lives. And he will be wiser and more learned for it. In a sense, Hauer is doing this naive kid a favour by putting him through this nightmare…)

Because oddly, time can seem to slow down to a crawl at the other end of the spectrum too – when the mind and/or body is in pain. Einstein said “When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute – and it’s longer than any hour. That’s relativity.” (Another example: People with depressive illnesses are often prescribed SSRI medication, which require a three month minimum before the patient can say objectively whether they are feeling better. To most people 90 days would fly by. But for the depressive, on a medication they are not sure will even work, this can seem like an eternity.) Most forms of torture, and particularly solitary confinement, are based on generating this effect. For all the modern Abu Ghraib innovations in the art of torture, the simple act of throwing someone into a pitch-black room for days, weeks, month, years on end is an incredibly potent way to inflict psychic torment on another human being.

Deprived of any external input, the brain perceives time as passing at in interminably slow rate. Though in one sense experientially similar, it is the fundamental opposite to the states of child-like fascination described at the beginning of this article. The brain does in the absence of information what the stomach does in the absence of food; it begins to consume itself. It invents all sorts of wild reveries to stave off the nothingness; nature abhors a vacuum and the mind will do anything to avoid that state.

In an excellent, harrowing BBC Horizon documentary called Total Isolation, we watched the effect of 48 hours of this type of isolation on six volunteers. In just this relatively short space of time, people panicked, paced their rooms endlessly like caged animals, sensed a “presence” in their rooms, and even had full-on hallucinations. Most importantly, however, they all lost their sense of time, and after a short while seemed to have no idea as to how much time had passed in the experiment. This made the experience all the more frightening; since they truly had no idea as to when they would get out. How long had passed? Twenty-four hours? Twelve hours? Six? Three? That total loss of connection with even the passage of time must be a truly horrendous thing to endure.

Going back to the Steve Taylor article, it seems that in the middle of these two extremes of childlike wonder and brutal despair, lies a middle road in which time runs at breakneck speed for the individual. That middle road is routine. Familiarity breeds contempt, and it also speeds things up considerably. For the person who gets up and repeats one day after the next with the same informational patterns, day-in and day-out, time is jet-propelled. And since most people’s lives are based on the 9-5, live-for-the-wage-packet patterns of modern office existence, then we can understand why the great majority of us are frustrated about our lives “flying past us”.

The thing is, routine seems so much easier than the constant investigation, thought and movement that is required for one to experience life in its “slow/fascinated” form. But of course, that’s not true at all. Each is nothing more than a habit, an association with pleasure formed in the neural patterns of the brain. The routine habit is perpetuated around us by a society that constantly pushes the idea of swift gratification – and the fact that public schooling tends to kill off one’s youthful love of learning. We associate learning with “work”, in the same vein as that office job we yearn to leave. But learning isn’t work. In fact, as Robert Anton Wilson once wrote, when done properly, it should feel like play.

If we can make that the habit, then we can become as children once again. We can get up in the mornings and look at the world anew, wide-eyed. We can feel endless fascination with the workings of every facet of the universe, just as we did when we were kids. We can take back the love of learning of which schooling and advertising has robbed us, bombard our senses daily with the joy of new experiences and connections – and by doing so, live longer, more fulfilled lives – regardless of how long we live.