Inside Scientology

To attack his enemies, Hubbard issued a policy known as "Fair Game," which maintained that all who opposed Scientology could be "tricked, sued or lied to and destroyed." This policy was enforced by Scientology's quasisecret police force, known as the Guardian's Office. By the 1970s, among its tasks was "Operation Snow White," a series of covert activities that included bugging the Justice Department and stealing documents from the IRS. (Scientology officials say Fair Game was canceled decades ago.)

The plan was discovered in FBI raids on Scientology's Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., offices in 1977, which yielded wiretap equipment, burglary tools and about 90,000 pages of documents. Eleven Scientology officials, including Hubbard's third wife, Mary Sue, went to federal prison for their role in the plot, which led to a 1982 "sweep" of the church's upper management.

By then, Hubbard, who was cited as an "unindicted co-conspirator" in Operation Snow White, had vanished from the public eye. For the next several years, rumors of his whereabouts circulated freely — he was at sea; he was on an island. In fact, Hubbard was on his isolated ranch, Whispering Wind, near the town of Creston, in the California desert. He was attended by a small number of Scientology officials, and his physician, Dr. Eugene Denk, who treated him for a number of conditions, including chronic pancreatitis. On January 17th, 1986, Hubbard suffered a crippling stroke. A week later, he died, in a 1982 Blue Bird motor home on his property. He was seventy-four years old.

Upon Hubbard's death, his ambitious twenty-five-year-old aide, David Miscavige, who would soon succeed him as leader of the church, announced that Scientology's founder had willingly "dropped" his healthy body and moved on to another dimension. In keeping with Hubbard's wishes, his body was cremated within twenty-four hours. There was no autopsy. But the coroner's report described the father of Scientology as in a state of decrepitude: unshaven, with long, thinning whitish-red hair and unkempt fingernails and toenails. In Hubbard's system was the anti-anxiety drug hydroxyzine (Vistaril), which several of his assistants would later attest was only one of many psychiatric and pain medications Hubbard ingested over the years.

These secrets were kept under wraps by Scientology officials. The church would later be named Hubbard's successor in accordance with his will, which had been amended and signed just a day before his death. In it, Hubbard ceded the copyrights to all of his works, as well as a significant portion of his estate, making Scientology, not Hubbard's wife and five children, his primary heir.

Today, every church or Scientology organization has an office reserved for Hubbard. Usually found on the church's ground floor, it is carefully maintained with books, desk, chair, pens, notepads, desk ornaments and other accouterments, as if the Founder might walk in at any moment.

* * * *

The imposing limestone-and-granite Church of Scientology in midtown Manhattan calls itself the "New York Org." A stately building on West 46th Street, northwest of Times Square, it is here that I come, on a hot July afternoon, to experience Scientology for myself.

The first Scientologist I meet here is a kid named Emmett: a clear-eyed and enthusiastic young man in his early twenties whose job is to be a "body-router," which means someone who brings people into the church. "Hi!" he says, accosting me as I stand near the center's entrance. "Do you have a minute?" He waves a postcard-size flier in my face. "We're showing a fifteen-minute film inside," he says. "It's about Dianetics. Ever heard of it?"

He ushers me through a set of glass doors and into the church's lobby, a glossy-marble space with the kind of lighting that bathes everything in a pinkish-golden glow. It is set up as a sort of museum, with a number of video-display panels, one of which offers an earnest testimonial by Tom Cruise. "The Aims of Scientology," a document written by Hubbard, also hangs in the lobby, and it declares Scientology's goals as "simple, but great," including "a civilization without insanity, without criminals and without war; where the able can prosper and honest beings can have rights, and where man is free to rise to greater heights."

The New York Org claims to receive more than 500 phone calls per day, and nearly as many visitors in a week. But aside from its staff, I find the place to be almost entirely empty. Seated alone in a small auditorium, I watch the film, which turns out to be an infomercial featuring a cast of "real" people talking about how Dianetics changed their lives, curing them of ailments ranging from cancer to depression. Scientology is not mentioned once in the film. Nor is Hubbard. And neither are mentioned afterward, during an hour or so conversation I have with a motherly woman in her early fifties named Laurie. She is what is known as a "greeter," and her role is to keep me in the church long enough for me to feel encouraged that, maybe, all of this is worth my time.

Self-betterment is a powerful concept to use as a sales technique, and Laurie begins her pitch in the gentlest of ways. "Tell me about yourself," she says. "What made you interested in Scientology?"

"I guess I was just curious," I tell Laurie.

"Good!" she says with a smile. "We like curious!"

In the next hour or so, Laurie asks me a number of questions: Am I married? Am I happy? What are my goals? Do I feel that I'm living up to my potential?

A failure to live up to potential is one of the things known in Scientology as one's "ruin." In trying to get at mine, Laurie is warm and nonaggressive. And, to my amazement, I begin to open up to her. While we chat, she delivers a soft sell for Scientology's "introductory package": a four-hour seminar and twelve hours of Dianetics auditing, which is done without the E-meter. The cost: just fifty dollars. "You don't have to do it," Laurie says. "It's just something I get the feeling might help you." She pats my arm, squeezes it warmly.

Then she gets down to business and presents me with the $100 Dianetics "starter" kit, which includes a large-type copy of Hubbard's tome, a few CDs and some workbooks to practice the stuff at home. "It's really such a good thing you came in," Laurie adds reassuringly. "You'll see."

On my next visit to the church, the following day, I see Laurie again. She spots me as soon as I walk in and rushes to greet me. "You're back!" She gives me a hug. "I am so glad you decided to give this a try." She then introduces me to a preppy-looking guy in his early thirties named Rurik, who, wasting no time on small talk, leads me to the church's second floor and installs me in a room for my introductory seminar. As with the previous day's film, I'm the only one there. Rurik starts his lecture with the claim that the mind really isn't in the brain. "Close your eyes and think of a picture of a cat," he tells me. I do. "Now, open your eyes and point to where you saw that picture."

I point to my eyes.

Rurik grins. "See? When you're asked to use your mind, you don't point to the brain."

The brain, Rurik says, has absolutely no bearing on our thoughts or feelings. Nor, he adds, does the mind — its chief function is to serve as a memory bank of all we've experienced in trillions of years of lifetimes. Indeed, Scientology holds that the entire field of neurological and mental-health research — from Freud to the study of brain chemistry — is pseudoscience. In Scientology's overview text, What Is Scientology?, psychiatry is described as a "hodgepodge of unproven theories that have never produced any result — except an ability to make the unmanageable and mutinous more docile and quiet, and turn the troubled into apathetic souls beyond the point of caring."

Most of the dedicated Scientologists I meet echo this opinion, including Kirstie Alley, who has been a Scientologist for more than twenty years and is the international spokesperson for Narconon, the church-supported anti-drug program. In an interview with Alley several weeks later, she calls Scientology the "anti-therapy." "Therapy is based on some guy analyzing you, and what he thinks is going on with you," she says. "And when he can't quite figure it out, he makes up a disease and gets a drug for that. If that doesn't work, he shocks you. And then surgery . . ." Scientology employs a holistic detoxification program known as the "purification rundown," which involves heavy doses of vitamin supplements, primarily niacin, used in conjunction with exercise and long hours in a sauna. Though many doctors point out that none of this has ever been scientifically proven, and, indeed, might be harmful, Scientology claims that the "purif" cleanses the body of impurities. "I can get someone off heroin a hell of a lot faster than I can get somebody off a psych drug," says Alley. "The guy on heroin's not being told daily, 'This is what you need for your disease, and you're gonna have to take this the rest of your life.'"

A few days later I arrive for my free Dianetics auditing sessions. I am put in a large, glass-enclosed room with a student auditor named David, who asks me to "relive" a moment of physical pain. "Don't choose something that's too stressful," David suggests.

Try as I might, I cannot relive much of anything — indeed, I can barely focus, given that I am surrounded in the room by a number of other pairs who are all being asked to do the same thing. After fifteen minutes, I give up.

Jane, the registrar who is now handling my "case," then whisks me away and, taking a look at my Oxford Capacity Analysis — a 200-item questionnaire that I filled out on my first day — tells me that she thinks I need something more personal. "I really want you to have a win," she says.

What Jane recommends is called Life Repair, basic Scientology counseling that she explains will "get to the root of what's inhibiting you." It is conducted in a private room, and involves one, but most likely two, 12.5-hour auditing "intensives," using the E-meter, which will cost around $2,000. Coupled with the purif, which is recommended to anyone starting in Scientology, the total cost will be around $4,000. "And then you'll be on the Bridge," Jane says enthusiastically. "You'll see. It'll change your life."

At the intake level, Scientology comes across as good, practical self-help. Rather than playing on themes that might distance a potential member — the concept that I am a "thetan," for example — members hit on topics that have universal appeal. Instead of claiming some heightened degree of enlightenment, they come across as fellow travelers: people who smoke too much, who have had bad marriages, who have had addictions they couldn't handle but have somehow managed to land on their feet. Scientology, they explain, has been a form of "recovery." As one woman I meet puts it, "Scientology works."

There are, however, a few things that seem jarring. Like the cost: $4,000 is a lot to spend for what Jane suggests are "basic" sessions. But perhaps even more alarming is the keen interest they take in my boyfriend. While Laurie inquired sympathetically about the dynamic of our relationship, Jane is suspicious, concerned with his views of the church and his attitude toward my being here. "If he's not open," she says, "that could be a problem."

And then there are Scientology's rules. A fiercely doctrinaire religion, Scientology follows Hubbard's edicts to the letter. Dissent or opposition to any of Hubbard's views isn't tolerated. Nor is debating certain church tenets — a practice Scientologists view as "counterintentioned." Comporting oneself in any way that could be seen as contrary to church goals is considered subversive and is known as a "suppressive act." One text that sheds enlightenment on both the mind-set of the founder and the inner workings of the church is Introduction to Scientology Ethics, which every Scientologist owns. In this book, the list of suppressive acts is six pages long and includes crimes ranging from murder to "squirreling," or altering Hubbard's teachings.