Beyond Belief (3 page)

Because my parents were working long days and nights, Justin and I were watched by other caretakers. When we first got to L.A., I spent my days at a nursery in the Fountain Building, where I stayed until my parents came to pick me up for dinner, which was served in the mess hall. Afterwards, Mom, Dad, Justin, and I would go back to the apartment for family time. I was taken back to the nursery when Mom and Dad went back to work. There were plenty of cots and cribs where the children could sleep until pick-up time, which was typically 11 p.m. or later.

During the day, when I was at the nursery, Justin went to the Apollo Training Academy (ATA), another building on Fountain Avenue. The ATA was for older children of Sea Org members. They were considered to be cadets, basically Sea Org members in training. I didn’t know what they did there all day, but Justin hated it enough that he begged my parents to let him go back to New Hampshire where his friends were.

Justin’s and my daily routine soon became normal. I was too young to understand that seeing your parents only one hour a day was highly unusual. I didn’t know what parents were supposed to do, I only knew that mine were seldom around.

W
E HAD ONLY BEEN IN
L
OS
A
NGELES FOR SIX WEEKS WHEN ON
January 24, 1986, L. Ron Hubbard died at the age of seventy-two. He had been living in seclusion in a remote area of the desert in California for the previous six years, tended to by a married couple, Pat and Anne Broeker, his two closest confidantes. He hadn’t been to the base or made public appearances in years, but everyone said he was actively working on new, ground-breaking research, so his isolation had been understandable.

To Scientologists, LRH had always been respected as a researcher and philosopher whose stories about his discoveries for the Church were riddled with colorful tales from his own travels and life experiences. By the time of his death, he had become almost godlike, a charismatic figure who’d developed the path to salvation for all Scientologists. Everyone viewed him as a personal friend, whether they knew him well or not at all. To us, he saw the good in all mankind.

L. Ron Hubbard had been a prolific writer of short pulp fiction tales for fifteen years before he published his first serious work,
Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health
, in 1950.
Dianetics
was a self-help program, and the philosophy behind it was that people had to get rid of moments of pain, which were obstacles to personal growth. These moments were what held us back, impaired our health, and undermined our quality of life. However, by addressing and overcoming them, we could conquer just about anything that made us suffer.

When it was released,
Dianetics
quickly sold millions of copies, with readers becoming rabid fans of the program overnight, saying this new guide to mental health was filled with amazing ways to heal and improve your life. Of course,
Dianetics
also had its skeptics and outright critics who questioned the alleged science used by LRH. For his part, LRH dismissed his naysayers as feeling threatened by his new perspective.

Despite the naysayers,
Dianetics
became such a sensation that LRH opened Dianetics centers in cities across America, so that people could engage in one-on-one study with a trained coach whom LRH referred to as an
auditor
. In these sessions with the auditor, the student, or “pre-Clear,” was guided back to his painful moments. They could be anything physical or emotional from childbirth to a car accident or any kind of actual moment of pain, as well as the sights, smells, emotions, and words heard or associated with that painful moment. L. Ron Hubbard believed there were chains of painful moments, and with an auditor’s help, they would disappear one by one. The goal of Dianetics was to address each and every one until finally the mind was “cleared of the entire chain.” Dianetics was a continual process of locating such chains, of which there could be thousands, and following them all the way back to the earliest incident. Only then would they disappear, bringing the pre-Clear closer to a state of “Clear.” When you were Clear, the goal of Dianetics, you no longer had psychosomatic illnesses, neuroses, or psychoses. You also experienced a giant lift in IQ and had perfect recall of your past. You were free of what LRH called your Reactive Mind.

By 1952, L. Ron Hubbard had moved past thinking of Dianetics as simply a self-help regimen. In his research, he had discovered that pre-Clears were demonstrating chains of painful moments that preceded their current lifetime. In fact, they could go back many lifetimes, indicating the possibility of past lives, which naturally opened the door to the realm of the spirit. This led LRH to another discovery: that man existed in three parts—the body, the mind, and the spirit. He called the spirit the
Thetan
. It was immortal, and it was also the most important of the three parts. Without it, there would be no body or mind. A Thetan wasn’t a thing, but rather the creator of things and the animator of the body. The mind was the computer, the body was the vessel for the Thetan, and the Thetan was the life force. Thus, Scientology was born.

The Thetan quickly became a vital part of Scientology. By offering followers a spiritual component, LRH took the first step toward making Scientology a religion, a designation that came with a variety of benefits. Suddenly, the claims of dubious science that had surrounded
Dianetics
were irrelevant; if Dianetics was part of religious practice, it didn’t need to be proven scientifically. There were also financial incentives and tax exemptions that made becoming a religion attractive. However, perhaps the most important part of Scientology becoming a religion was that, unlike Dianetics, in which people could simply become Clear, get fixed, and never return to another auditing session, Scientology, with its infinite spiritual component and its journeys into past lives, was designed to keep people coming back indefinitely.

LRH developed a curriculum that specified the order in which Scientology was to be taught. This step-by-step program was called the Bridge to Total Freedom and was divided into two parts:
auditing
, which was a type of one-on-one counseling; and
training
, a program by which to learn how to audit others. Under this road map for Scientologists in their journey to spiritual freedom, everyone had to start at the bottom and move up one level at a time. You could go up one side of the Bridge or both. There were also many courses that weren’t actually on the Bridge available to Scientologists, as well. But as for the ascent itself, a person had to attain a certain level of awareness before he or she could advance to the next level and ultimately cross the Bridge to Total Freedom.

The levels on the Bridge up to a State of Clear were based on LRH’s Dianetics’ research. However, with the discovery of the Thetan, he had to decode the spiritual levels beyond a state of Clear. These became the highest levels on the Bridge, known as the Operating Thetan, or OT Levels. There were eight levels, the final one being OT VIII, enticingly called “Truth Revealed.”

LRH warned that no one could bypass any level to get to this ultimate mystery and said proper preparation was imperative. Doing levels out of order, he claimed, could result in serious injury or even death. For this reason, people who had already achieved this knowledge were forbidden to share it with those below them on the Bridge. Additionally, the OT courses could only be delivered by specially-trained Sea Org members. A number of Sea Org bases around the world could deliver OT Levels up to Level V. The Flag Base in Clearwater delivered Levels VI and VII. The
Freewinds
, the ship my mother was preparing for service, was going to be the only place in the world that would deliver OT VIII, the highest level yet decoded.

Even though LRH spent his last years in self-imposed exile, he let it be known through communications from the Broekers that he was hard at work on advanced, never-before-revealed levels beyond OT VIII.

The day after LRH’s death, both my uncle Dave and Pat Broeker addressed a capacity crowd of Scientologists at the Hollywood Palladium, the 40,000-square-foot art-deco style concert hall on Sunset Boulevard. Uncle Dave told everybody that LRH had “moved on to a new level of research.” There were a few gasps of disbelief, occasional muted applause, but mostly the auditorium was in total silence. Dave went on to explain that it had been L. Ron Hubbard’s decision to “discard” his body because “it had ceased to be useful and had become an impediment to the work he now must do beyond its confines.”

“The being we knew as L. Ron Hubbard still exists,” he told his followers, helping to diffuse the shock.

The fact that LRH had orchestrated his own journey, combined with the fact that he hadn’t been seen in years, made his departure bearable.

Since both my uncle and Pat Broeker were onstage that day, it wasn’t immediately clear who LRH’s successor would be. Reportedly, there was a power struggle between the two men over who would assume leadership of the Church. There were opposing stories of exactly what transpired, but accusations emerged that my uncle used some questionable tactics to oust Pat from the leadership position. Regardless of how it happened, in the end my uncle prevailed, eventually becoming the head of the Church, with his official title being Chairman of the Board, Religious Technology Center. From this point forward, everyone in the Church referred to him as COB, but to me, he was just Uncle Dave.

My father, Ronnie Miscavige Jr., was actually three years older than Uncle Dave. He was the oldest, followed by Uncle Dave and his twin sister, Denise, and Lori, the baby of the family. When they were kids, my dad and Dave shared a room and got along well, even teaming up to play pranks on their sisters. Dad was very athletic, and although he played football in school, his real passion was gymnastics. He even landed a place on the Junior Olympics team in his region. Dave also enjoyed sports, but because he had asthma, he was sometimes held back from competing and doing other physical activities. Denise was kind, free-spirited, and loved to dance, but she was often in trouble with my grandparents, because they didn’t approve of some of the boys she dated. Little Lori loved to dance along with her big sister.

Their father, my grandfather, was Ron Miscavige Sr. He had been born and raised in Mount Carmel, a small coal-mining town in southwest Pennsylvania, where he grew up Polish Catholic. He worked as a salesman, selling things from cookware to insurance. He wasn’t particularly tall, but he was loud, gruff, gregarious, and a little intimidating. He joined the Marines when he was just eighteen, and in 1957, the year after he was discharged, he married my grandmother, Loretta Gidaro, a beautiful young woman with thick brown hair, olive skin, and the brightest blue eyes. Grandma Loretta was a coal miner’s daughter of German and Italian descent, who was humorous, kind, and always looking out for the welfare of her family. The two settled in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, outside Philadelphia, where she worked as a nurse until taking time off when her children were born: Dad in 1957, David and Denise in 1960, and Lori in 1962.

Being in sales, Grandpa was very much a people person. He would frequently invite characters home to have dinner with the family, where they would tell their entertaining stories over a nice meal. It was through a fellow salesman that he first heard about the Church of Scientology. He wasn’t drawn to Scientology because he had a particular personal issue, but rather because he was always hungry for answers about spirituality and our minds. At the time he was thirty-four, but he had always been interested in philosophy of one kind or another. When he was just a kid, he’d read
The Prophet
by Kahlil Gibran, and became fascinated by the questions about human life and spirituality that it raised. Early on, he’d been curious about social anthropology, how humans came to be here, and why we did the things we did.

This interest in the origins of man led him to visit a local Scientology mission in Cherry Hill and buy one of L. Ron Hubbard’s books. As Grandpa would later say himself, after that trip to the mission, he needed no convincing—he was sold. After buying a few more books, he went to the mission and began the auditing process. He said that in the next few months the benefits of Scientology helped him become the top salesperson in his company, and he claimed he was even featured in
Newsweek
for his success. His boss was so impressed that he sent the whole company of twenty or so employees down to the Cherry Hill Mission, because, if this was what Ron was doing, they had better check it out, too.

For her part, Grandma Loretta didn’t object to his interest in Scientology; in fact, she liked it and started taking services at the mission as well. Pretty soon, Grandpa was bringing all four of his children for auditing, beginning when my father was twelve. In addition, Grandpa had heard that Scientology had produced promising results in treating ailments such as asthma, so he thought Dave could really benefit. According to Grandpa, Dave’s improvement was impressive, further convincing him that Scientology had the answers he had been looking for. It had helped him succeed at work, made him feel better about important decisions, and now it appeared to be improving his son’s health.

Ultimately, Grandpa liked that Scientology was more of a self-help philosophy than a religion. He liked that, instead of discussing heaven, hell, and sin, it promised breakthroughs in relationships and marriages, careers, communication, and physical and emotional well-being. He also liked that there was a utopian quality to Scientology. It held a point of view that man is essentially good and in charge of his own spiritual salvation, but that salvation depended on a cooperation with the universe. L. Ron Hubbard felt it was possible to clear the world of human misery, end wars, and promote harmony. It was idealistic but somehow rational at the same time, a combination that appealed to Grandpa. The fact that it was unlike any religion or belief he’d ever known didn’t bother him in the least.