Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief (3 page)

Just as this fuzzy parable begins to ramble into incoherence, Hubbard comes to the point, which is that a being is not his occupation or even the body he presently inhabits. The
central insight of Scientology is that the being is eternal, what Hubbard terms a “
thetan.” “This chap, in other words, was somebody until he began to identify his beingness with a thing.… None of these beingnesses are the person. The person is the thetan.”

“He had this amazing buoyancy,” Haggis recalled. “He had a deadpan sense of humor and this sense of himself that seemed to say, ‘Yes, I am fully aware that I might be mad, but I also might be on to something.’ ”

The zealotry that empowered so many members of the church came from the belief that they were the vanguard of the struggle to save humanity. “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, are the aims of Scientology,” Hubbard writes. Those breathless aims drew young idealists, like Haggis, to the church’s banner.

To advance such lofty goals, Hubbard developed a “technology” to attain spiritual freedom and discover oneself as an immortal being. “Scientology works 100 percent
of the time when it is properly applied to a person who sincerely desires to improve his life,” a church publication declares. This guarantee rests on the assumption that through rigorous research, Hubbard had uncovered a perfect understanding of human nature. One must not stray from the path he has laid down or question his methods. Scientology is exact. Scientology is
certain. Step by step one can ascend toward clarity and power, becoming more oneself—but, paradoxically, also more like Hubbard. Scientology is the geography of his mind. Perhaps no individual in history has taken
such copious internal soundings and described with so much logic and minute detail the inner workings of his own mentality. The method
Hubbard put forward created a road map toward his own ideal self. Hubbard’s habits, his imagination, his goals and wishes—his character, in other words—became both the basis and the destination of Scientology.

Secretly, Haggis didn’t really respect Hubbard as a writer. He hadn’t been able to get through
Dianetics
, for instance. He read about thirty pages, then put it down. Much of the Scientology coursework, however, gave him a feeling of accomplishment. In 1976, he traveled to Los Angeles, the center of the Scientology universe, checking in at the old
Château Élysée, on Franklin Avenue.
Clark Gable and
Katharine Hepburn had once stayed there, along with many other stars, but when Haggis arrived it was a run-down church retreat called the Manor Hotel.
¹
He had a little apartment with a kitchen where he could write.

There were about 30,000 Scientologists in America at the time. Most of them were white
, urban, and middle class; they were predominantly in their twenties, and many of them, especially in Los Angeles, were involved in graphic or performing arts. In other words, they were a lot like Paul Haggis. He immediately became a part of a community in a city that can otherwise be quite isolating. For the first time in his life, he experienced a feeling of kinship and camaraderie with people who had a lot in common—“all these atheists looking for something to believe in, and all these wanderers looking for a club to join.”

In 1977, Haggis returned to Canada to continue working for his father, who could see that his son was struggling. Ted Haggis asked him what he wanted to do with his life. Haggis said he wanted to be a writer. His father said, “Well, there are only two places to do that, New York and Los Angeles. Pick one, and I’ll keep you on the payroll for a year.” Paul chose LA because it was the heart of the film world. Soon after this conversation with his father, Haggis and
Diane
Gettas got married. Two months later, they loaded up his brown Camaro and drove to Los Angeles, moving into an apartment with Diane’s brother, Gregg, and three other people. Paul got a job moving furniture. On the weekends he took photographs for yearbooks. At night he wrote
scripts on spec at a secondhand drafting table. The following year, Diane gave birth to their first child,
Alissa.

SCIENTOLOGY HAD
a giddy and playful air in the mid-seventies, when
Haggis arrived in Los Angeles. It was seen as a cool, boutique religion, aimed especially toward the needs of artists and entertainers. The counterculture was still thriving in the seventies, and Scientology both was a part of it and stood apart from it. There was a saying, “After drugs
, there’s Scientology,” and it was true that many who were drawn to the religion had taken hallucinogens and were open to alternative realities. Recruits had a sense of boundless possibility. Mystical powers were forecast; out-of-body experiences were to be expected; fundamental secrets of the universe were to be revealed.

Haggis became friends with other Scientologists who also hoped to make it in Hollywood. One of them was
Skip Press, a writer and musician on the staff of the
Celebrity Centre, which was the church’s main foothold in the entertainment industry. Like many young recruits, Press believed that Scientology had given him superhuman powers
; for instance, he believed that when he got into the right mental state, he
could change traffic lights to green. He and Haggis formed a casual self-help group with other aspiring writers. They met at a Scientology hangout across from the Celebrity Centre called Two Dollar Bill’s, where they would criticize each other’s work and scheme about how to get ahead.

Paul Haggis on vacation in Antigua in 1975, the year he joined the Church of Scientology

Eventually, this informal writers club came to the attention of
Yvonne Gillham, the charismatic founder of the Celebrity Centre. Naturally warm and energetic, Gillham was an ideal candidate to woo the kinds of artists and opinion leaders that
Hubbard sought to front his religion. The former kindergarten director staged parties, poetry readings, workshops, and dances.
Chick Corea and other musicians associated with the church often played there. Gillham persuaded Haggis and his circle to hold their meetings at the Celebrity Centre, and they were folded into her web.

Haggis and a friend from the writers club eventually got a job scripting cartoons for Ruby-Spears Productions, beginning with a short-lived series called
Dingbat and the Creeps
, then
Heathcliff
. After that, Haggis went on to write
Richie Rich
and
Scooby-Doo
for Hanna-Barbera. He bought a used IBM Selectric typewriter. His career began to creep forward.

One day, a well-off strawberry farmer from Vancouver introduced himself to Haggis and Skip Press at the Celebrity Centre, saying he wanted to produce a life story of L. Ron Hubbard. He was offering fifteen thousand dollars for a script. Press declined, but Haggis accepted the money. His memory is that it was a horror script that he hoped to interest the strawberry farmer in. He never actually wrote a script about Hubbard, and eventually returned the entire sum, but in Press’s opinion, that was when Haggis’s career began to accelerate. “The money enabled Paul to cruise a bit and develop his career. Next thing I knew, Paul was getting an agent.” His Scientology connections were paying off.

HAGGIS SPENT
much of his time and money taking advanced courses and being “
audited,” a kind of Scientology psychotherapy that involves the use of an
electropsychometer, or
E-Meter. The device measures
bodily changes in electrical resistance that occur when a person answers questions posed by an auditor. Hubbard compared it to a lie detector. The E-Meter bolstered the church’s claim to being a scientific
path to spiritual discovery. “It gives Man his
first keen look into the heads and hearts of his fellows,” Hubbard claimed, adding that Scientology boosted some people’s IQ one point for every hour of auditing. “Our most spectacular feat
was raising a boy from 83 IQ to 212,” he once boasted to the
Saturday Evening Post
.

The theory of auditing is that it locates and discharges mental
“masses” that are blocking the free flow of energy. Ideas and fantasies are not immaterial; they have weight and solidity. They can root themselves in the mind as phobias and obsessions. Auditing breaks up the masses that occupy what Hubbard terms the “
reactive mind,” which is where the fears and phobias reside. The
E-Meter is presumed
to measure changes in those masses. If the needle on the meter moves to the right, resistance is rising; to the left, it is falling. The auditor asks systematic questions aimed at detecting sources of
“spiritual distress”—problems at work or in a relationship, for instance. Whenever the client, or “
preclear,” gives an answer that prompts the meter needle to jump, that subject becomes an area of concentration until the auditor is satisfied that emotional consequences of the troubling experience have drained away. Certain patterns of needle movement, such as sudden jumps or darts, long versus short falls, et cetera, have meaning as well. The auditor tries to guide the preclear to a “cognition” about the subject under examination, which leads to a “floating” needle. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the needle is frozen. “The needle just idles
around and yawns at your questions,” Hubbard explains. The individual should experience a corresponding feeling of release. Eventually, the reactive mind is cleansed of its obsessions, fears, and irrational urges, and the preclear becomes Clear.
²

Haggis found the E-Meter impressively responsive. He would grasp a cylindrical electrode in each hand. (When he first joined Scientology, the electrodes were empty Campbell’s soup cans with the labels stripped off.) An imperceptible electrical charge would run from the meter through his body. The meter seemed able to gauge the kinds of thoughts he was having—whether they were scary or happy, or when he was hiding something. It was a little spooky. The auditor often probed for what Scientologists call
“earlier similars.” If Paul was having another fight with Diane, for instance, the auditor would ask him, “Can you remember an earlier time when something like this happened?” Each new memory led further and further back in time. The goal was to uncover and neutralize the emotional memories that were plaguing Paul’s behavior.

Often, the process led participants to recall
past lives. Although that never happened to Haggis, he envied others who professed to have vivid recollections of ancient times or distant civilizations. Wouldn’t it be cool if you had many lifetimes before? he thought. Wouldn’t it be easier to face death?

Scientology is not just a matter of belief, the recruits were constantly told; it is a step-by-step
scientific process that will help you overcome your limitations and realize your full potential for greatness. Only Scientology can awaken individuals to the joyful truth of their immortal state. Only Scientology can rescue humanity from its inevitable doom. The recruits were infused with a sense of mystery, purpose, and intrigue. Life inside Scientology was just so much more compelling than life outside.

Preclears sometimes experience mystical states characterized by feelings of bliss or a sense of blending into the universe. They come to expect such phenomena, and they yearn for them if they don’t occur.
“Exteriorization”—the sense that one has actually left his physical being behind—is a commonly reported occurrence for Scientologists. If one’s consciousness can actually uproot itself from the physical body and move about at will—what does that say about mortality? We must be something more than, something other than, a mere physical incarnation; we actually are
thetans, to use Hubbard’s term, immortal spiritual
beings that are incarnated in innumerable lifetimes.
Hubbard said that exteriorization could be accomplished in about half the preclears by having the auditor simply command, “Be three feet back
of your head.” Free of the limitations
of his body, the thetan can roam the universe, circling stars, strolling on Mars, or even creating entirely new universes. Reality expands far beyond what the individual had originally perceived it to be. The ultimate
goal
of auditing is not just to liberate a person from destructive mental phenomena; it is to emancipate him from the laws of
matter, energy, space, and time—or MEST, as Hubbard termed them. These are just artifacts of the thetan’s imagination, in any case. Bored thetans had created MEST universes where they could frolic and play games; eventually, they became so absorbed in their distractions they forgot their true immortal natures. They identified with the bodies that they were temporarily inhabiting, in a universe they had invented for their own amusement. The goal of Scientology
is to recall to the thetan his immortality and help him relinquish his self-imposed limitations.

Once, Haggis had what he thought was an out-of-body experience. He was lying on a couch, and then he found himself across the room, observing himself lying there. The experience of being out of his body wasn’t that grand, and later he wondered if he had simply been visualizing the scene. He didn’t have the certainty his colleagues reported when they talked about seeing objects behind them or in distant places and times.