I first encountered both auditing and the structure of Scientology's extensive technology when I was given some simple auditing by a Scientology staff member. It was part of a standard introductory session which had begun with the free Hubbard film and lecture. When it finally came time for me to be audited, actually to see an E-Meter and have it demonstrated on me, the moment, despite the monotony of the film and lecture which had come first, became heavy with meaning, as if *now*, having survived the film and lecture, the inner door was going to open and the heart and substance of Scientology revealed in a clear light.
I was led to a small room by a Miss Adler, a pleasant-looking, large lady who, as I was already getting used to with scientologists, insisted on glaring at me from beneath lowered brows. The room we entered was small and I was made to sit down on one side of a small table. Miss Adler sat down opposite me. For a long moment she continued to stare, and then turned the E-Meter around so that I could look at it. There it was, a small, folding box which opens up to stand on the desk in front of an auditor much the way a book would stand if you opened it in the middle and set it up like a small tent. A large meter faces the auditor, with a large dial on the upper left of the panel, a small on-off switch below it, and three knobs along the bottom: a sensitivity booster, a
123
124 SCIENTOLOGY
test-set-transit knob, and a trim knob. Two wires run out from either side of the whole thing and are clamped onto two tin cans. These cans are held by the *preclear*, in this instance me, and as the auditor asks various questions, some general, some more specific, the needle is carefully observed. And if it jumps....
Hubbard once said: "The meter tells you what the preclear's mind is doing when the preclear is made to think of something. If they're emotionally disturbed about cats, and they're talking about cats, the needle flies about. If they're not disturbed about cats, the needle doesn't fly about. So you let them talk about cats until they're no longer disturbed about cats, and then the needle no longer flies about." It comes to rest because the disturbance is gone. Or because the battery inside the E-Meter has run down.
The E-Meter is actually a very simple device which measures electrical resistances. It is quite similar to the invention of Sir Charles Wheatstone - dubbed a Wheatstone bridge - on which the unknown resistance (capacity to conduct electricity) of an object or subject was measured by passing a very small charge of electricity through it and then comparing its conductivity with a known resistance. In Scientology's E-Meter, which was refined by Volney Mathison from the basic design of the Wheatstone bridge, a small battery provides the power to pass a very small charge through the leads and through your body. Scientology believes, according to a book called *The Hubbard Electrometer*, that the machine "measures the relative density of the body." What is measurable by the needle "is specifically the impingement of the individual himself (the spirit) upon the body by the direct action of thought." The current, Hubbard wrote in a handbook, *E-Meter Essentials*, "is influenced by the mental masses, pictures, circuits and machinery." As I examined the meter, I remembered the FDA case in Washington and the charges which followed. The E-Meter Miss Adler was showing me had that small
TECHNIQUES, DRILLS, AND PROCESSES 125
message on it: "The E-Meter is not intended or effective for the diagnosis, treatment or prevention of any disease."
We were going to start with the Pinch Test, Miss Adler explained, and indicated I should pick up the two tin cans. She waited until I seemed to be holding them firmly, and then reached over to pinch my left forearm. She was wearing a very large orange stone ring on her left hand and I watched it, and as her hand got closer she watched the needle, and it sprang for the sky and she said, "Ahh. Anticipation." Yes ma'am. True. Anticipation. You're going to pinch me, lady. She had, by the way, made me take off my wedding ring, and I quickly figured out that its metal might impede or distort any reading on the meter. So she pinched me. Then she asked me to see if I could recreate the sensation. I screwed up my face a bit and summoned up my best Stanislavskian resources, and *I thought about that pinch*. I tried to make it happen again and found myself evaluating its quality instead. A good pinch. Decent. Well executed. The needle, meanwhile, was doing precious little. Miss Adler said "Good," several times. Which meant to me, Good, the needle isn't moving, or Good! the needle moved. It meant something either way.
Once that was over, she turned the E-Meter away from my view and said she would now do some simple auditing. I had put down the cans, which had gotten clammy in my fists. I picked them up again, quickly, wondering if she might be mad at me for dawdling. She looked at me. "What do you think of Scientology?"
"Well...." What was I going to say? I liked it, I didn't like it, it frightened me, it didn't frighten me...." I'm confused by it. There seem to be so many things to learn about it. I stopped.
Miss Adler saw I was finished and said, "Thank you," slowly, almost formally, and I realized the politesse was part of the procedure, integral to the consistency of demand and acknowledgment of answer. So she asked me again, just as
126 SCIENTOLOGY
naturally, her eyes dropping to the meter, which I couldn't see at all. "What do you think of Scientology?"
The cans were heavy in my hands and I did not want to start with another, "Well-" so I looked off to the side, as if thinking. Could she, I wondered, actually "know" how to read something From this rather simplistic machine?
The classic lie detector, or polygraph, had been developed in the crime detection laboratory at Northwestern University by Leonard Keeler, a one-time police officer from Berkeley, California. An article in the January 1967 *Scientific American* by Burke M. Smith, associate professor of neurology, and psychiatry (clinical psychology) and chief clinical psychologist at the School of Medicine of the University of Virginia, describes the standard polygraph as "a simple, compact and often portable machine that records pulse rate, relative blood pressure, the rate and depth of breathing and often the resistance of the skin to the conduction of electricity" and makes the point that the machine is not specifically a "lie detector," but something which records physiological changes. "Any detecting of lies," he wrote, "is done by the examiner, the person who conducts the interrogation."
I felt Miss Adler watching me, waiting, so I said, still wondering about the efficacy of the E-Meter, "I think Scientology is *interesting*....I want to know more about it, but I'm not sure what it has for me."
Miss Adler's eyes were now down on the meter and she said, "Thank you." And then she asked me the same question again: "What do you think of Scientology?"
"Nothing," I said evenly, taking the plunge, wondering if that might not be the right answer. (In his article, Dr. Smith had written: "The examining session is conducted in an atmosphere that is inevitably at least somewhat tense....")
"Good," Miss Adler said just as evenly. "Thank you."
She went on to ask me the following questions, each two or three times, each acknowledged with a "Thank you."
TECHNIQUES, DRILLS, AND PROCESSES 127
"Do you have any problems with people?"
"Do you have any problems with your work?"
"Do you have any problems with the world at large?"
With that last one, after answering all the others humbly and with slight hesitations and mumblings, I allowed myself a small note of wry bitterness. I said, "Who doesn't these days?" It was obvious from all three questions that *anything* I might have felt the least bit worried about, concerned about, *guilty* about, would have eventually come out, if not then, then later, when I would be asked, in advanced auditing sessions, to be more specific.
After a final "Thank you," Miss Adler was finished. She fixed me with one of those eye-locks and asserted, very quietly, that I needed the HAS (Hubbard Apprentice Scientologist) Communications Course, that I put myself down a great deal and she saw that I could use the reinforcement of the Communications Course. I said I'd think about it.
The Communications Course is the first course of sessions you pay for. The cost can run from $15 to $25, depending upon where you take it, at the central organization offices or at one of the franchised offices. The Hubbard Association of Scientologists International, Ltd., only sets the base fees.
Before going any further into Scientology's techniques and exercises, I should describe the structure of your path on the route to Hubbard's Total Freedom. The Communications Course is the bottom rung of a ladder which leads into auditing and the first two levels: Straight Wire Release and Dianetic Release. Next comes Grade 0 Release, and then four more separate Grades, ending in Grade IV. The next step is to take what is called the DAC, the Dianetics Auditors Course. Its purpose is twofold, to introduce the importance of each individual functioning independently as an auditor, thereby suggesting that studying all the levels of professional auditing is much more valuable than merely being audited oneself, and to train one to audit oneself. After the DAC, one
128 SCIENTOLOGY
takes Grade V-VA, also known as *power*. This is followed by *solo*, Grade VI, and then Grade VII, *clear*, the temporal summit.
Scientology's activities are particularly confusing because at first glance there are no clear-cut lines visible between when one is expected to do one thing and when one might do another. To isolate them then: The buying and reading of the books provides Knowledge; attending and encouraging friends to attend the free lectures provides Orientation; the Scientology Congresses where one meets other Scientologists, shares experiences, and listens to tapes of L. Ron Hubbard lectures offers Enlightenment; the actual processing from one Grade up to the next is done to achieve Freedom: and the training courses through which one becomes an auditor offers Ability. The last, Academy Training, is made infinitely more attractive to prospective scientologists because it offers achieving *clear* for a total cost of $3,550, a savings on the $4,025 for achieving *clear* merely through processing. Elements of the Training Route, as it is often referred to, will be discussed later. To begin with, let me get into the Communications Course, where everyone really gets his start and where so many of the precepts inherent in Scientology's techniques are firmly established.
The experience of a young freelance photographer, Bud Lee, who was assigned to take some pictures of Scientology in action, dramatizes both what goes on in the course and how it is absorbed. Bud signed up for a $750 course which would have taken him all the way to Grade IV, and prepared himself for the Communications Course. The first lesson was called Confrontation, Bud explained, "where we were facing each other, with our hands on our knees, and we had to sit for an hour, without moving anything. Which is fine. I really believed in that. I could see the girl's corona around her, kind of a yellowish-green halo, and I thought this was great. I didn't
TECHNIQUES, DRILLS, AND PROCESSES 129
know whether it was an optical illusion or what, but at least it was an experience."
As Bud told me about it, I couldn't help but remember Jack Kerouac's *On The Road*, when the wild poet, patterned after Allen Ginsberg, tells the book's narrator: "Dean and I are embarked on a tremendous season together. We're trying to communicate with absolute honesty and absolute completeness everything on our minds. We've had to take benzedrine. We sit on the bed, cross-legged, facing each other. I have finally taught Dean that he can do anything he wants, become mayor of Denver, marry a millionairess, or become the greatest poet since Rimbaud. But he keeps rushing out to see the midget auto races...."
The second session of the Communications Course was called Bull-Baiting. Says Bud, "I sat across from my partner, this girl, and we were instructed to be either a coach or a student. In this case, she was the coach. And of course you're instructed to say anything; the Bull-Baiting is where they really break you down. Now the idea, you're supposed to overcome your subliminal mind and your body and you reach your optimum. When you've reached that, you've overcome all your prejudices, handicaps, your shortcomings in other words. The idea being that you can be happy, there's no need for any kind of neuroses. You can overcome a common cold, for example, just by reaching your optimum. So this exercise is the first of many where they're trying to break you. The instructress, whose name was Bobbie, or Barbara - she looked something like Bobble Gentry: long black hair, a very, very good-looking body, but her eyes were very, very kind of hard, and she was always smiling and saying, 'Beautiful.' Every time someone made a comment in the class she'd say 'Beautiful,' or 'Groovy,' or give you a big smile. And she smoked, and was very, very relaxed. But very apart, not at all compassionate. Kind of a very withdrawn coolness about her. But very sharp. Well, the Bull-Baiting starts with - Bobble
130 SCIENTOLOGY
had instructed all the students to sit in the same position as they sat in in the previous exercise, with your hands on your knees, upright, relaxed, and you're not allowed to move anything. If you move - like I have a tendency of dropping my shoulder - if they see something move, they yell, 'Flunk!' and then 'Start!' Your coach will tell you what you did. Well, the instructress started working on my bald head, and my pot belly." Bud is not bald. His hair is thinning and he is concerned about it and quite openly vulnerable to the notion that somebody would criticize him for that. He also does not have a pot belly. He is a large-framed person, with a kind young face, unexpected small lines of concern around his eyes, and a manner that is a trifle hesitant, but ultimately honest and quite unafraid. "She assumed I was a Madison Avenue ad account executive or something. She didn't think of me as anything else. And she looked at me and said, 'Your *affluent* belly,' and then, 'You go by that window every morning and you say, Maybe I should buy it, what would the boys in the office think? And then one day you bought some of this cream and you started working with this cream, and it said on the package that it would grow hair -' she started working on that. To me, she really wasn't that insulting because she really didn't get that far. She said that they don't call a cripple a cripple, or a black man a black man - there was this woman in the class who didn't have a chin, and obviously that point was made for her. And a lot of Negroes, a lot of different ethnic groups. So she said you work on other things, things that are not so obvious. The upshot was that I would laugh, and she explained that laughing is the emotion that is closest to the surface; you laugh before you cry."
Bud never took the last two sessions of the Communications Course. Later that evening, because he had been openly taking photographs, he was expelled and his money refunded. He was very upset, particularly because he was desperately interested to find out what was going to happen next.
TECHNIQUES, DRILLS, AND PROCESSES 131
What happened next is a session called "Dear Alice." It was described to me by Gary Watkins, the once highly placed Scientologist who was expelled by the movement for involving himself with a splinter group Hubbard felt was threatening him. The purpose of Dear Alice, Gary said, is "to increase your intention in communication, your ability to reach another person with exactly what you intended to reach them, rather than have your communication go off astray. It's done by reading out of a book, "Alice in Wonderland." You look down at the book and you look at the other person and you say: 'It's a Cheshire Cat.' Then you find another phrase in the book, and you go." When done properly, Hubbard has said, the exercise increases "your 'ownership' of a communication. You look down at the book, you *own* that phrase, it's yours, you deliver it like it's yours." Says Gary Watkins, "People learn that book by heart before they're finished."
The next part of the exercise is something called Termination. "When somebody reads out of Dear Alice," Gary explained, "and says, 'It's a Cheshire Cat,' the other person says, 'Thank you.'" This is done "to increase your ability to acknowledge others, and acknowledge in a manner that means not just 'Thank you,' but End of Cycle. Completion of Communication. Over and Out. Or STOP. And very often that's what a Scientologist learns: 'Thank you. Stop.' Shut up. In Scientology, the thank-yous mean Completion of that cycle of Communication. Start a new cycle."
The final exercise in the Communications Course is one designed to increase ownership through "the ability to duplicate. Using Dear Alice, or some other text, one person reads off to another person, and that person has to tell them back specifically what they said. In all these exercises," Gary points out, "one is always in the auditor's position, or role, the other is the auditee."
At one time, the "termination" or "acknowledgment" drill was done using the E-Meter, to accustom students to the fact
132 SCIENTOLOGY
that something they say produces a "read" on the meter. Anyone taking the Training Route towards becoming a professional auditor would also take several TR's, Training Drills, which are not included in the usual Communications Course. TR's 0 through 2 are similar to the Confrontation, Bull-Baiting, and various uses of Dear Alice. TR 3 is called "duplicate question," meant "to duplicate without variation an auditing question, each time newly, in its own unit of time, not as a blur with other questions, and to acknowledge it." Asking such questions as "Do fish swim? Do birds fly?" students would do them again and again, for hours, striving to achieve repetition with no variations. In TR 4, a student auditor's coach would try to throw a student off by being difficult and not repeating "Do fish swim?" as directed. It becomes the student's task to make absolutely sure he can elicit a precise duplication each and every time, no matter what obstructions occur.
Once the Communications Course is over, you decide whether you want to take straight processing to achieve Freedom, or the Training Route to improve Ability as well as achieve Freedom. Anyone who decides to take straight processing begins with what is called Straight Wire Release, defined on Scientology's "Classification Gradation And Awareness Chart of Levels and Certificates" as achieving "Improvement in Memory and Ability to Recall." Before going into it, I have to emphasize a fundamental scientological principle basic to all processes and exercises. Hubbard described it in his book, *The Creation of Human Ability*: "The first goal which an Auditor much achieve is willingness in the preclear to receive directions. The condition of the preclear is such, in nearly all cases, that he has chosen as a main point of resistance in life, direction of himself other than his own." The result, Hubbard explains, is the continuous resistance on man's part to direction from the outside, which also weakens his ability to direct
TECHNIQUES, DRILLS, AND PROCESSES 133
himself and, "it is the ability to direct himself which the Auditor is seeking to return to the preclear."
Every auditing session begins with a rigidly followed routine. The auditor must make sure that the preclear is comfortable in the particular room they are in. The auditor then says, "Start of session!" and they begin. In Straight Wire Release, three basic questions are asked: "Recall a communication. Recall something real. Recall an emotion." This continues as the preclear remembers various events or objects, gripping the cans until the moment his auditor tells him he has achieved Release, a needle which floats freely and no longer jumps on any of the answers given to those three questions: "Recall a communication. Recall something real. Recall an emotion."
The next level is called Dianetic Release and is designed, according to the chart, for "Erasure of Loss and Misemotion." The session consists of two questions, essentially: "Recall a loss. Recall a misemotion." This is certainly a far cry from the extensive auditing which was done during the Dianetics era with the auditee in *dianetic reverie*. Church of Scientology Minister Bob Thomas explained the more important differences in the new level of release. "Some of the early reverie technology that was used," he told me, "smacked a little bit of hypnosis, but certainly we don't use anything like that any more. It's not necessary. A person is fully aware, fully awake, fully alert, and no suggestions are made to him whatsoever. We start out in Dianetics by simply asking him to recall moments when he felt as though he liked somebody, moments when he felt he was experiencing something really real, moments when he felt he really understood something, things like this, which just kind of increases ability to recall. And then we go into a little bit deeper incident, and then a little bit deeper. But it's strictly a general question and command that's given to him, such as 'locate an incident.' And then we say, 'Okay, go to the beginning of it, move through it to the end, and tell me what's happening.' And that's it."
134 SCIENTOLOGY
Grade 0 Communications Release gives one "Ability to communicate freely with anyone on any subject." Bob Thomas gave me an example of the type of question an auditor might ask. "'If you could communicate to *blank* - whatever or whoever the person is having difficulty communicating to - put in that *blank*.' So he's having difficulty communicating with his wife; you'd say, 'If you could communicate to a *wife*, what would you talk about?' And then when we get a subject, we say, 'If you were talking to a wife about *that*, what would you say exactly?' Until the person feels much more at ease about communicating to that particular person or terminal, as we call it." Much more generally, this Grade is also run with two simple questions: "What are you willing to tell me about? What are you willing to tell me about it?" The most specific question anyone is ever asked during auditing, according to Thomas, is: "Should you have told me something you didn't?"
Grade I Release concerns Problems and acquiring the "Ability to recognize source of problems and make them vanish." The procedure is simply naming various problems and discussing possible solutions. The subjects covered can range from finances to sex to suicide to athlete's foot.
Grade II is Relief Release and involves achieving "Relief from hostilities and sufferings of life." The two areas dealt with on this grade are called "Overts" and "Withholds." The *Scientology Abridged Dictionary*, a copy of which every *preclear* is quick to purchase, defines an "Overt" as a "Harmful or contra-survival act...an act of commission or omission that harms the greater number of dynamics....A failure to eradicate something or stop someone that would harm broadly would be an overt act." A "Withhold" is defined as an "undisclosed contra-survival act...in which the individual has done or been an accessory to doing something which is a transgression against some moral or ethical code...." This Grade is achieved by answering two questions: "What have you done? What haven't you said?"
TECHNIQUES, DRILLS, AND PROCESSES 135
Grade III is called Freedom Release, "Freedom from the upsets of the past and ability to face the future." Scientology defines upsets as ARC breaks, breaks in the triangle of Affinity-Reality-Communications. The E-Meter is particularly important at this level because it is used to fix the date of any important ARC break. This is done by using what Scientology calls the "Over and Under" technique of asking questions pertaining to the sought-for date. The date is finally tracked down by process of elimination. When the incident has been properly fixed, it is rerun in detail until Release from it is achieved.
Grade IV is Ability Release, "Moving out of fixed conditions and gaining abilities to do new things." The general subject which is audited is something called "Service Facsimiles," defined as "an aberrated, non-survival solution the preclear uses to make others wrong, self right, to aid the survival of self, hinder the survival of others, help self dominate others and help escape domination." It is a combination of realizing when you have been passing the buck, as well as appreciating the intensity of your own determination to survive. The question asked is "What method have you used to make others wrong during your life?" Answers are written down, and with the aid of the E-Meter one particular incident is isolated and dissected in terms of its having been just such a "service facsimile."
All auditing sessions end the same way. A *preclear* is sent to a department known as Technical Services where somebody makes sure the *preclear* has truly ended the auditing session. This has been done by slowing down the pace of the questioning and initiating a careful reorientation to one's surroundings, bringing them back into "present time," sometimes accompanied with a demand from the auditor to have the preclear "Tell me I am no longer auditing you."
Achieving Grade IV in Scientology is known as having "done your Grades." Looking back on them, I remembered
136 SCIENTOLOGY
how Bob Thomas had broadly summarized what succeeding at each Grade level is meant to produce. "What we're really trying to do is increase the person's confidence in being able to remember what he wants to remember and not remember what he doesn't want to remember; increase his confidence in being able to control his memories...."
It is at this point, after Grade IV Release, that you as a scientologist will decide whether or not to go into Scientology training. To continue up the ladder towards *clear* it is now necessary for you to take the Dianetics Auditors Course, which teaches the rudiments of auditing. Hubbard stresses the course's importance because in it, a person "learns the anatomy of the human mind, and gains practical experience in handling it in actual auditing sessions." The levels or Classes of Academy Training approximate the progress a *preclear* makes in his Grades, except that there is a somewhat different pattern of emphasis. You receive not only auditing, but "A Theory Course, with the appropriate certificate and a Practical Course with its levels of classification. The levels follow each other in a smooth gradient, and each level is properly mastered before the student progresses confidently to the next level." Local organizations can train you to Level IV, just as they can process somebody to Grade IV. Advanced levels and Grades are achieved, as was mentioned earlier, either at Saint Hill or at the new Los Angeles headquarters.
As I said, the essential difference between Academy Training and straight processing is initially one of intensity. As Gary Watkins described a person who takes the Training Route, "They'll take the Communications Course, but for weeks, the face-to-face stuff. Until they're letter perfect. They'll do one for one hour straight, and then another. Then they'll begin a process called 'Give me that hand,' a Havingness process, a Communications-Control-Havingness process." The drills in this group are called CCH's, and "Give me that hand" is CCH 1. "This," Gary went on to explain to me, "is definitely
TECHNIQUES, DRILLS, AND PROCESSES 137
an auditor-preclear situation, where the auditor and preclear sit across from one another - the student in training is not being audited, but the situation is exactly as it will be when CCH 1 is used in actual auditing - and one person makes an indication to their right hand and says, 'Give me that hand.' They get the hand, they shake it, they acknowledge getting it, say 'Thank you,' and then they place the hand back in the lap. They'll do that for as long as it takes to 'flatten' it, meaning they have successfully done it three times without change." To "flatten" is also an E-Meter needle term, but applies to other facets of Scientology drilling as well. Gary continues: "They're thus doing it under the auditor's control, based upon the premise that the average person does not feel he is sufficiently in control of his life. By accepting the auditor's control, he therefore somehow gets the idea that *he* could control *himself* more.
"Then there is CCH 2, which is the auditor standing beside the preclear, pointing to a wall, saying 'You look at that wall.' Thank you. 'You walk over to the wall.' They walk over together. He says, 'Thank you.' The preclear is supposed to stop in front of the wall. 'Touch the wall.' 'Thank you.' 'Turn around.' 'Thank you.' And you start again...until it's flat. Everybody's pre-informed of what it's all going to be, and what they're going to do. There are some absolutely wild, fantastic things that happen to people during these exercises. You would think it's a very simple procedure, but it is not. Certainly on a repetitive basis it's not. Every psychotic tendency that you would imagine could come out of a person when they're asked to do these things. Very few people come in and do them cold. People will scream; everything comes up: their resistance to authority, their objection to control, their tendencies towards sickness, certain somatic illnesses or pains they are not even aware of; because they are habitually attempting to shut off their awareness, and suddenly they'll get into better communication with their body and they'll scream,
138 SCIENTOLOGY
and then they'll remember the specific incident relating to the pain.
"CCH 3 is 'Put your hand against mine.' You put your hands up. 'Follow and contribute to their motion -'" This CCH is also known as Hand Space Mimicry "- at which point you'll make a series of motions like this." Gary moves his hand around, the palm up, flat, as if someone's was being held against it, his movements decisive and varied. "First with your right hand and then with your left. It can be *beautiful* to do because ideally, perfect duplication and harmony with another person is a marvelous thing. If it's not overdone. And if a person is rational enough to appreciate what's happening. It brings a person's awareness and attention right, like that!" He snaps his fingers with a loud crack. "The rest of the CCH is: 'Put your hands one inch from mine. Thank you.' And you do the same thing. That's when it really is a groovy scene. That can be a ball. You do that up to a distance of three feet and after each time the preclear is asked: 'Did you contribute to their motion?' No matter what they say, you continue. Ideally, the answer is Yes, but it wouldn't matter; if they say No three times, it's flat. If they said 'No' three times the same way, without any significant change. It turns on automaticities: a person can start twitching, some people have eyeballs turn blood red and raw and then go back down again. A lot of things will turn up. This is a way, in Hubbard's language, of stimulating incidents, ailments, impulses, circuits, mental circuits, under control, that are stimulated by life out of control, and just wonk you, rather than you commanding the situation.
"CCH 4, you take a book - it's a silent process," also known as Book Mimicry, "and you say, 'I'm going to take this book and I want you to duplicate this motion.' And you do anything you want with it: hand it to them, etc., and that brings people's attention straight into present time, they're right with you. Some people can't do that. Their attention shoots out,
TECHNIQUES, DRILLS, AND PROCESSES 139
because duplication is their factor, it's their out-factor and they're not good at it."
Looking at all of the CCH's, Gary says, "The first two are really 'turn-on' processes. They really bring up a lot of crap. Their purpose is to turn on, under control, those impulses or responses that life is ordinarily 'restimulating in you,' and therefore you experience it, observe it, key it out, to use his term, 'Key it out so it is no longer impinging upon you.' Under control The second two will do that to some people to some degree but most often are present-time processes. Some people have trouble with CCH 3, but CCH 3 and 4 should be pure fun, you should be sailing right out of the muck you were in with CCH 1 and 2."
A person taking the Training Route will also learn something called Assists. There are two types. Physical Assists would be used if someone hurt something, like an arm. The student would learn to touch the area around the injury and say, at the same time, "Notice my fingers. Thank you. Notice my fingers. Thank you." And continue doing this around the injured area until it got better. The other type of assists involve someone coming in to a Scientology organization with a problem. An auditor would ask "Where was it? Thank you. When was it? Thank you. Who was involved? Thank you. What did the situation look like? Thank you." As Gary described it, "To get the person separated from that incident so that they're actually *looking* at the incident rather than being in it." This would be somewhat similar to the straight auditing technique used by a Class I Auditor to resolve general problems. Having asked "Do you have a present-time problem?" he would try to locate it and work it out according to what Hubbard labeled a situation's "intention," and its "counter-intention." As Gary put it, "What Hubbard really gets involved with in terms of problems and present-time problems he calls desensitizing problems."
To become a proficient auditor is not merely a question of
140 SCIENTOLOGY
absorbing techniques. Says Minister Thomas, "It takes a great deal of training. To be a highest level graduate auditor takes, oh, probably between six months and a year of intensive training. And by intensive training I mean full-time training, as much as six to ten hours a day. It's comparable to several years of college, I would say, in terms of hours."
As you as a student auditor progress up through the levels, listening to lectures and taking courses and becoming first a Hubbard Apprentice Scientologist, then a Hubbard Qualified Scientologist, then a Hubbard Recognized Scientologist, then a Hubbard Trained Scientologist, then a Hubbard Certified Auditor, then a Hubbard Professional Auditor, then a Hubbard Advanced Auditor, then a Hubbard Validated Auditor, then a Hubbard Senior Scientologist, and finally, at the same time as achieving *clear*, a Hubbard Graduate Auditor, you become more and more familiar with the many drills and intricacies of operating the E-Meter.
The first few sessions involve simple familiarization, such as simply touching the meter and then letting it go. You learn all the knobs and controls, how to calibrate, how to set it up on a table, how to squeeze the cans and thus how to direct a future *preclear* to squeeze the cans, and how to read the tone arm. A "read" on the meter is anything which shows up within a tenth of a second of a question having been asked. As you progress, you learn the various needle actions, each with a different name: "Theta bop," "Rock slam," "Free needle," "Rocket read," "Tick," and others, such as "Stuck," "Null," "Speeded rise," "Slowed rise," and "Stop." To familiarize you with reading the meter, a list called the "Preclear Origination Sheet" is used. You hold the cans, watch the meter, and read off this list which presumably duplicates most of the standard responses you will hear from a *preclear*. "I have a pain in my stomach." "WOW - I didn't know that before." "This processing is worth the fee." "OUCH, OH OUCH." "Your eyes stink." And about one hundred others.
You then learn what causes a "read" on a meter, and how
TECHNIQUES, DRILLS, AND PROCESSES 141
that "read" is "cleaned." "Cleaning" a read means locating its source. The exercise uses a particular passage from a book which creates a small "read," or "tick." The passage is reread until the one source of the "tick" is isolated and the "tick" itself is precisely duplicated.
Isolating dates is made more sophisticated in a drill called Track Dating. There are no set commands, but any date within hundreds of trillions of years can be set, beginning with round numbers such as "150 billion trillion years ago." This is located, using questions to indicate the "order of magnitude" of the date: seconds, minutes, days, years, tens of thousands of years...short of ad infinitum. "The last step of this drill," according to *The Book of E-Meter Drills*, which has been compiled by Mary Sue Hubbard, "the coach writes down a full date like this: *56,276,345,829,100 years ago, 315 days, 42 hours, 15 minutes, and 10 seconds*." Using a "greater-than lesser-than" technique, you're supposed eventually to hit the date on the button.
You learn to differentiate "reads" of varying magnitudes by using prepared assessment lists on various subjects: "What is your favorite dog? Which tree do you like the best? Which fruit tastes the best?" etc., each question followed by a long list of fruits, trees, or dogs, each with its own "read." Gary Watkins explains applying this technique in actual auditing. "You found a goal by reading off a list of goals - the list is a list of lifetime goals prepared by that person - and you got a particular read on a goal. You found their goal, and their goal is to be a fish. So you've got this list and you say 'Who or What would want to be a fish?' because you want to find an Identity Terminal. A terminal or identity that they have assumed or borrowed from regularly in order to achieve that goal, or the identity they're trying to create all the time to achieve that goal. So you would say - you don't know which one it is - you say, 'Who or What would want to be a fish?' and you have a list." The person answers. "'Good. Who or What would want to be a fish?' 'A fish.' 'Good. Who or What would
142 SCIENTOLOGY
want to be a fish?' 'Well, a turtle.' 'Good. 'Who or What would want to be a fish?' 'Well, an octopus.' Fine. So you have this whole list, it's on this list somewhere, and it's got a particular kind of read. The right identity has what you call a Rocket Read that goes Pshoow! You read the question and the needles floating this way -" Gary holds a stiff palm up and then allows it the slightest, smooth undulation "- and 'Who or What would want to be a fish?' and they say, 'A turtle,' and Ptchui!" His hand swings down to one side like a lunging needle sucked to earth. "It takes off and then comes right back up." The point of the student using the assessment list is that he learns to know when that "read" has occurred. Such training can continue for many many hours. Says Gary, "You have to assess a list: 'Apples. Pears. Peaches. Sharks. Octopuses. Turtles,'- you're watching the meter while you're doing this. 'Apples. Peaches. Pears....' You're not paying any attention to the person, couldn't care less, they're there as a convenience. You don't ignore them, but it's the 'reads' they produce which you're interested in." Where this process would be used would be at CLASS III, Auditing by List, what Gary calls "a very soft process."
But Auditing by List is important both in Academy Training and in Straight Processing. If you're receiving straight processing you may be asked, at almost any level, a general question such as: "Who might want to harm *blank*?" blank being an object, place, or person. And then you would be asked a list of a hundred items, each of which would match with something or someone who might want to harm that object, place, or person. The object which might be harmed is located, and then the "Who" of the question is located.
All of these drills and processes bring you closer to handling L. Ron Hubbard's predetermined concepts of what does or does not exist, with facility. *Power processing*, which is Grade V-VA, is based on mental manipulation of simple questions, as for example in the first part of Grade V, where one might be asked "What is no-source?" In the second part of V there
TECHNIQUES, DRILLS, AND PROCESSES 143
would be two questions: "What exists?" "What have you done about it?" In Grade V-VA, you run names of people, and it can go on endlessly, as you, the *preclear*, locate a name which produces a "read" on the meter. The reason for the "read" is discovered and whatever "charge" there is on that name is flattened, as you are made to realize how you were victimized by the person in question, and how you victimized that person in return. If this appears somehow simplistic, you must remember that by Grade V-VA you know exactly what is being asked; Scientology has become a living language and the structure of existence as seen by Scientology is firmly established. To protect you from outside influences, when you take *power processes*, you wear a small tag pinned to your clothing: "I Am On Power Processes," it reads. "Please Do Not Ask Me Questions, Audit Me, or Discuss My Case With Me." The process itself can be run for fifteen minutes or fifteen days.
Grade VI, or solo, developed from Hubbard's theories about the existence of past goals, how they are implanted, and how we can free ourselves from their negative influences. Working in terms of goals, he evolved something called a Line Plot. On one side he wrote Terminal, which would represent what you wished to be. On the other side he wrote Opposition Terminal, which would be anything that might make it difficult for you to achieve your goal. This plotting looked something like this:
OPPOSITION
TERMINAL TERMINAL
(GOAL) TO BE A
DOCTOR \
\
\
\
\ SICK PEOPLE
/
/
/
/
/
DRUGGIST \
\
\
\
\ SNAKE OIL SALES-
/ MAN
/
/
/
/
A POLICEMAN \
\
\
\
\ A THIEF
144 SCIENTOLOGY
If your goal was to be a doctor, an opposition goal would be sick people - their existence would represent an opposition to becoming a doctor - and they, in turn, would be opposed by the existence of a druggist who might sell drugs which would cure them. The druggist, in turn, would be opposed by the snake oil salesman, who would be opposed by a policeman, who would be opposed by a thief. *Und so veiter*.
From this, Hubbard deduced that the accurate plotting must be done in terms of creation and destruction, based on his belief that in a cycle of action everything is an act of creation, and thus the creation of a negative was equal to the destruction of a positive, in other words, the negation of a negation. For the process itself, *solo*, you, the *preclear*, use a special E-Meter with a window in it so that you can look through it and see what you are writing and at the same time observe the needle and see when you have successfully "Blown Off" mass - the Mass of Goals-Problems-Mass. The Line Plot itself might look something like this as you work down it:
TO CREATE YOU DESTROY UN-UNDERSTANDINGNESS UNDERSTANDING UN-INTELLIGENCENESS INTELLIGENCE
Once you have completed and been Released in Grade VI, *solo*, you are ready to go on to Grade VII, the achievement of *clear*. It is virtually impossible to know exactly how somebody makes *clear* right now because the techniques in Scientology change so often. Gary Watkins told me that at one time new bulletins from Hubbard were coming in as often as once a week, while the longest any particular process or technique stayed around was five months. If you ask why such constant change didn't confuse people, didn't and doesn't make them suspicious, I can only say that I found it did at times confuse them, but that all this new data was coming in, hot off the Telex wires, and out-weighed the confusion; it was proof that
TECHNIQUES, DRILLS, AND PROCESSES 145
L. Ron Hubbard - wherever he might be - was working away to perfect every aspect of Scientology, purifying the techniques, making them better and better. As far as going *clear* is concerned, I know that you can make it either *solo* or with an auditor; someone cleared recently on a list of twenty questions, being absolutely *clear* on every one of them. If the definition of a Release is, as Gary put it, "being someone who knows at this point that they're not going to get any worse in life; they've reached a certain level of awareness and ability and they'll never get worse," then a *clear* must be someone who has achieved Release - I don't think it's wrong to use the word Insight for Release - in every aspect of his MEST life. My conclusions are that the *clear* processes themselves are probably amalgamations of all the preceding techniques, taken to the point where you can demonstrate not only control over communications, over the source of problems, the achievement of relief, the expression of Freedom, the knowing of Ability, and the possession of Power, but the management of negations as well, which is the beginning of those processes designed to lead to something known as exteriorization - what we usually call dissociation, a sense of total separation from your body. The levels of these processes are called the O.T. Levels, the grades of *operating thetans*.
Before I get into the O.T. Levels, I should digress to explain something which will help in understanding this concept of exteriorization, as well as the notions of negating which are so important to Scientology.
Hubbard had at one time called the structuring of the Line Plot used in *solo*, R6EW, for Route 6 End Words. The Scientology dictionary defines this as words which create "locks, words that are not in the GPM's but...are close in meaning to significances that are part of the GPM's. They keep large parts of the Reactive Mind in restimulation." Running this process had at one time been the door to *clear*: Understanding-Nix-understanding; Communication-Nix-Communication.
146 SCIENTOLOGY
Apparently John McMasters, the world's first *clear*, cleared on this very process, the negation of negations of negations, breaking through to envision the entire structure of existence precisely as L. Ron Hubbard had defined it, seeing this enormous, pomegranate-like mass, joined by bonds of agreements, a mass of goals held together within a person and forcing him to automatically negate reality without knowing what he was doing. R6EW was the process which unlocked those bonds and finally, by looking at both sides of the Graph - CREATE and DESTROY - demonstrating that only by negating a negation can one finally be *clear* and Totally Free.
The structured progression in Scientology processing and training only appeared in 1965. Before that there were various levels of attainment, but they were not codified to the extent of being defined as preceding one another in strict fashion. The reason for the structure was the discovery that running a person on a process designed for someone on a lower level was dangerous. Gary Watkins was one of the auditors who, as he explained, discovered "that if you had raised a person's ability and awareness to a certain point and then ran them on a lower level process, you did them in, and ran them back down." He found this out by working with a woman who, until 1958, had been extremely successful in business and in Scientology. She was being run on some of Hubbard's Creative Processes when her processing was changed. Says Gary, "Rather than running her on that, Hubbard abandoned that line of processing and some nut at some center ran her on a particular process called O.W. - General O.W., which means Overt Withhold: 'What have you done? What have you withheld?' - which that woman needed like a... At any rate she was run on this for *weeks*. It drove her down, it started her on a downhill trend that ran until the winter of 1965." The woman began to drink, her marriage broke up, and she lost her job. Quite simply, she could not absorb the new insights and concepts she had been shifted onto, and it affected her
TECHNIQUES, DRILLS, AND PROCESSES 147
much the same way a behavioral psychologist affects a rat in a maze when he wants to drive it crazy: he takes the existing "logic" of the rat's existence and replaces it with another "logic" or pattern or whatever you want to call it. Whatever it is, it is too much for the tortured animal to absorb, and it goes nuts. The woman, because she was a far more complex mechanism, did not quite go nuts, but she was damn close to it when Gary set out to discover what was wrong with her. "I said, 'Let's find out when the trouble started,' and we traced it back and we found it was in 1958. I notified the Org, and I said, 'This is critical!' They teletyped the information to Ron and it came out in a Bulletin two weeks later. And at that point he designed this chart -" the Gradation Chart "- saying nobody who had reached a certain level could be run at a lower level."
The Gradation Chart made its appearance in May of 1965. A few days later, in an HCO Policy Letter, Hubbard directed that 'Persons who have attained Release may not thereafter be audited on any processes except Assists, By Passed Charge Assessments, Present Time Problems and Missed Withholds ['What have you done? What have you withheld?'] until they are trained up to Level VI and started on R6 processes.... The next action for a person who has attained Release is to take the next Course in Scientology and move on through to Clear properly. This is shown on the Gradation Chart.... There is no other way to Clear." The policy letter strikes me as being as close as Hubbard ever came to admitting that Scientology techniques advanced through nothing less than trial and error which, when you are dealing with people, is not the best way to reassure them that you always know what you are doing.
It took Gary a long time to locate the source of the woman's trouble. "She came," he recalls, "and I let her talk for a while. We cleaned up some things, some auditing errors that had been made....There were specific ways to clean up auditing
148 SCIENTOLOGY
errors. There were two ways to do it. *Really* the way to do it is to get the person to start talking, and when they hit it, they'd know. And they'd get so upset, *you'd* know. That would be the main thing, you'd say to yourself, 'Yes, I've found the trouble.' And then say, to them, 'Could you tell me a little more about *that*?' At the same time, by watching the meter, you would know because it would start flying all over the place. Or it would get stuck. One or the other."
The woman had been run on an Exteriorization Process called Grand Tour, described in *The Creation of Human Ability*. It is defined as instructing the *preclear* to move to different points in space, to which Hubbard adds, "In the Grand Tour it is more important for the preclear to locate and occupy exact locations in space and in objects than it is for him to examine the surrounding areas." The woman, who had had no difficulty with the process, was being told to occupy several spaces, among them the top of the Empire State Building and the top of the George Washington Bridge. When she was taken off this process, she fell apart. Today, apparently free of Scientology, she is, according to Gary, "doing all right." More he could not tell me.
So that you don't think exteriorization is something like simply "imagining" yourself to be somewhere - the places the woman was told to occupy were chosen arbitrarily, it didn't matter where she was told to be - look at it this way: You physically occupy a particular place, and then you go "out of" yourself, knowing full well that you are still in your original place, and "be" elsewhere. It doesn't have to be far away. One girl told me, with an expression of small rapture, how she had come into do Grade IV, and while she was doing it, suddenly "exteriorized." "I suddenly *saw* myself, the whole bit, sitting in that room. I was watching myself do Grade IV and I knew it was me there doing it." She shivered at this point, but it was a shiver of excitement. I mentioned before that exteriorization could be called dissociation, which is a splitting off of
TECHNIQUES, DRILLS, AND PROCESSES 149
certain mental processes from the main body of consciousness. When you dissociate, you do see yourself as if from the outside. It is not just the power of suggestion.
Though the Creative Processes did not seem to work well with everyone, Hubbard was intrigued by their potential and never abandoned them completely. As Gary explained it to me, "Most people weren't up to it. He [Hubbard] found it was helpful to a point, but he couldn't stabilize a case at that level. He would help them up to fantastic levels of ability, but he had tremendous problems. He could not stabilize a case at the level he could help them achieve. People could create actions, and *do* things that were out of accord with their responsibility level."* The challenge was to raise the responsibility level. With time, as the Grades of Release were further developed, that responsibility level was achieved. In 1968, Hubbard announced what he called "100 Percent Gains Attainable by Standard Tech." Each and every process now works exactly as it is defined. The data used is stable. Everything works. The refinement and redefinition of the early Creative Processes had weeded out the failures, while the more esoteric techniques were now ready to be used. It is these which have now been restructured into the levels above *clear*, the Grades of *operating thetan*.
I do not know exactly what goes on above *clear*. The levels there are designated O.T. (*operating thetan*) levels, and there are eight of them, all available at a special 5 percent discount fee of $2,850. Scientology brochures explain that O.T. I is a step above *clear*, and in O.T. II "a being further expands, regains abilities and becomes ready for O.T. III." In O.T. III, "the student goes through the 'Wall of Fire' that no one could even approach without resultant sickness and death before L. Ron
* As an example, Gary suggested a brilliant salesman, silver-tongued and immensely persuasive, who can *sell* you a million dollars worth of goods, but then cannot deliver because he has not worked up to the million-dollar level in terms of stocking and supplying.
150 SCIENTOLOGY
Hubbard found the way for you to go through safely and reach the other side, shining and free from the curtain of degradation that has hung like a poisonous veil over this planet." What Hubbard sees to be the "Wall of Fire," I don't know. I asked Gary Watkins if he could explain which abilities Hubbard would be perfecting at the O.T. levels. "They could be anything," he said. "Reading people's minds, communicating without verbal sounds, lifting objects at will, the ability to exteriorize and be at any point on the planet at your own decision, without negating your responsibility for having a body - if you ask me now I can tell you if it's raining in Washington - that type of thing." Gary rejected actually *doing* any of these things as cheap parlor tricks. When I pressed him on what a person would do with such super-abilities, he explained that it was suddenly realizing you *could* do them which was important, an explanation which coincides with Scientology's definition of the O.T. V Course: "Gradient scale drills to handle matter, energy, space and time from outside your body," and the O.T. VII Course where "one confronts at source the origination of thought and progresses up to realms wherein is revealed the total truths of spiritual existence and power."
Gary explained this more prosaically. "The ability to have full awareness in present time," is how he put it, "knowingly, so that you knew what was going on. You could walk into a room and be fully aware of eleven conversations at the same time and walk around and call people by name and contribute to the conversations at the right moment. A tremendous ability to command others, for worthwhile purposes, with affinity, in an enjoyable manner; have people do as you would have them do. Tremendous auditing ability in all counseling and perceptive abilities. The ability not to be subject, emotionally, to people who are victimizing themselves as a solution to life. Also, to destroy an object at will if you wanted." As to what processes are being used, Gary says, "If it is an extension of
TECHNIQUES, DRILLS, AND PROCESSES 151
what I know they're doing to that point then it would be helping a person clear up their resistance to abilities which they have -" those abilities he mentioned before.
Once a person has become *clear* and has learned to negate negations, there are still, as Gary put it, "many areas of life which he doesn't want to confront and is unwilling to do." He is unwilling, at that point, to steal - the concept of eradicating resistances is something within his capacity, "but he does not like stealing in the actual world." Hubbard, at these levels, does not say there are things people dislike, he simply says that there "is something they *cannot* do. Then," Gary continues, explaining how Hubbard might structure the advanced techniques on the O.T. levels, "you have to raise your ability to confront What Is, and your willingness to be Cause over What Is, therefore get the idea of somebody stealing something therefore get the idea of stealing something. And the person says, 'Yes, I could have that command.' Boom! What else don't you like, what Effect in life would you be unwilling to be Cause over?"
Jack Horner defined it somewhat more specifically. "The Level VI materials -" the O.T. levels progress from I through VIII, "- leave a person in the position where he is pretty well in control of his own existence, his own life. One of the things about clear is that you realize you are surrounded by people still reacting to their own environment, who are not clear. There's not much game when you've got to play it alone. So the O.T. techniques go into the control and handling of the other dynamics." What Horner thinks they're using are the Route I exteriorization techniques from Hubbard's book *The Creation of Human Ability*, for example R1-4, which is "be three feet back of your head." Other processes in this Route direct the person to "mock up" things and then either destroy them or sustain them. By "mock up," Scientology means "a mental model, construction or picture created by a *thetan*".
One exteriorization process which is only whispered about,
152 SCIENTOLOGY
but which everybody seems to know about, is called R2-.45, and is one of the 75 Route 2 processes also discussed in *The Creation of Human Ability*. No description accompanies its mention in the book. Only a small note: AN ENORMOUSLY EFFECTIVE PROCESS FOR EXTERIORIZATION BUT ITS USE IS FROWNED UPON BY THIS SOCIETY AT THIS TIME. What the process stands for, I was told, is R2-.45, the .45 being a .45 pistol. Hubbard is said to have marched out onto center stage at one of the Scientology congresses in Washington, D.C., in the late fifties, pulled out a .45 loaded with blanks, fired it into the audience, and announced to the stunned assemblage, "I just thought you'd like to see what R2-.45 looks like!" What no one is willing to say out loud is that this may be one of the advanced processes being taught somewhere at the present time.