Ruthless (5 page)

One day David was in class when an announcement came over the speaker above the blackboard: “David Miscavige, please come to the principal's office.” He was
confused—he
wasn't in any trouble that he knew of. He went to the office, and I was standing there with the principal, who said, “David, you are excused from school today. Your father is taking you to see a Scientologist to handle your asthma. So, you're excused.”

I drove him down to Frank Ogle's cafeteria and we walked in. I introduced
nine-year
-old
David to Frank, told him about the asthma, and asked if he could do anything to help my son. I had heard about auditing but had never received any myself, but I was willing to try anything to get rid of David's asthma. I had to give him a chance, some hope. Maybe this will work, I thought, even though I had no idea what auditing was. Frank looked at me and confidently said, “Sure.” He then took David into a back office and closed the door.

I sat down in the cafeteria and let my thoughts wander.

Forty-five
minutes later, David walked out and he looked like a totally different person.

“My asthma's gone!” he declared. “It's gone!”

He was radiant. He looked confident. He was cheerful. I actually saw all those things at that moment. Something of significance had taken place in the space of 45 minutes.

That was the end of David's asthma. Throughout the rest of his childhood, he never again had a serious
attack—some
minor ones, yes, but never where he was gasping and couldn't breathe. It truly was an amazing occurrence, a miracle actually, considering how asthma had affected him so horribly. Nothing we had tried up to that
point—the
adrenaline shots, cold showers, inhalers, bench presses in the
garage—had
given David the confidence that something useful was being done to handle his asthma for the rest of his
life—nothing
until that auditing session with Frank Ogle.

Years later, I asked David what Frank did that day and he said, “Creative processing.” That was an early development in Scientology, based on the theory that we create a lot of our own difficulties but that these difficulties can be overcome by encouraging the individual to
re-create
the difficulty mentally. Using his own creative energies, the person creates the condition, problem, situation, or whatever is being addressed. In many cases, doing so thoroughly enough will bring about a cessation or lessening of whatever is bothering the individual. I'd had a personal experience of that when I gave my headache to the person in the mirror, and my headache totally went away. That had made me wonder whether the same thing could happen with David's asthma and, sure enough, it did. Something had definitely, definitely, definitely
worked.

The whole family could tell that it had made a big impression on David. That was
the
turning point in his young life. He decided, “This is
it!
This is valuable.”

Say what you will, but there was a definite, observable change in David's health in regard to asthma. For all intents and purposes, as far as David was concerned, he was cured. And it stayed that way for years.

Imagine for a moment that you had a serious physical ailment such as David's
asthma—or
any number of debilitating
conditions—and
someone sat you down and through simple mental exercises your condition disappeared. What kind of impression would that make on you? It would literally be life changing. That is what happened to David that day, and it determined the direction his life would take.

Seven

Getting in Deeper

Meanwhile, Loretta and I were still having marital problems. Loretta insisted that we see our internist to find out if he might be able to help. A psychiatrist two doors down from his office did marriage counseling, so our doctor arranged an appointment for us with him. We told him our story, and he gave me tranquilizers to take. We went home and I took one. Tranquilizers are supposed to calm you down, but these had the opposite effect on me. I became intensely nervous and jittery, to a degree I had never experienced before. I flushed the rest of the tranquilizers down the toilet. “I am never going to talk to that guy again as long as I live,” I swore.

Needless to say, our problems continued. Loretta said, “We've got to get help. Let's go back to the psychiatrist.”

“No way,” I said. “Let's go see Frank Ogle. Maybe he can help us with auditing.” Basically, auditing is talk therapy as practiced since the days of Freud, though a Scientologist would object to that comparison. Still, the basic goal of both psychotherapy and Scientology auditing is to help a person resolve issues by talking about them. A therapist helps the patient stay on track to uncover the source of the problem; a Scientology practitioner guides the person being audited to a resolution of whatever the issue is.

Frank had a house out in the country, and he had grown a beard since the last time I saw him. I thought it was an effort to make himself look like Jesus.

“Frank, we need some help,” I said.

“Okay, have a seat on that couch over there,” he replied. We sat down on the couch. “Okay, I am going to do some processing on you. Now, Ron, in spite of what Loretta has done, can you have her?” (Meaning, I guess, could I forgive her.)

“Yes.”

“Thank you. Loretta, in spite of what Ron has done, can you have him?”

“No!” Loretta did not have much forgiveness in her heart for me.

It went on like this for a while. Meanwhile, two chiropractors had come to Frank for some instruction, and they were sitting on another couch observing Frank audit Loretta and me. The chiropractors were murmuring to one another—“Oh, yeah, I see what he is doing, blah, blah, blah”—as Frank was auditing us.

At one point Frank said to us, “Just a second,” and he turned to the chiropractors and said, “Listen, when I'm auditing, could you two please shut the hell up?”

We carried on for a while longer until Frank said, “Okay, this isn't working. Come over here. I'm going to put you on an
E-meter
.”

The
E-meter
is an electronic device that Scientology practitioners use in auditing. The person being audited holds electrodes, and the
E-meter
reacts to changes in a tiny flow of electricity (around half a volt coming from the meter's battery) through a person's body. The theory is that mental energies influence the meter's tiny current, and these effects show up on the needle dial of the meter and are useful to the practitioner. (Some people who have never looked at an
E-meter
assert that the meter reacts to sweat on the person's hands. Of course, none of those people have ever seen some of the wild needle actions and patterns that occur during auditing, which could not possibly be caused by sweating hands. No way.) He put Loretta on the meter, meaning he turned the meter on and had her grab hold of two tin cans that served as electrodes. The meter showed that she had a high reading, that is, she was putting up a lot of resistance to the tiny current in the meter. Her reading was about 5.0. Then he put me on the meter and my reading was 1.5. In my ignorance, I immediately thought back to a chart I had seen in his cafeteria in Woodbury that showed the different levels of emotions. The level of 1.5 was pretty low on the chart, and I said to Frank, “Wait, 1.5, that's close to death, isn't it?”

“You said it, not me,” was Frank's reply. He led me to believe that I was realizing I was close to death! “Some people are stuck in their head and can't get out. Some people are stuck outside of their head and can't get in. You're stuck inside your head and can't get out. That means you are in the personality of some dead person. Now, who do you think that could be?”

“I don't know. Aunt Stella? No, she's still living. My aunt Mary? No.”

“Okay,” Frank said, “Just try to be outside in that car,” and he gestured to a car we could see through the window.

I tried but couldn't do it. “Aw, jeez, I can't do it. Man, I need a drink right now.”

So Frank got a bottle of scotch and poured me a drink. Then he told me firmly, “You need auditing. I'm going to send you to somebody who's a
real
Scientologist. These people have experienced death and come back.”

He gave me a name and phone number and we left. Later, Loretta called Frank and he told her, “Ron better get some auditing because he's either going to kill somebody or he's going to rob a bank,” and she believed him!

Anyone familiar with Scientology knows that what took place that day at Frank's was strictly the Keystone Kops version. Regardless, that's how we got started.

The next day I went down to Norm Muller's Scientology center in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, and said, “I want some auditing.” Norm Muller was from New Zealand and had been a practicing hypnotist before he became interested in Scientology. He had studied under L. Ron Hubbard in England and then moved to the United States and opened his center in Cherry Hill. I got to know Norm pretty well, and he used to tell me about his association with Hubbard, which was interesting to me. “Hubbard used to tell me to go into an auditing session and do ‘A' on the person and that ‘B' would happen if I did,” Norm once told me, “and every time I did so, things happened just like he predicted. That gave me faith in what he had to say.”

So both Loretta and I began to receive auditing. In fact, I got the whole family involved. Loretta and I would separately receive our individual auditing sessions, and the kids would do the communication drills I mentioned earlier. My wife and I seemed to have different reasons for being involved in Scientology. I was having fun, and it seemed I became more rambunctious as I received more auditing. Loretta seemed to be going along for the ride to see if it would make me a better person in her eyes. That was her main interest. In her view, I was the problem in the marriage, so it was good that I was getting the auditing. I suppose she was just going through the motions. Still, the family dynamics changed. We developed a common purpose, to learn more about Scientology. The boys were more interested than the girls, I'd say, but everyone was now involved.

My own life continued to improve as I did more Scientology. I read every book Hubbard wrote and listened to many, many of his lectures. I received Scientology auditing, and from what I learned of the philosophy in my studies and what I experienced subjectively from auditing, I gained a certainty that there was a lot of value in the subject.

In studying what LRH wrote and said, I found he was making many valid points about life, how it worked and what to do to improve things. The more I absorbed, the more I became tolerant of others around me, and to that degree my life improved. To my way of thinking, your ability to tolerate things around you has a lot to do with your ability to deal with them effectively.

The auditing also helped me a lot. I look at it this way: if something is going on in your life that may not be positive but you aren't really aware of it, you can't do anything about it because of your lack of awareness. In auditing, you begin to uncover these things, so you can do something about them. The major sour area of my life for years had been my arguments and fights with Loretta. Through the auditing, my attitude about the arguments shifted, and you could say that a lot of the wind went out of the sails. We still argued, but our arguments were never again as loud as before Scientology, and I never again even had the urge to strike her. I realized that facets of my personality made me react irrationally and were out of my control, and just that realization helped me deal with them better.

I was good at explaining Scientology to people. I used to keep a box with copies of Hubbard's book
Dianetics
in the trunk of my car and sold one to practically everybody I met. One day, I went into an Arthur Treacher's Fish and Chips restaurant and started talking to a guy. The next day, he showed up at a Scientology center in town, told the registrar that he wanted to do the Communication Course (a basic introductory course) and pulled out a check already made out for the $50 fee. The registrar later wrote a report saying that she suspected the man was an infiltrator since he already knew how much his course cost. I had told him the day before!

Years later, as I became more involved with the organization, I learned that in addition to the positive things I found in Scientology, other aspects, particularly in the way the organization was run, seemed absolutely worthless to me. Many of these I personally experienced and they were terrible. But that's getting ahead of the story. Those early weeks and months were a revelation.

By early 1971, I had finished all the courses and actions I could do at Norm's center, so I began making arrangements to travel to the Scientology headquarters, called St. Hill, in East Grinstead, south of London, for more advanced courses. Many people from the United States went to the Los Angeles center, but Norm Muller advised me, “Ron, go to St. Hill. Don't go to LA. You'll love England. They've got all kinds of quaint shops in town. You'll love it there.”

So that is why I went to England. And Norm was right, I loved St. Hill. That, by the way, is where I first met the great pianist Chick Corea, who was there at the time. Chick had become interested in Scientology about a year earlier than I, and we wound up in England at the same time. One day I went into the Qualifications Division of the organization, where people went to be certified after completing a course or a level of their auditing, and Chick happened to be there.

“Man,” he said to me, all bright and happy, “I just attested to Clear!”

“That's great!” I replied.

“How about a big ol' hug?” Chick said. So I gave him a hug, and that is how we met. I knew how he felt because I had just achieved the state myself and understood how great it was.

Clear
is a Scientology term with a lot of baggage because it was defined as several different things at different times. Also, it was defined as an absolute state, which contradicts one of the essential principles of Scientology, that “absolutes are unobtainable.” But basically Clear means that one has, through Scientology, rid oneself of
hang-ups
that had prohibited one from being truly oneself. One has lost the mental mechanisms that compel one to react to things unthinkingly rather than responding to them rationally. It is not that the person becomes an unfeeling automaton. Quite the contrary. A Clear is much better able to feel all of life, the good, the bad and the ugly. The Clear is less closed off to the experiences of living.

Here is how I explain it to people: You have a problem with your hand, for example. It hurts all the time. The reason it hurts all the time is because three times a day you pick up a hammer and smash your hand with it. The goal of Scientology is not to get you to a point where you can hit yourself with the hammer and it doesn't hurt
anymore—the
idea is to bring a person up to the awareness of “Hey, what the hell am I doing, hitting my hand with this hammer? No wonder it hurts all the time! I've been causing my own pain!” You throw the hammer away and that is the end of it. People, for the most part, make their own situations in life. Whatever condition you are in, you've thought yourself into that situation. Napoleon Hill, one of the first personal success gurus, says it in six words: “You become what you think about.” Long before that, Buddha said that we are the product of our thoughts. That is a central tenet of Scientology. Your father may have told you that you are no good, but he has been dead for 20 years; you are the one keeping the recording going.

At the end of the Clearing Course, I lay down to sleep one night and . . . the mental pictures and noise that had always been there when I closed my eyes were gone. Totally gone. I jumped out of bed. Wait a minute, I thought, where is the stream of pictures I used to get? They were gone. Inside, my head was totally still. It was unbelievable. But true!

Scientologists hold up L. Ron Hubbard as the originator, or source, of everything in Scientology. He himself credited many others, including Freud, as sources of inspiration. In
nineteenth-century
America something called the New Thought movement sprang up. Christian Science is probably the
best-known
surviving offshoot of the movement. Beginning in the 1880s and persisting well into the twentieth century, many books were published by the likes of Napoleon Hill, William Walker Atkinson, Charles F. Haanel, Prentice Mulford, Wallace Wattles, Perry Joseph Green, Frank Channing Haddock, Thomas Troward and, of course, Mary Baker Eddy. These writings are full of concepts that Hubbard incorporated into Scientology. Concepts like illness begins in the mind, that we are all spiritual beings and that “you are what you think, not what you think you are” are all found in writings of the day. New Age ideas, expressed, for example, in the law of attraction and the book
The Secret,
come directly from the New Thought movement. Anyone with even a rudimentary familiarity with Scientology can pick up any book from the period and find numerous parallels.

Hubbard advances the concept of the reactive mind in Dianetics, which was the precursor to Scientology. The New Thought writers called it the subconscious mind or the subjective mind, and they described it as a mind that never sleeps and records everything that you ever experience, exactly as Hubbard explained in his book
Dianetics
many years later. Another example: Hubbard declares that the dynamic principle of existence is the urge to survive, and he divides this urge into survival for self, family, group and all humanity. Will Durant's
The Story of Civilization
describes those same dynamics. Hubbard dedicated
Dianetics
to Will Durant but gave him no specific credit for that idea.