It’s one thing to encounter the strange when you’re expecting the normal, it’s another thing altogether to encounter the strange when you’re expecting the strange...the latter of which is exactly what happened when Christa and I sat down with Lucy (an affectionate sobriquet) in the downtown Minneapolis church of Scientology.
Still a bit punchy (or maybe spooked is a better word) from agreeing to be hooked up to the notorious e-meter and getting zapped with a modicum of electricity, I was eager to move on to the less physical portion of our evening.
The illustrious and inimitable e-meter:
(note: These are not my real hands)
We sat down at a spartan wooden table near the window. For the record
Lucy was very friendly. We liked her. She was chatty, maternal, warm, professional and maybe a bit broken: She had the sad eyes of
Paul McCartney.
All in all I spoke with Lucy for around forty minutes. My questions ran the gamut: We covered everything from Tom Cruise to pharmaceutical companies to imported beer to Plato’s chariot metaphor; suffice it to say much of what we talked about falls outside the sphere of this blog. Yet with respect to the basics of Scientology, here’s what Lucy told me.
The crux of what Lucy told me is this: There are two parts to our minds: the analytical mind and the reactive mind. Our analytical mind is our mind as it was meant to function—our pleasant memories, mathematical capacities, etc. We have many categories in this analytical mind (close to eighty, she said) and they all have different functions. The “reactive” mind is the part of us that stores all of our negative experences, almost visually stored like a camcorder. Every negative thought that we have had in our lives, every embarrasing experience, every fear, every heartbreak is stored in our reactive minds, most of them unconscious. The purpose of “auditing” (which is a counseling type of procedure of self-discovery that is clearly laid out in Dianetics) is to help us uncover these “engrams” (i.e. negative thoughts) and to gain a “win,” which would be a complete removal of the specific engram. An auditor functions much like a cabinet file retriever, helping the auditee retrieve the engrams from their files. The upshot is that the auditor can in essence zap these bad memories, which they do by saying the word “cancel” at the end of each auditing session. Many points of contact with hypnosis (my comparison, not hers)...
When I asked Lucy what “auditing had done for her,” she told me that over twenty years ago her daughter had severe allergies, and auditing helped her daughter overcome it. This was the chief reason for Lucy’s becoming a scientologist thirty years ago.
Switching gears a bit, my eschatalogical curiousity got the better of me.
“What happens to us when we die?” I asked Lucy. “Does Scientology believe in a heaven or a hell?”
“You can go wherever you want to go,” said Lucy.
“Really?”
“Absolutely. If you want to go to heaven, you can. If you want to go to hell, then you have that option as well.”
I paused a bit before I asked my next question, searching for the right tone (I didn’t want to come across as smarty-pants) I asked the somewhat obvious: “With all respect, why would anyone want to go to hell?”
“Oh, you don’t have to,” she said. “That’s the beauty of it. Read Dianetics, it’ll explain everything.”
I looked over at the stone bust of L. Ron Hubbard, and I swear I saw it wink.
(note: Not L. Ron Hubbard)
“Would you like to watch a video?” Lucy asked us.
"Sure."
After all, what’s a video after being zapped by an electric Tonka Toy????
Stay tuned for the rest of the story…
Comments