One Day in 1975
Article by Haamam
One day in 1975, when he was twenty-two, Haggis was walking to a record store. When he arrived at the corner of Dundas and Waterloo Streets, a young man pressed a book into his hands. "You have a mind," the man said. "This is the owner's manual." The man, whose name was Jim Logan, added, "Give me two dollars." The book was "Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health," by L. Ron Hubbard, which was published in 1950. By the time Haggis began reading it, "Dianetics" had sold about two and a half million copies. Today, according to the church, that figure has reached more than twenty-one million.
Haggis opened the book and saw a page stamped with the words "Church of Scientology."
"Take me there," Haggis said to Logan.
Haggis had heard about Scientology a couple of months earlier, from a friend who had called it a cult. The thought that he might be entering a cult didn't bother him. In fact, he said, "it drew my interest. I tend to run toward things I don't understand." When he arrived at the church's headquarters, he recalled, "it didn't look like a cult. Two guys in a small office above Woolworth's."
At the time, Haggis and Gettas were having arguments; the Scientologists told him that taking church courses would improve the relationship. "It was pitched to me as applied philosophy," Haggis says. He and Gettas took a course together and, shortly afterward, became Hubbard Qualified Scientologists, one of the first levels in what the church calls the Bridge to Total Freedom.
The Church of Scientology says that its purpose is to transform individual lives and the world. "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 wrote. Scientology postulates that every person is a Thetan--an immortal spiritual being that lives through countless lifetimes. Scientologists believe that Hubbard discovered the fundame! ntal tru ths of existence, and they revere him as "the source" of the religion. Hubbard's writings offer a "technology" of spiritual advancement and self-betterment that provides "the means to attain true spiritual freedom and immortality." A church publication declares, "Scientology works 100 percent of the time when it is properly applied to a person who sincerely desires to improve his life." Proof of this efficacy, the church says, can be measured by the accomplishments of its adherents. "As Scientologists in all walks of life will attest, they have enjoyed greater success in their relationships, family life, jobs and professions. They take an active, vital role in life and leading roles in their communities. And participation in Scientology brings to many a broader social consciousness, manifested through meaningful contribution to charitable and social reform activities."
In 1955, a year after the church's founding, an affiliated publication urged Scientologists to cultivate celebrities: "It is obvious what would happen to Scientology if prime communicators benefitting from it would mention it." At the end of the sixties, the church established its first Celebrity Centre, in Hollywood. (There are now satellites in Paris, Vienna, Düsseldorf, Munich, Florence, London, New York, Las Vegas, and Nashville.) Over the next decade, Scientology became a potent force in Hollywood. In many respects, Haggis was typical of the recruits from that era, at least among those in the entertainment business. Many of them were young and had quit school in order to follow their dreams, but they were also smart and ambitious. The actress Kirstie Alley, for example, left the University of Kansas in 1970, during her sophomore year, to get married. Scientology, she says, helped her lose her craving for cocaine. "Without Scientology, I would be dead," she has said.
In 1975, the year that Haggis became a Scientologist, John Travolta, a high-school dropout, was making his first movie, "The Devil's Rain," in Durango, Mexico! , when a n actress on the set gave him a copy of "Dianetics." "My career immediately took off," he told a church publication. "Scientology put me into the big time." The testimonials of such celebrities have attracted many curious seekers. In Variety, Scientology has advertised courses promising to help aspiring actors "make it in the industry."
One of those actors, Josh Brolin, told me that, in a "moment of real desperation," he visited the Celebrity Centre and received "auditing"--spiritual counselling. He quickly decided that Scientology wasn't for him. But he still wonders what the religion does for celebrities like Cruise and Travolta: "Each has a good head on his shoulders, they make great business decisions, they seem to have wonderful families. Is that because they were helped by Scientology?" This is the question that makes celebrities so crucial to the religion. And, clearly, there must be something rewarding if such notable people lend their names to a belief system that is widely scorned.
Brolin says that he once witnessed John Travolta practicing Scientology. Brolin was at a dinner party in Los Angeles with Travolta and Marlon Brando. Brando arrived with a cut on his leg, and explained that he had injured himself while helping a stranded motorist on the Pacific Coast Highway. He was in pain. Travolta offered to help, saying that he had just reached a new level in Scientology. Travolta touched Brando's leg and Brando closed his eyes. "I watched this process going on--it was very physical," Brolin recalls. "I was thinking, This is really fucking bizarre! Then, after ten minutes, Brando opens his eyes and says, 'That really helped. I actually feel different!' " (Travolta, through a lawyer, called this account "pure fabrication.")
Many Hollywood actors were drawn into the church by a friend or by reading "Dianetics"; a surprising number of them, though, came through the Beverly Hills Playhouse. For decades, the resident acting coach there was Milton Katselas, and he taught hundreds of f! uture st ars, including Ted Danson, Michelle Pfeiffer, and George Clooney. "Most of Hollywood went through that class," Anne Archer told me. In 1974, two years after her son Tommy Davis was born, she began studying with Katselas. She was a young mother in a dissolving marriage, coming off a television series ("Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice") that had been cancelled after one season. Katselas had a transformative effect. She recalled discussions "about life, people, and behavior," and said that Katselas "said some things in class that were really smart." Some of the other students told her that Katselas was a Scientologist, so she began the Life Repair program at the Celebrity Centre. "I went two or three times a week, probably for a couple of weeks," she said. "I remember walking out of the building and walking down the street toward my car and I felt like my feet were not touching the ground. And I said to myself, 'My God, this is the happiest I've ever been in my entire life. I've finally found something that works.' " She added, "Life didn't seem so hard anymore. I was back in the driver's seat."
Jim Gordon, a veteran police officer in Los Angeles, and also an aspiring actor, spent ten years at the Playhouse, starting in 1990. He told me that Scientology "recruited a ton of kids out of that school." Like Scientology, the Playhouse presented a strict hierarchy of study; under Katselas's tutelage, students graduated from one level to the next. As Gordon advanced within the Playhouse, he began recognizing many students from the roles they were getting in Hollywood. "You see a lot of people you know from TV," Gordon says. He began feeling the pull of the church. "When you started off, they weren't really pushing it, but as you progressed through the Playhouse's levels Scientology became more of a focus," he told me. After a few years, he joined. Like the courses at the Playhouse, Scientology offered actors a method that they could apply to both their lives and their careers.
Not long after Gord! on becam e a Scientologist, he was asked to serve as an "ethics officer" at the Playhouse, monitoring the progress of other students and counselling those who were having trouble. He was good at pinpointing students who were struggling. "It's almost like picking out the wounded chicks," he says. He sometimes urged a student to meet with the senior ethics officer at the Playhouse, a Scientologist who often recommended courses at the Celebrity Centre. "My job was to keep the students active and make sure they were not being suppressed," Gordon says. In the rhetoric of Scientology, "suppressive persons"--or S.P.s--block an individual's spiritual progress. Implicitly, the message to the students was that success awaited them if only they could sweep away the impediments to stardom, including S.P.s. Katselas received a ten-per-cent commission from the church on the money contributed by his students.
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