Inside Scientology - Janet Reitman [186]
"They're Scientologists," Donna whispered.
"Just wait," Mike said.
"Maybe we should go." Donna looked chagrined.
"No, let's see what they do." A few seconds later, the woman returned and everyone at her table got up and left. "Wow," Mike said. He looked around at the other well-dressed people eating on the patio. "I guess they know we're declared."
"But we haven't seen anything in writing," Donna protested. When Scientologists are formally excommunicated, a written declaration known as a "goldenrod" is issued, stating their crimes against the organization. It is printed on a piece of golden parchment and sent to both the member and his or her church, where it is often posted on the wall. The Hendersons had not received their goldenrod.
"Oh, we're definitely declared." Mike reminded his wife of another Scientologist friend they ran into at a local Dillard's department store. Upon seeing them, she'd turned and walked in the other direction. "If she walked away from us and wouldn't talk to us, then it's known among Scientologists in Clearwater that we're declared." Mike seemed regretful about this.
In their prior, flush life as OTs, Mike and Donna owned a Bellanca Viking airplane, which they sold to help recoup some of their financial losses. After dinner, Mike took me to the hangar where they had kept the plane. He'd repurposed it as a storeroom for a floor-to-ceiling assortment of boxes and stacking shelves filled with Scientology books, tapes, CDs, DVDs, E-meters, and other paraphernalia.
"This is probably one of the best collections ever put together," Mike said, handing me a leather-bound, gold-leaf-edged copy of Dianetics. He was selling it on eBay. "This is a special edition. You'd probably get a hundred, maybe a hundred and fifty dollars for something like that." He picked up another book. "This is a transcript of a taped lecture that Hubbard gave on the Apollo in 1968." It forms the basis of Hubbard's book Mission into Time, in which Hubbard discussed his past life in ancient Greece. I opened the book, with its fraying dust jacket, and read the inscription: We hope the reading of this book is only the first step of a personal voyage of discovery into the new and vital world religion of Scientology.
Mike reached over to a shelf and took down an emerald green Planetary Dissemination Meter, a special-edition E-meter that came in a silk bag embroidered with gold thread. "My wife owns five of these. Each one cost ten grand. And that isn't even the most expensive one." He lifted an E-meter plated in twenty-four-karat gold. "This one is worth twenty thousand dollars." Mike estimated that he was one of just one hundred people who owned a gold E-meter. He'd used it to audit body thetans—millions of them, he figured. But the exorcism and indeed the entire OT experience, he admitted, hadn't really worked.
"I've had to come to grips with the fact that, yes, I've raised a family, and yes, I've had a successful business and all that, but a lot of my energy and my impetus as a person was channeled toward Scientology," he said sadly. "It's been a real letdown, letting go of that. But I just couldn't keep lying to myself any longer."
He looked around in the hangar, where virtually everything was for sale. "Maybe at some point in human evolution, people will be able to do some things we can't do now, but you're not going to have the ability to use every ounce of your intelligence, and develop psychic powers, and be able to leave your body at will. And that's what we thought when we got into Scientology.