Inside Scientology - Janet Reitman [33]
New techniques were constantly being devised and refined by trial and error, with Hubbard serving as coach. "Hubbard would arrive early in the morning and pin the process up on the door, and then we'd come in and copy it down and run it on each other," said Walter. The teams kept track of everything that happened during these sessions and then submitted their notes for Hubbard's review. Each evening, Hubbard read these notes, made revisions, and then posted a new set of processes for the next morning. This is how, between 1962 and 1964, many of Scientology's core auditing procedures and many of its theoretical precepts were developed.
Walter was in awe of Hubbard's raw ability to dissect problems, and people. "He could tear you apart if he wanted to—just rip you to shreds, and then put you back together again." Having played sports his whole life, Walter saw that kind of process as proof of Hubbard's commitment to helping his students improve, and he gladly allowed himself to serve as test subject. "I loved it, and I got tremendous gains from that kind of coaching."
But as time went on, Walter's mind was slowly reshaped, though he wouldn't realize it for many years. Later he'd understand that this as a byproduct of other, less positive effects of Scientology's auditing processes and especially its particular use of language. Hubbard's word for spirit, for example, was theta. No one spoke of love in Scientology; they had affinity. The word auditing no longer referred to a task that accountants performed but instead meant "to listen and compute" in accordance with the standard, a word that seemed to denote the accepted application of Hubbard's technology. But commenting on the precise definition of standard, Walter said, "Who knows what that meant? It meant whatever he wanted it to mean," and this malleable use of words served as an effective instrument of control.
Before long, the accepted definitions for ordinary words had vanished, replaced with new meanings that separated Scientology from other subjects and Scientologists from other people. "It's very, very subtle stuff, changing words and giving them a whole different meaning—it creates an artificial reality," said Walter. "What happens is this new linguistic system undermines your ability to even monitor your own thoughts because nothing means what it used to mean. I couldn't believe that I could get taken over like that. I was the most independent-minded idiot that ever walked the planet. But that's what happened."
By the early 1960s, a close cadre of true believers surrounded L. Ron Hubbard. Most were young—Alan Walter was twenty-five—and convinced that Scientology would "unlock the truth and knowledge of our spiritual, mental, and human potential," as Walter put it.
But those who'd known Hubbard since the 1950s, and had once believed this as well, were no longer so sure. By the time he moved to Saint Hill, most of Hubbard's early acolytes had departed, disillusioned with Hubbard's leadership and also, in some cases, with the substance of Scientology itself. Helen O'Brien, for example, once among Hubbard's closest confidantes, had begun seeing the "holes appear in [the soap] bubble," as she phrased it, as far back as 1952. Scientology, though rooted in the same principles as Dianetics, was not like the previous movement. "The tremendous appeal of Dianetics came from Hubbard's apparent certainty that you could easily clear yourself in present time of the heritage of woe from past misadventures," she wrote