Inside Scientology - Janet Reitman [55]
The pressure to keep raising more money was intense. Particularly in America, church staff struggled to stay productive, devising ingenious measures to do so. Throughout the orgs, a take-no-prisoners approach resulted in a huge boom in both membership and income. This had been accomplished by keeping staff up all night, and in some cases, locking members into rooms until they wrote a check for their next service. Those who couldn't afford it at the time were encouraged to "postulate," or imagine, that they'd have the money in the near future, and then write what were called "postulate checks." According to this idea, the member would have the money to cover the check by the time it was deposited. In practice this didn't work—checks bounced all the time. But such voodoo accounting did at least temporarily raise the orgs' sales statistics.
To make sure the various organizations ran smoothly, Hubbard insisted that every member of the staff memorize a complex "org board," or management chart, listing every single post within a Scientology organization, from the executive division to the maintenance crew. In the 1970s, Scientologists recited the organizational chart at meetings. "All the staff would stand in front of that organizational board, and as a group they would chant every part of it," said Nancy Many, who worked at the Boston Org and held various senior executive posts at the international management level of Scientology. "There was a time when I could just rattle off that entire organizational board by heart."
Hubbard dubbed this method "Chinese School." In his writings, he described it as a joyous singsong affair that could be applied to anything one needed to learn—a foreign language, a mathematical or scientific theorem, or Hubbard's elaborate, eighty-point tone scale. It was also a form of social conditioning. "Chinese School was an effective means of robotically learning almost anything," said Many. "You knew who was responsible for what, and what everyone was supposed to do, and it was ingrained—you didn't even think about it. From a standard of efficiency, it was felt that the more each individual member of the organization understood about the functions in other departments and divisions, the stronger the group would be. That was the good part of Chinese School," she said. "The bad part, of course, is you got your mind to meld with LRH."
The Sea Org, of which Jeff Hawkins was now a member, enforced Scientology's codes, but only Scientology staff members were subjected to them. The paying public had no sense of the repressive environment at the orgs. They were being sold total freedom, even if the path to get there kept changing. Each year, new rundowns, or auditing procedures, were created to enhance members' understanding of themselves and their eternal nature. Tremendous emphasis was put on past lives—indeed, "Get 'em past life!" was one of L. Ron Hubbard's frequent proclamations, according to some former aides. If a Scientologist didn't have a past life experience, the argument went, something was wrong with his or her auditing.
In a similar vein, the original goal of Scientology and Dianetics—becoming Clear—was now only the beginning. Signs had been appearing at Scientology organizations around the world, declaring a new initiative: "Go OT." Operating Thetan was Scientology's new product line—there were eight OT levels,