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Chapter 13:
Children and Celebrities
Education is necessary because one
earns better after he has learned.
-- "Child Dianetics" {1}
There are two
types of people that the Scientologists are very anxious to attract:
children and celebrities. In England, the Scientologists already have a
number of children in the Org, although Hubbard wrote that "serious
processing" should not be done before a child was five years old,
"extensive Processing" except in very unusual circumstances, should not
be done before he was eight, and that no child should be "forced" into
the prenatal area until he was twelve.{2}
The youngest Scientology clear right now is said to be eleven,{3}
although the Scientologists have reported "processing" an eighteen month
baby, and a baby who was just a few days old (by saying to him
repeatedly, "Lie in bed. Thank you.").{4}
Hubbard has an extremely permissive attitude toward child-rearing: "So
he tears up his shirt, wrecks his bed, breaks up his fire engine. It's
NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS," he wrote.{5} He also said in Child Dianetics:
Care for the child? -- nonsense!
He's probably got a better grasp of immediate situations than you have.
Only when he's almost psychotic with aberrations will a child be an
accident prone.
Hubbard also
believes that it's pretty difficult to make a child grow up to be a
pervert, and his description of what can lead to perversions is an
example of Hubbard's amazing imagination and facility for cataloging a
variety of unbelievable tortures: "Kicking a baby's head in, running him
over with a steam roller, cutting him in half with a rusty knife,
boiling him in lysol, and all the while with crazy people screaming the
most horrifying and unprintable things at him."{6}
Hubbard's permissiveness, however, does not always extend toward
children who don't want Scientology auditing. "If the child is even
faintly unwilling to be audited, you can coax the child into short
sessions, and then, as time goes on, lengthen them gradually," he
wrote.{7}
Hubbard, who has seven children, plus seven grandchildren naturally has
devised an auditing technique for kids. Children are given such simple
processing as "Feel my arm. Thank you. Feel your arm. Thank you."{8}
They are also sent back to relive their birth, and it is apparently as
painful an experience for them as it is for some of the adult preclears,
since Hubbard wrote:
If the auditor should make a slip,
like telling the child that birth won't hurt him much when he returns to
it, the child will be expecting a mild or nothing at all ... an auditor
hasn't known frustration until he has run a child halfway through a
painful experience only to find that a happy ending has been tacked onto
it.{9}
Scientologists
feel that their treatment is of great benefit to children, and they have
made a number of active attempts to get their methods taught in schools.
Below is a quote by Hubbard, ostensibly telling Scientologists how to
deal with the press, but in fact telling them how to get Scientology in
schools.
Hubbard recommends Scientologists put teachers and students on "meters"
(E-meters), and give "daily mental activities" -- which is what they do
in Scientology. It is interesting to note that Hubbard's obsession with
sex and violence become apparent once again, inasmuch as the
hypothetical case he chose concerns a teen-age girl who was raped.
Teen-age girl shows up in H[ubbard]
G[uidance] C[enter] who has been beaten and raped by teen-age boys at
High School and withholding it since. Audit it out, get parents to OK
investigation. Call in press. Release story of vice and crime at local
high school with the Org doing the investigation. On subsequent days,
criticize laxity of police. Criticize principal. Finally, take more
teen-age sex cases. Just day by day deal off a new action to the press.
String the story out. Take an action. Hold a press conference. Put
students on meters. Put teachers on meters. Get parents to sue. Finally,
advise school hire a permanent mental consultant and give daily mental
exercises to "teen-age monsters." Then wrap it up and skip it. You've
made something evil become something good attained -- Scientology in
schools.
At the end of this
piece he gave the Scientologists another exercise to do: "Do a story
design and calendar for Scientology Ministers demand FDA prove sterility
pills aren't sex stimulants."{10}
One case in which the Scientologists did get into a school caused a
scandal in England in 1960. At that time, Miss Sheila Hoad, owner of the
East Grinstead Aston House Prep school for boys and girls from
three-and-a-half to eleven, became friendly with an American
Scientologist named Dr. (perhaps of Scientology) Thompson, who lived in
an apartment adjoining the school.
Dr. Thompson gave Miss Hoad a book called Creative Learning: A
Scientological Experiment in Schools, which was written by two
Scientologists and was once actively promoted in Scientology
publications. Miss Hoad proceeded to follow the instructions in the
book, and for twenty minutes each day, instead of English grammar
lessons, she gave the following exercises to do.
Session 1 consisted of 20 minutes of obeying simple commands like "stand
up" and "sit down." The purpose of this was to have the "pupils follow
the order without questions and happily." Session 4 consisted of the
teacher saying "hello" and the kids saying "all right" for ten minutes,
and then this process was reversed. In session 5, the teacher asked them
to "remember a time that seems real to you," "remember a time when you
were in good communication with someone" and "remember a time when you a
felt some strange affinity for someone," and the teacher then
acknowledged it. ("Thank you" "All right") There was a note that simpler
words could be used for that lesson.
Then came the death lessons.{11}
Miss Hoad told twenty-five of her pupils to "close your eyes.
Concentrate. Now imagine you are dying. Imagine you are dead. Now you
have turned to dust and ashes. Now imagine you are putting the ashes
back inside yourself." These "death lessons," as they came to be called,
were given behind locked doors with a "Do Not Disturb" sign outside, and
the children were told "never think about these lessons after they are
over," which suggested to many that she was warning the children not to
tell their parents about it.
But one nine-year-old pupil became so depressed after the lessons that
her mother had to take her to a doctor and she whispered the secret to
him. Another child, after ointment was rubbed on her chest for a cold
said "Mummy, I am going to die. I feel funny inside." That mother, who
had perhaps heard about Hubbard's attaching an E-meter into plants to
see if they could feel pain, said "Let Dr. Thompson inject his cucumbers
when he thinks they are in pain. But let him leave my daughter alone."
The other parents were equally outraged, although Miss Hoad insisted
that the lessons were the same as saying "The Lord's Prayer."{12} The
parents disagreed. Miss Hoad resigned after several parents pulled their
children out of the school and even more were absent.{13} The
Scientologists dissociated themselves from the treatment saying that
those methods were "outdated and dangerous" and that the current
practice was to imagine "beautiful things."{14} Dr. Thompson, who had a
child in the school, said he would not remove the child.{15} Rumors to
the effect that death lessons were being given in other English schools
persisted for a long time after the incident.{16}
In addition to trying to get children to become Scientologists,
Scientologists also actively solicit celebrities. Their celebrity
chasing goes back to around 1955 when Hubbard invited his followers to
write and tell him which celebrity they wanted, promising to allocate
one to each person who asked for one. The person, however, was
responsible for all the expenses involved in getting the celebrity into
Scientology. Anyone who succeeded would receive two weeks of special
coaching at the Phoenix Org, although they would have to pay for their
own living expenses and transportation.{17}
Some of the people whom Hubbard hoped would become Scientologists, and
whom he offered to allocate, were: Walter Winchell, Ed Sullivan, Marlene
Dietrich, Ernest Hemingway, Danny Kaye, Joseph Alsop, Stewart Alsop, Sid
Caesar, Liberace, Fred Allen, Arthur Godfrey, George Gobel, Fulton J.
Sheen, James Stewart, Howard Hughes, Billy Graham, Bob Hope, Pablo
Picasso, Walt Disney, Milton Berle, Jackie Gleason, Lowell Thomas, Red
Skelton, Henry Luce, Walter Lippman, Groucho Marx, Cecil B. DeMille,
Arturo Toscanini, Bing Crosby, Greta Garbo, Charles Addams, Donald
O'Connor, Edward R. Murrow.{18}
Hubbard admitted that pursuing these celebrities would be a bit
difficult, but he told his followers not to be dismayed and to pursue
them relentlessly. "Put yourself at every hand across his or her path,"
wrote Hubbard, and do not permit "discouragement or `no's' or clerks or
secretaries to intervene in days or weeks or months to bring your
celebrity in for a formal auditing session."
Project Celebrity still seems to be one of their policies, since the
Scientologists recently opened a Celebrity Center in California
allegedly for the purpose of attracting Hollywood personalities. Last
year it was claimed that the following celebrities were Scientologists:
Tennessee Williams, Leonard Cohen, Mama Cass Elliot, Stephen Boyd, Jim
Morrison, William Burroughs and possibly the Beatles.
One famous, in fact infamous person interested in Scientology that they
do not boast about, talk about, or probably even want is Charles Manson,
the convicted murderer of Sharon Tate and her friends. The New York
Times stated that Manson first got interested in Scientology while he
was incarcerated in the McNeil Island Penitentiary in Washington
(Scientology has programs for prisons).
After his release, The Times reported, he went to Los Angeles where he
was said to have met local Scientologists and attended several parties
for movie stars, possibly the July 18 dedication of the celebrity
center.{19} Scientology literature was also said to be found at the
ranch when Manson and his family were captured.{20} But for reasons
unknown, it is claimed that Manson may have been made a "suppressive
person" by the Scientologists, and there have also been hints that he
may have joined the Process, the sex and satan group which originally
broke away from Scientology.{21}
Another bit of publicity that the Scientologists are probably not too
pleased with concerns the murder of three people in Los Angeles.{22} Two
were Scientologists. According to The New York Post, all three were
brutally beaten, ritualistically stabbed, had their right eyes cut out,
and were dumped 100 yards from a Scientology commune. One of the girls,
Miss Doreen Gaul, nineteen, who came from New York to study Scientology,
was naked except for a strand of Indian beads. The boy, James Sharpe was
fifteen years old. The third was unidentified. Doreen Gaul's father
allegedly told a New York Post reporter that she had lately become
disenchanted with Scientology.
She was not the only one. For the past fourteen years, John McMasters,
the first Scientology clear, appears to have been groomed by Hubbard to
take his place when he dies. McMasters recently wrote a letter to
Hubbard, and sent copies to "suppressives" and Scientology enemies.{23}
Although McMasters declared that "I shall never withdraw my allegiance
to Ron or Scientology" he announced that he was leaving Hubbard's ships
to spread Scientology in Africa, because of his "horror at what such
people on the Sea Org could do to mankind."
He criticized Hubbard and Scientology for their "savage and vicious
ethics" and seemed particularly perturbed over the death of the three
Los Angeles teen-agers. Their deaths may have partially precipitated
McMasters' decision to dissociate himself from certain aspects of
Scientology. "Somehow we are violating our basic ethics for such things
to happen to us," he wrote. "These last two ghastly murders of our
students, one of whom is a clear, need never have happened if we hadn't
been mocking up [making] enemies so solidly."
_______________
Notes:
{1} initial quote [4]
{2} age to process [4]
{3} youngest clear 11 [283]
{4} processing 18 month and new born [47]
{5} Hubbard quote on permissiveness [4]
{6} Hubbard quote on perversions [6]
{7} Hubbard quote on coaxing children into auditing [41]
{8} children treatment [41]
{9} prenatal area [4]
{10} Hubbard quote on getting into schools; FDA assignment [261]
{11} death lessons [166, 210, 211, 162]
{12} same as Lord's prayer [209]
{13} Hoad resigns [167]
{14} (15) dissociate themselves [169]
{15} (14) Thompson keeps child in school [167]
{16} rumors elsewhere [209]
{17} celebrity chasing; names of celebrities; how to get them [27]
{18} who is Scientologist & famous now [138]
{19} Manson and Scientology [151]
{20} lit found at ranch [141]
{21} Manson and Process [141]
{22} 3 murdered [147, 275]
{23} McMasters letter [122]
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