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HOW I GOT INTO SCIENTOLOGY AND WHY I GOT OUT -- ILLUSTRATED INTERVIEW WITH JASON BEGHE |
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April, 2008 [Transcribed from the video by Tara Carreon, ABOL librarian]
SPEAKING FREELY It would probably be useful for me to kind of go through this thing, because I'm still trying to discover what happened. I still feel a little lost and bewildered, and I don't quite get it. And that's a common thing for me in my life. Like some things politically, I can't get how people don't see that that politician is a liar. You know what I mean? I don't get it. And so for me, if I was going to write something, the concept of the title would be "How I got into Scientology and Why I Got Out." BEGINNINGS As a little kid -- I'm talking about even before I could talk -- I can remember being interested in people, really interested in people. And I was pretty shiny, and everybody wanted to pick me up. And I didn't like that.
And I could SEE people. I felt like I could understand who somebody was pretty well as a little guy. And I might have had some judgment on it, but I didn't have a condemnation like, "Uhhh." I just thought, "Okay, that's dad" -- not just "daddy" -- and "Oh, okay, that's that guy, Uncle Gino;" and "this is this guy at the party" as a 3 or 4 year old kid looking around. And at a certain point, certainly before first grade, I became very, very interested in "Who am I?" Not just, "Oh, that's that guy I know," but I had some kind of a perception about a person.
And as a little kid, how I perceived the people in front of me -- whether it was accurate or not, I believed it was true -- was by kind of looking into their eyes and seeing who they are. And so I remember as a little kid looking in the mirror -- not looking at how do I look -- looking and trying to say, "Who am I?"
And I would say, "Who are you? Who are you?" As a five or six-year old kid I remember it. Eight years old. It was pretty intense. And I never got it. And I thought, I guess that's just the life condition, it's too hard to self-perceive. And then, as I was growing up, I played the fool and did normal, stupid things, and drugs and whatever. But it was always something that was in the back of my mind. I was always on a spiritual journey one way or another, some New Age shit. Not a lot of organized religion. But by the time I was 14, I'd kind of lost interest in that. But I would read a lot, even to the point where as a 21-year old kid, I remember I was into the spiritual teaching of this one guy who was originally teaching in French, and I learned French just so I could read it in the original French. So it was important to me. But it was all based on "Who am I?" Kind of that Greek, "know thyself" philosophy. So, somehow I got into Scientology, which was Bodhi Elfman was in my acting class, and my acting teacher, who was a big disseminator, Milton Katselas, was ranting about some shit which was pissing me off, because he was wasting class time. He was like, "You guys are auditioning me." He was pissed off and he wanted more unmitigated adoration, and he wasn't feeling like he was getting it. And in the middle of his tirade, I was at first thinking, "Who are these fucking people that are not flowing the correct amount of attention to the Master?" And then I looked and said, "I wonder if I am." And I said, "Do I trust Milton?" And I said, "No, I really don't."
And that was kind of like a weird thing. And I thought, "Who do I trust?" And I thought, "Well, at least my parents -- No, I don't trust them." Okay, I didn't trust anybody in the room. And then I had this realization: "I don't trust myself." And so in Scientologese, I found my own ruin. And for some reason, I thought, "Oh, let me try and trust somebody; Let me try and trust Milton," which is what he was yelling and crying about in this whole big speech. And I knew he was a Scientologist, so I said, "Bodhi, give me some book on Scientology." I was doing a scene with him. And he was just a nervous little kid at the time. And so he gave me this big fat book called "What is Scientology?" It had a lot of pictures. And so I took this book and I read it. I think I stayed up most of the night and I read the thing. I don't know if I got it word for word. I didn't clear all my MUs for sure.
But I got through the thing and I thought, "Okay, if that's true, fuck, I'll go Clear. I'll try that. That sounds fine." So I gave Bodhi the book back the next day and I said, "Take me to that big castle thing, I want to check this shit out." So he was very excited. He brings me in and everybody's all excited, and they've greased the path because I've been on TV and shit, and everybody's really nice. And I figured I want to do this purif thing, because I'd done drugs and I could feel them in my body. And I read the thing, what the purif's supposed to do -- and I felt at that point I hadn't done drugs in ten or fifteen years -- and I thought, "That was one of the biggest mistakes I'd made in my life." And I thought, "If this can really take that effect away," because I felt I had lost some of the shine that I'd had. I mean, I wasn't a drug addict, but I was a drug indulger. So I go there basically planning on doing the purif, but they've got to give this tour. And I must have gotten there at 10:00 in the morning, and I swear to God, I'm starting to go nuts. I've done tests. I'm on the cans with some lady. I'm like, "Fuck me, can I just buy this course and let's get going?" And then they give me my personality test, and I was all on the top of the thing, and they are still telling me that I'm fucked up.
I must have been there 8 hours. I'm ready to pull my hair out! And they said, "You should do some little course called Ups and Downs." I said, "Look, I'll do the course, but can I just do the purif thing?"
"Yes, yes, yes, you just have to do the TRs and objectives with it." "What's that?" "That's this course." I said, "Fine, let's go." So I buy the course, and now it's 8:30 at night and I say, "Can I start? And I had to get a little oral surgery. So let me do something. I came here for some Scientology, and all I got was everybody selling to me. I never got to do anything." Because I wanted to try the shit.
So now it's 8:30, and they say, "You can start your TRs course -- and the TRs are these communication drills -- then you do the purif, where you clear all the drugs out; then you do the auditing, which is called Objectives -- and it's like this stuff where you walk across the room and you touch the wall and all this kind of shit -- "the end phenomena is firmly rooted in present time." I said, "That doesn't sound bad. I'll do it. Okay if you can deliver that. Cool." So I said, "Give me some scientology for Christ's sake. I've been here nine hours getting nothing." So they say, "Okay, you can start your TRs course." So I go in and do this thing called M7, which is basically Bodhi and the supervisor are helping me clear the word through, and the first thing I ever did in Scientology was read, "Keeping Scientology Working." It was a pretty heavy bulletin. Q. Explain what that bulletin says. A. It says that basically Scientology -- well, it's a very interesting bulletin. It's updated, so you're reading the updates. It was written in 1965, and it was updated in 1970 and 1975. And those updates are before you read the actual bulletin.
And the updates are like L. Ron Hubbard just going bananas: "This thing is true. It was true in 1965 and it will be true forever. If you just follow this, Scientology will never fail, and we'll take over the universe, and we'll save all mankind, and we're the only hope for the world. So if you apply this one policy, everything will be fine."
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