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Foreword: Knowledge Report

For a decade, I pretended that a decade of my life hadn't happened. Those "lost" years included the seven I was involved with the Church of Scientology, and the three it took to be certain I wouldn't, again, return. Eventually, I began to peer and prod and even write about those years and just as I'd completed a shaggy draft of this memoir, found out that Jamie, the man who'd introduced me to the Church, had died. A memorial was planned for him in Los Angeles, a city I'd fled decades before and since visited just once—and then only because a book tour took me there. Because I'd been examining what had come of meeting and then marrying Jamie, it seemed imperative to attend his memorial, even though it meant putting myself back in the maw of what I'd first found scary, then intriguing, and then, during the awful time of leaving, terrifying.

I'd also see people who'd once been incredibly dear to me but with whom, since leaving the Church, I'd lost contact. One of them, Paloma—who'd been not only a close friend, but also one of my auditors (Scientology's form of counselor) —even offered her guestroom. Paloma's open-heartedness and her willingness to walk outside Scientology's boundaries moved and surprised me: generally, those in the Church do not associate with those who have defected from it. But Paloma welcomed me, and, as we always had, we talked deeply, including about what we were currently writing. She pressed, and finally I offered up that I'd finished a draft of a memoir.

"About Scientology!" I nodded, and she looked shocked. I told her it was also about my family, "who was its own kind of cult, you know," I said, laughing.

She looked troubled, and after a bit more discussion, I suggested we not talk further about it. "When you start your next chunk of auditing," I said, "you're going to have to answer those 'security questions' about who you've been talking to. I don't want to make trouble for you in any way."

Paloma shook her head. "I don't have that kind of relationship with the Church. I won't let them dictate who are and who are not my friends."

I found this admirable, and even possible: Paloma has been married to a non-Scientologist for three decades; perhaps she and the Church—she and her own psyche—had figured things out. And for a few months after that remarkable and ultimately very heartwarming time in Los Angeles, she and I stayed in touch. In one startling phone call she even implied that she might have accomplished all she needed to in the Church.

However, almost immediately after that admission, the phone calls and emails stopped. As Scientologists put it, we "fell out of comm." I was not surprised. I knew she was regretting our candid discussions. A few months later, a mutual friend told me she was ill. This, too, I did not find surprising. Because Scientology—like Christian Science and other spiritual paths—believes that physical troubles are linked to emotional and psychological ones, I was fairly sure that Paloma was tracing her illness back to our talks: If she had doubted, and certainly in communicating such feelings to an ex-Scientologist, she was guilty of transgressions against her church. By now she'd be seeing someone known as the "Ethics Officer." Maybe getting auditing. In any case, spending a lot of money "handling" the fact that she'd talked to an apostate. She would not be in touch again.

So I was startled when, a few months later, I received a business-sized envelope with her name and address in the upper left hand corner.

Standing in the morning sun next to my mailbox, which is at the end of my driveway in the rural area where I live, I opened it. Inside were three typed pages. Centered at the top of the first page were the words: Knowledge Report.

For even a seasoned member of the Church of Scientology, the phrase, "Knowledge Report"^[i] can buckle the knees; to be the subject of one can curdle the blood. Knowledge Reports are one of the increasingly totalitarian tactics Hubbard employed as Scientology became bigger and more successful—and more controversial. In a 1982 policy letter, "Keeping Scientology Working," he writes that for an organization to run effectively, "the individual members themselves enforce the actions and mores of the group."^[ii] This leads to rampant paranoia, as it's possible to imagine that every step you take in your job—especially if you work in an organization established on Hubbard's principles—and indeed in your life, is being observed: snitching is encouraged. As a Knowledge Report may lead to intense disciplinary measures, to receive one is literally hair-raising.

The walk out to my mailbox that morning was in order to stretch my legs and take a break from writing; I was almost done with a second draft of the memoir. By that time, I had processed enough of my emotions about the Church to be able to give a laugh at what I held in my hand, although it was a shocked laugh. I understood why Paloma might have been led to write a Knowledge Report, but why on earth would she send me a copy? It would be placed in her Ethics folder—this much I remembered from my time in the Church—but I wasn't a Scientologist, hadn't been one in over a decade; Scientology's protocols had nothing to do with me.

Nevertheless, as I read what Paloma had written, my world tilted and spun.

Time, Place, Form, Event,^[iii] Hubbard requires in such a report, and Paloma supplied them. She described our friendship while I was in the Church, discussed her role as my auditor, addressed how my parents had been virulent in their disapproval, how the Church had dubbed them Suppressive Persons and insisted I formally disconnect from them, which I'd refused to do. She also included details of our recent talks, including the fact that I'd called Scientology a "cult"; and that—this was the "knowledge" she was "reporting"—I was writing a memoir about it. Except for perspective (her point of view was not mine), what she wrote was neither histrionic nor incorrect. It was knowledge—her knowledge—and, being a good Scientologist, she reported it.

I scanned the pages again, wondering what her purpose was. Was the Report was designed to scare me? Would the Church, having this knowledge, attack me, as they are infamous for doing to those who criticize them? Was this intended to "shut me up?"

Of course it was intended to scare me, and to shut me up: the Church uses these totalitarian methods with utter purposefulness. And it demands its practitioners employ them as well, creating a semi-hysterical "us versus them" tension that keeps those practitioners in thrall. I knew this. I was even empathetic to her need to employ every available tool to make her illness go away. Still, I was shocked that Paloma, smart and kind, and a writer herself, would be willing to subject a fellow writer, and a friend, to such a thing.

But why be shocked? Paloma had been a Scientologist for at least thirty years, weathering decades of attacks against Church practices. Her decision to file a Knowledge Report, and to send a copy to me, is simply an example of the mind control her Church exercises, teaching its practitioners, as they accept and embrace its commonsensical and useful ideas, to accept and embrace its authoritarian and outrageous ones. Scientologists willingly and of their own accord place those blinding mechanisms around their intelligences—so that they can continue to believe.

I know, because I was once so persuaded. With determination, I'd screwed those mechanisms into place, and in spite of ferocious doubts, kept them there a long time.

I slid the pages of the Knowledge Report back into its envelope and headed back up the driveway, thinking of the many memoirs, written by former Scientologists, filled with their dreadful stories, and of the nonfiction books and documentaries that substantiate these abuses; thinking too, how I have no specific abuses to report in my own book—except how and why I came to be in a cult for seven years. Beyond this incident of receiving a Knowledge Report—if one can call it an "incident"—I had no personal outrage or scandal to relate. I never had to sleep in a closet, or scrub a latrine with my toothbrush; I was never locked in a trailer playing musical chairs with my future attached to grabbing a seat. I lost dear friends when I finally left, but I didn't have to abandon cherished family, leap an electric fence on a motorcycle, execute a complicated escape plan.

Although, I did lose things. Those years, for instance.

That's how I'd thought of it, for a very long time.

However. Scientologists, as they learn a particular skill, "drill" that skill with a partner. If one does the drill incorrectly, the partner says, "Flunk." And, immediately, then, "Start." The first few times I experienced this I'd been startled, even horrified, but I came to see its efficacy: you just get on with doing the thing you didn't do correctly the first time. Staying in Scientology as long as I did, I felt I'd "flunked" a huge chunk of my life. But writing the book was changing that perspective, and I was finding a possible "start." Certainly in examining those "lost" years and what, in fact, I might have gained from them. Also the hope that the book might bolster a person doubting her own involvement in the Church to find the courage to leave; maybe it would even include those who felt they'd tossed a decade into the dustbin in other ways—a drug problem, a destructive relationship—and offer a lens through which to see meaning and purpose. Not so much in having made those choices in the first place, but in the life we have as a result. That is, having "flunked," there is the option to "start."

All this I thought about on that walk back from the mailbox. Then I settled in again at my desk, put the envelope in a drawer, and got back to work. I was, I realized somewhat grimly, writing a knowledge report of my own.

Endnotes
[i] Knowledge Report: Hubbard, L. Ron. "Knowledge Reports." Introduction to Scientology Ethics. Bridge Publications, Inc. 2007. Also HCO PL (Hubbard Communications Office Policy Letter) 22 July 1982R Revised 9 August 2000: "Keeping Scientology Working."
[ii] Ibid
[iii] A link to the current online form for such Knowledge Reports is available at Scientology's Religious Technology Center's website. http://www.rtc.org/matters/intro.html

Bibliography
Hubbard, L. Ron. Dianetics, the Modern Science of Mental Health. Bridge Publications, Inc. Los Angeles, CA. 2007.
Hubbard, L. Ron. Introduction to Scientology Ethics. Bridge Publications, Inc. 2007.
Hubbard, L. Ron. Technical Dictionary of Dianetics and Scientology. Bridge Publications. Los Angeles, CA. 1982. (Note: The information within parentheses, which I include with definitions cited from this dictionary, indicates where one may find the source of the quoted definition; e.g. policy letters or other documents written by Hubbard, or recordings of his tapes and lectures.)
Scientology Glossary: http://www.whatisscientology.org/html/Part14/Chp50/pg1018.html
Scientology Handbook: http://www.scientologyhandbook.org/
Also:
Official Church of Scientology website: http://www.scientology.org./
Official website for Scientology courses: http://www.scientologycourses.org/
Official website for Scientology's Religious Technology Center: http://www.rtc.org/
Official Website for Hubbard's Study Technology: http://www.studytechnology.org/index.html