I took my first courses in Scientology in 1968. At the time, I was a young Assistant Professor of English at Cornell University, traveling 500 miles (2-way) on weekends to study Scientology in New York City. I found the courses impressive and powerful...and USEFUL. For example, since the first course was called The Communication Course, I expected some sort of fluff like “how to make friends and influence people” and was astonished to find myself doing a set of drills that really took apart the basics of communication and reassembled them, basics like the ability to be there (oneself, no substitute) and put something across with strong intention.
When I got back to Cornell after this one-weekend course, I found my communications had changed. I don’t mean that I was self-consciously “doing” anything differently. Rather, the act of communicating had simplified for me (and it had previously been very complex - more complex than I’d realized until the complexities vanished). I was (and have been ever since) a calmer, more self-assured, more “impinging,” more aware person.
Awareness is part of it because when one’s attention is free, not caught up in complicated efforts to be interesting or to justify one’s existence or to push others away - free of such claptrap, it becomes easy to notice OTHERS and appreciate them.
I have since taken many Scientology courses and received Scientology counseling (called “auditing”) and been involved in many other Scientology-related activities, but I still look at that first course, the Communication Course, as the single most powerful revelation of the nature of Scientology - the sheer elegance and simplicity and power of the drills done on that course!
Here are a few of the many other positive experiences I’ve had in Scientology:
1. All my previous life I’d suffered from a chronic “sinus condition” and was usually stuffed up or nearly so. It was supposed to be hereditary (my Dad suffered from it). It vanished during an auditing (counseling session) and in the decades since has not returned.
2. About two weeks after I’d started receiving Scientology training and counseling, I had (as a result of an auditing session) a realization about ability and ways in which I’d been holding myself back. I found, after that session, that my general rate of production as a poet had tripled. I simply produced faster with no deterioration in quality. And not only poetry: at that time, I liked to sit down at a piano and improvise - clumsily (I’d had little training), but I enjoyed experimenting with chords and melodies. After that session, I found a piano, went at it and discovered that suddenly I could do things I hadn’t been able to do before - for example, strike a long, fast complex run of notes, then duplicate it (hit the exact same notes again - no mistakes), and do this at several times the speed I’d been able to manage previously. It was as if I’d been “super-charged.”
3. Around 1962, my vision became myopic, and from 1962 through mid-1968, I was required to wear glasses in order to drive. Within a few days before my first Scientology auditing, I’d gone in for my driver’s license renewal, flunked the vision test (as usual), and been again required to wear glasses when driving. In an auditing session a few days later, I had a realization about certain things I had not wanted to SEE (about a failing marriage) back in 1962, and at that point of realization, my vision became unblurred. The next day I retook the license test and passed it, my vision having returned to 20-20, in which state it remained for over 15 years. (It is no longer 20-20, but is better than it was in 1962.)
4. One day, years ago, my back “went out.” I could not stand up fully, could barely walk. After a week of lying in bed with my knees up and receiving various conventional treatments, with little improvement, I received an auditing session (it involved no physical contact, no adjustment, just a few questions asked and answered) that lasted about two minutes, after which my back was entirely returned to normal, no stiffness, no pain, no difficulty standing, etc. (It has not since “gone out.”)
These are a few of the minor miracles I’ve experienced. I say “minor” because they are, indeed, insignificant compared to many of the positive results I’ve had from Scientology. But they are the easiest to describe. One goes into a session with bad eyesight, has a realization, comes out with 20-20 vision - an undeniable “result.”
It is harder to explain precisely how Scientology helped me (as it did) move from a succession of painful and doomed relationships to the stable, creative, “fun” marriage I’ve enjoyed for the past 15 years, how it moved me from being utterly caught up in my own difficulties to being someone who could help others, how it increased my awareness of myself as a spiritual entity, how it has contributed to my generally excellent physical health and how it has put me in touch with something in myself that is hard to describe - an inexhaustable font of creative joy that is always available to me and that, increasingly, I can share with others.
If I had to summarize the results of Scientology in one sentence, it would be: Scientology has increased my abilities to create games to play, to choose which games I’ll play, to play the games I choose to play, to persist at them and win them or, if necessary, experience a loss without losing my joy in the playing.
