The Stoned Apocalypse by Marco Vassi Read Free Book Online Page A

wanted to meet the man. I felt that we could communicate very clearly very quickly. It was obvious to me that as with all organizations, Scientology was composed of a very few geniuses who put the thing together, and the hordes who blindly followed its dictates. I felt in the privileged position of knowing both that Scientology is a sham, and that in a very real sense, it does work.
    The next afternoon, I took my first class in the large room that had been set up for some three hundred people. The two major groups were split up between listening to lectures and sitting, two by two, in completely frozen attitudes, staring into one another’s eyes. I dutifully went through the preliminary indoctrination, and while I was disparaging the squareness of the teacher, was admiring his absolute ease in managing the situation. He said that he had been an accountant, had taken up Scientology as a part-time study, and soon converted to full-time staff member. Along with all the other low-level worker ants in the place, he worked some thirteen hours a day, seven days a week, teaching, studying, and recruiting. His eyes burned with an unholy fervor.
    After a brief talk, during which he told us to leave our mest — that is, our matter-energy-space-time — at the door, he set us to eyeballing one another. The scenario was to sit without expression while your partner attempts to make you laugh or blink or show any reaction whatsoever. The top grades in the organization have to be able to do it for two hours, showing no response while someone else attempts to push all one’s “buttons,” or weak spots in the personality. The point, I assume, is for a person to gain a sense of center from which to observe and operate, but since the process is managed through external conditioning with no concomitant sense of internal awareness, the result is the automaton quality by which one can spot Scientologists.
    My partner was a burned-out product of Reichian therapy, and had been mangled by one of those horror-movie therapists of that particular school, where the second- and third-generation doctors had picked up all of Reich’s sternness and implacability, without any of his warmth or genius. He was like one of hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers who float from scene to scene, seeking some escape from their inner emptiness. I was to be his button pusher the first time around, and while he sat still, I made disparaging remarks, tried to evoke anger, and in general acted like a prick. He kept flubbing, and each time he moved I had to say, “Flunk! You moved.” I hadn’t yet read Giles Goat Boy so I missed some of the richness of the moment. But he startled me out of my role when he leaned forward and whispered, “These people all have the emotional plague.” It was like receiving a subversive message in a prison camp, and I looked up, startled.
    The teacher caught my eye; something in the scene must have triggered his danger instinct, for he quickly came over to us. The student began to fight with him, telling him that this was an inhuman activity. They got into an argument and the teacher almost lost his cool. But then he drew a pad out of his pocket, scribbled something down, and thrust it at my partner. “I declare you to be in a state of nonexistence,” he said. “Go to the registrar to be rerouted.”
    It got very curious, but I watched him leave with the sang froid of a desert rat who must leave his companion on the burning sands. War was not easy, and Scientology was waging an all-out struggle for ultimate peace and order. No Reichian agents could be allowed to infiltrate.
    For my next partner I got someone who had been in the scene for over a year. He began by saying that he had had over eighty acid trips, and could tell me from deep knowledge that Scientology was the highest trip possible. This was still at a time when I naïvely believed that anyone who had taken acid was automatically made a more decent and honest human being by