Troublemaker: Surviving Hollywood and Scientology by Leah Remini, Rebecca Paley Page A

my best notto blink or breathe. If you yawned, you were pretty much dead in the water.
    “Get your course pack and come into the practical room for a checkout on your materials,” the supervisor would command.
    Being checked out sent me directly back to elementary school, where teachers seemed to take sadistic pleasure in pointing out a kid’s gap in understanding in front of everyone in class. In quizzing me, the supervisor asked for definitions of words in the course packet, then examples of how to use those words in a sentence. Sometimes starting at the top of the page, which read “Sussex, England,” and if you didn’t know where that was, you would have to re-read the whole thing again (Sussex was where L. Ron Hubbard once had a home and is now the highly coveted Church of Scientology called St. Hill Manor). They went back as much as ten pages in the course to find something I had forgotten. It could be the third point in the ten points of “Keeping Scientology Working” or reciting verbatim all twelve “antisocial personality attributes.” Then I would have to go all the way back in my course to that point. It was frustrating, but the objective was to get the correct data and technology per HCOB (Hubbard Communications Office Bulletin). That meant doing it exactly right. I mean
exactly
.
    Being on course was time-consuming, but when a parishioner was getting audited, there was no time limit. An auditing session could be twenty minutes or twenty hours. As determined by L. Ron Hubbard policy, you were expected to do twelve and a half hours a week of auditing or study. If you were not a good student before Scientology, you certainly would become one.
    Auditing is all about rooting out hidden pain, stress, or anxiety with the use of an E-Meter and then getting rid of it. The E-Meter, short for “electropsychometer,” is an “electronic instrument that measures mental state and change of state in individuals,” according to the church. During the process, the preclear, or PC (person getting the auditing), is asked a set of questions or given directions as he holds on to two empty “cans” hooked up to the meter. It is believed that the thoughts in a person’s mind affect the flow of energy between the cans and cause the needle on the dial to move.
    When you are being interviewed by the auditor, there is a “mental image picture.” This is a Scientology term for something you can “see” in your mind, most often demonstrated by asking someone to close their eyes and think of a cat and then describe what it “looks like.” These mental image pictures include emotion, pain, or stress, which changes the flow of the current and moves the needle.
    The auditor’s job is to keep the session focused by using the meter and observing the reactions on the needle. There are twenty-eight “needle characteristics” that auditors have to know verbatim. A little shaky movement on the dial means you are having a bad thought about the thing you are talking about, or about something you are not telling the auditor. If the needle falls to the right, it tells the auditor to pursue what the PC is thinking about or talking about.
    That is one of the hardest parts about being in session—there might be something you really want to get off your chest or to understand better (a fight with a boyfriend, problems with your mother, an issue with a colleague at work), but if the needle doesn’t move when you talk about a particular subject, you have to move on. In Scientology you further discuss only what’s reading on the meter.
    Auditing can also become a form of self-editing, when it comes to criticizing others. The theory in Scientology is that if you are critical of someone, you have “similar transgressions of your own.”
    For example, if you were to say, “My boyfriend beats me,” that would be seen as saying something critical to the auditor. He would then turn it around and say, “I got that, but have you done