I passed a test!

On the way home from door-knocking today, I stopped by the Scientologist booth on Whyte Avenue.

I got the free “Stress Test” with a real e meter (pictured left).

And to the surprise of the kind older gentleman asking the questions to me, I passed (note it does say “Fail” on it).

He had me hold the metal cans in my hands and then he played with the knob to zero it so the needle would be still in the neutral part (actually it might have been slightly biased to fail), and then he asked me to think about “people or situations”, to which there was little response (I wasn’t really thinking of anything there). Then he asked me to think about my family (no response), my girlfriend (no response), my grandparents – or maybe problems with them (no response). It moved a little when I thought about school, but not enough for him to judge anything. So overall I didn’t have enough stress to set off the e-meter!

He was kind enough to explain that the e-meter measured the resistance of my body and that since my thoughts are apparently distributed throughout my body (not in my head like I had previously thought) that it would subtly affect the readings (since the machine is apparently much more sensitive than a police lie detector – which gives false positives he told me!).

After nothing really gave a response, he asked me if I was on drugs. I said no, and he asked a couple more times, really seeming concerned that his test didn’t send me flying into the failure house.

Although when I lightly adjusted my grip the needle went flying. He assured me that usually your grip doesn’t change when you’re thinking, although I mentioned some people have naturally shaky hands, but that didn’t seem to register with him.

He had me read the first two paragraphs on the inside cover of Dianetics which talked about how they’ve sold “50 million copies” and that it’s the “most read book on the mind”. It also mentioned something about the “reactive mind.”

I asked him about this and he told me Hubbard figured it all out in the 40s through psychiatry with patients. I asked if Hubbard was a psychiatrist and he said no, but apparently Hubbard read a lot of Freud which qualifies him. Apparently, Hubbard got to correspond with a lot of psychiatric patients who started telling him about their conditions, from which he wrote his book, Dianetics, which he sold to other patients who wanted to learn more.

I didn’t get a copy of Dianetics since it costs $24, but I did get a free DVD intro to Dianetics.

He also told me to look online, but watch out for all the negative lies about Scientology. I asked him who and why would people bad talk Scientology, and he replied that it was the “people selling drugs.” He elaborated that the big pharmaceutical companies didn’t really want us finding out about Scientology, and that any time there’s a new start up idea, people always try to bash it. I asked him “every time”, and he said yes, every time anyone has an idea, someone out there will try to knock it down. Usually they don’t have the money to keep going he said, but Scientology is still here 58 years later.

I also learnt that Scientology has the ability to marry people in Canada, but does not have tax exemption status. I guess we can credit the government for something.

They were taking down as I finished my conversation, so I took my DVD and headed out. I didn’t ask about Xenu or H-Bombs because I think I had more fun playing the ignorance card, and really just wanted to see what methods they were using there.

I have to say, it was definitely an interesting experience.