(Continued...)

"Hubbard uses jargon like David Mamet uses curse words, only instead of bull sessions between losers at a pawn shop, he crafted a system for losers to base their lives around"The lights click on. Brian and I catch our breath. It was an edge-of-your-seat conversion experience. We stagger out of the screening room to be shepherded again by Jimmy. My reactive mind™ records a sense memory of his Aqua Velva. He leads us down a hallway lined with video screens, text-crammed posters, and an incredible amount of books. Admission to the Center is free, but do your analytical mind a favor and pony up a suggested $30 or so for what Scientologists call "source materials." I clutch paperback copies of Dianetics, Scientology: A New Slant On Life, and Scientology: The Fundamentals of Thought while Jimmy turns our attention to a wall monitor.

"Remember, it's dramatic, it's propaganda, but bottom line is this stuff works."

He plays a video of testimonials from actual Scientologists, not actors (although in any random sampling of Scientologists, you're bound to find at least seventeen actors). A woman says Scientology made her cancer go away. A guy who lived for years with no sense of smell reports that, after submitting to the engram™-scrubbing process known as auditing™, his nose was as good as new. Several people credit Scientology as a life saver and nearly everyone speaks in tones that say, "I don't wanna use the word 'miracle,' but..."

The next stop on our victory tour is the stress test, conducted with a junky, plastic, hobby-science device called an E-meter™. Not having Wikipedia on hand, I ask Jimmy what an E-meter™ does and how it works.

"Basically it reads your thoughts," he says.

Fair enough. Jimmy instructs me to hold the cups loosely and think about someone in my life to whom I have a strong emotional reaction. I think about a close friend. The needle doesn't budge.

"Okay, now think about someone else. Same deal."

I think about my mother. Still no reaction from the needle.

"Are you thinking?" The needle surges. "Oh! What was that? Just now?"

I try to remember. My best guess: the spike happened around the time my thoughts about mom were trailing off. Maybe my emotional response was so powerful that it left some kind of ectoplasmic turbulence in its wake. Or maybe I accidentally squeezed the cups.

But there's no time to contemplate. We're already being prepped for our next task, the Oxford Capacity Analysis (which, you may have guessed, has absolutely nothing to do with the university). In the dramatic triangle of our afternoon, the OCA is the probing, uncomfortable tip. We settle in for a rousing third act.

Brian and I are made to sit at desks in a cubby. Jimmy tells us the OCA is a standard personality test, not a Scientology thing (I discover later that it was not only devised by a Scientologist but a close friend of Hubbard's, in 1959). It's comprised of 200 questions, each of which can be answered positively, negatively, or not at all. I've taken tests like this before. I once worked as a Wal-Mart cashier, and before they hired me they asked, among other things, whether I'd go to the cops or my manager if I saw a crime committed in the store. I answered incorrectly then (I didn't trust my manager to bring a roll of quarters when I needed it, let alone handle a crime scene), and I have a feeling I'm not doing any better on the OCA.

We finish and hand off our exams to a new handler named Terry, who is trained in OCA scoring and interpretation. Terry is the antithesis of Jimmy; where Jimmy had earthy, Runyonesque charm, Terry has the silver scratch-off congeniality of a parolee who just wishes you'd make fun of his Burger King uniform. He leads us purposefully up the stairs to what he calls the "VIP room" (just across from the well-stocked Scientology snack bar) and sits me down at a small table. Terry looks me dead in the eye through his off-the-Walgreens-display reading glasses. His expression would be familiar to anyone who's sat across from a doctor and been told they're dying from a flesh-rotting genital parasite. My reactive mind™ braces itself for disaster.

"Walk out and never mention Scientology again, you are perfectly free to do so. You can also dive off a bridge or blow your brains out"The results aren't good. Terry shows me a graph with a few peaks and valleys, but mostly valleys. It indicates that I am deeply depressed. I'm also unstable, nervous, uncertain, irresponsible enough to leave an infant on the roof of my car, and so withdrawn that leaving an infant on the roof of my car is probably the closest I will ever come to connecting with another human being. On the plus side, I seem to be a go-getter, but as Terry points out, test results in that category were inconclusive.

Brian fares even worse. Terry interprets his results this way: "You'll find yourself at age 50 with no teeth left in your mouth because you've gotten in so many fights, and no friends left except people who hate themselves as much as you hate yourself."

Fucking Christ. Thankfully, in both our cases, Scientology can help.

After stumbling separately out of the VIP room, Brian and I realize that we've been at the Scientology center for nearly three and a half hours. We've already gotten serious bang for our entertainment buck. But there's still one more stop left on our itinerary: Orientation.

If you see just one piece of Scientology propaganda this year (a category that includes Vanilla Sky and Paul Haggis's Crash), make it Orientation. There is no better encapsulation of what the religion purports to be, and what it actually is. You can walk into almost any Scientology center in the country and ask to see it (it's also posted periodically on the Web, but the Church doesn't let it stay up for long). Not seeing it is like turning down a ticket to see the Rolling Stones play your own basement, more or less. If you think it's base to intrude on someone else's space for your own glib amusement, remember that Hubbard's missionary strategy relies heavily on co-opting celebrities to penetrate the mainstream consciousness. He's been sneaking into your living room for years. No harm in pulling up a chair in his.

Much of Orientation defies description. (Besides, I really do want you to see it.) But its climax is stunning. The host, a stiff-haired automaton shuffling from room to room in a typical Scientology "org" to interview various Church officials, ends his journey with a direct appeal to the viewer. At first the camera keeps a nice, comfortable distance. Then the host picks up steam, and we ease in closer and closer until we're right up in his face.

"Right this instant, you are at the threshold of your next trillion years," he intones. "You will live it in shivering agonized darkness, or you will live it triumphantly in the light; the choice is yours, not ours."

The camera moves in so close that we now appear to be inside the host's nostril.

"If you leave this room after seeing this film, and walk out and never mention Scientology again, you are perfectly free to do so. It would be stupid, but you can do it. You can also dive off a bridge or blow your brains out. That is your choice."

Evil Ron Popeil finishes his pitch and steps aside to reveal a huge, ornate doorway. The doors open and a supernova of white light spills out, along with a single, towering, monolithic word: "HELLO."

Brian and I slip out of the screening room and escape onto 46th Street. Two guys, rotten to the core, irredeemable except through thousands of dollars in intensive, Church-monitored auditing™. We have a choice to make: Shiver in agonized darkness? Leap off a bridge? Blow our brains out?

We go for burritos.

On our way, we pass a crowd of bewildered theatergoers spilling out of the Lion King. Suckers.

Illustrations by Brian Weaver

Scott Jacobson is a writer for the Daily Show with Jon Stewart

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