By Mark Guarino Chicago Tribune

4:27 p.m. CST, January 18, 2013
Q: Scientology presents itself is as an alternative to psychiatry, which was stigmatized in Hubbard's day. But therapy, as well as self-help culture, is generally accepted now. Does this shifting world threaten Scientology?

A: Scientology's approach to therapy is somewhat different. Between what they call the auditor, who in another term might be a therapist, and for the person receiving the treatment, there is the E-Meter device that functions as sort of a handicapped lie detector. If you believe that it can detect what is true and not true, that becomes a very potent intermediary. Hubbard said that it could register what lies below consciousness and it knew better than you what was true.

So let's say you enter into this therapeutic situation and an auditor asks what is troubling you. And they ask for early examples of situations, and finally, you run out of such examples, but they continue to press you and you get an image in your mind and the auditor is looking at you and says "What's that?" and you say, "Well, I don't know. It's just an image; I don't even know where it came from. It's an old English village." You flesh out this imaginary occurrence that the E-Meter validates. So it gives substance to fantasies that becomes a storehouse of these past life events. And that's very potent for a lot of people and reassuring that they've lived before and they will live again. Scientology has demonstrated to them that they are an eternal being. Once you gain that knowledge, you would be very reluctant to let go of it.

Q: How do you see Scientology's future?

A: It's too rich to actually go out of business. Interest in Scientology is obviously diminished. The proclivity people had for it in the past, the novelty, these things have all diminished with the weight of all these revelations that have come out about the church and inside behavior of its regents. Their reckoning is on the horizon. Whether it will come in the form of a federal investigation, or it is just a matter of the decision of its members and potential recruits to put distance between themselves and the church, that is something I can't answer.

Mark Guarino is a staff writer for the Christian Science Monitor, where he covers national news out of the Midwest.

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