How To: Become a Scientologist

Want to be cool like Kirstie Alley, Jenna Elfman and the rest of Hollywood's A-list? Here's your blueprint.

1. Take a free personality test
Called the Oxford Capacity Analysis and administered by two Scientology volunteers, this will help you find the weak areas in your life. (Some example questions: "Is your voice monotonous, rather than varied in pitch?" "Do you often sing or whistle just for the fun of it?") Here's a list of all the questions, along with what the church considers the "right" answers. Cheat away right here!

2. Hit the bank and the books (in that order)
You need to attend classes, and that means paying some fees. Sorry—"fixed donations." Entry-level courses will run you 50–100 bucks, but to make the upper reaches of Scientology you need to take higher-level courses, and that ain't cheap. (One estimate puts the cost of reaching the church's highest level at $380,000.) Can't afford classes? Then you can't be a member. But the church will take you on as an employee to recruit people who have more money.

3. Don't be gay or a journalist (Sorry, Anderson Cooper)
Well, you can technically "be" gay, but you have to be an "ethics in" homosexual, which means you can't actually "have" any homosexual sex. So you can see why they only let ultra-macho dudes like Tom Cruise and John Travolta become members. Journalists, on the other hand, aren't allowed anywhere near Old Mother Hubbard's cupboard.

4. Locate those bad memories
It's time to get hooked up to a Hubbard Electropsychometer, or E-Meter, a biofeedback device dreamed up by the father of Scientology/shitty author, L. Ron Hubbard. You hold two electrodes that look like coffee cans while a Scientology minister has you recall happy and traumatic experiences from your life. The results will determine how many "engrams" you need to lose to free your "thetan." More on those terms right…now!

5. Free that thetan!
According to Scientology, each person is an immortal spirit called a thetan whose earthly problems are all due to engrams, extreme pain recorded in your mind.  As a "preclear," you need to be "audited" so you can lose those engrams and free your thetan, but here's the rub: since you've got trillions of engrams from all your past lives, it's going to take time and—yep—money. Purchased in 12.5 hour blocks, advanced auditing sessions costs $8,000–$9,000.

6. Sign on the dotted line
Time to sign some legal contracts that have you deny any psychiatric care offered by doctors (hear that, Brooke Shields?) and, of course, pledge your loyalty for "the next billion years." Now you're finally privy to the more, um, interesting tenets of Scientology made available only to advanced members. Those thetans we talked about? They're actually the souls of peopled killed by Xenu, the dictator of the Galactic Confederacy who brought billions of his people to earth, dumped them into volcanoes and killed them with hydrogen bombs. (Hence the cover of Dianetics.) Sounds logical, no?

Sorry, but the rest of your journey happens behind closed doors. Good luck with that. But if you see evil lord Xenu, give him a swift kick in the nuts for us.