The Afterlife for Scientologists

Singer Isaac Hayes died on Sunday at the age of 65. Besides being a sex symbol, a soul-music legend, and a beloved voice-over artist, Hayes was also a dedicated Scientologist. According to his religious beliefs, what happens to Hayes now that he's passed away?

His soul will be "born again into the flesh of another body," as the Scientology Press Office's FAQ puts it. The actual details of how that rebirth occurs are not fully understood by church outsiders, but some core beliefs of Scientology are that every human being is really an immortal spiritual being known as a thetan and that the "meat bodies" we inhabit are merely vessels we shed upon death. (Members of the elite church cadre known as Sea Org, for example, sign contracts that pledge a billion years of service throughout successive lives.)

When a body dies, its thetan forgets the details of the former life, though painful and traumatic images known as engrams remain rooted in its unconscious. In order to move up the path of spiritual progression—known as the Bridge to Total Freedom—one must eradicate these psychic scars, which cause a person to act fearfully and irrationally. Once a Scientologist has purged them through the counseling process known as auditing, he or she is said to be "clear."

According to an avowed Scientology antagonist who claims, on her Web site, to present factual information typically omitted from church press materials, the official Scientology publication Celebrity announced that Hayes attained "clear" status around 2002, though it is not known whether he progressed onto the highest parts of the Bridge, the "operating thetan" levels. Details about what happens in these advanced stages remain closely guarded Scientology secrets, but at the very end of the process, thetans are supposed to gain power over the physical world; consequently, according to founder L. Ron Hubbard, they "feel no need of bodies," ending the cycle of birth and death and becoming pure, incorporeal souls.

If Hayes had progressed high enough on the Bridge, he might have begun preparing for his next life in the final days of this one. According to former Sea Org member Chuck Beatty, some upper-level operating thetans are said to possess the ability to choose their next set of birth parents.

In a widely reprinted 1990 Los Angeles Times article, Hubbard was quoted (apparently from a lecture given in the 1950s) describing how, after death, a thetan is carried to a "landing station" on Venus, where it is "programmed with lies," put in a capsule, and then "dumped" back on Earth, where it wanders in search of a baby to inhabit. Yet according to Laurie Hamilton, who says she has been a Scientologist since 1968, adherents are "free to accept or discard" such stories so long as they embrace the "methods and practices" of Scientology. One of the church's official Web sites stresses that a belief in past lives is not mandatory dogma but, rather, a personal truth that most Scientologists come to as they go through auditing.

The Web site also stresses that Scientologists do not believe in "reincarnation." Unlike religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism, in which reincarnation functions as a kind of justice system—i.e., an individual's behavior in one life determines the caliber of the next—rebirth in Scientology is a more mechanical process. Hubbard described it as "simply living time after time, getting a new body, eventually losing it and getting a new one."

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I'm nonplussed, maybe, but not wrong about it

I need to say something. And even though I'm going to refrain from typing in all caps, I urge you to pretend I did.

The word "nonplussed" does not mean unfazed, unperturbed or unconcerned. I know most people use it that way, but I really wish they'd stop.

"Nonplussed" comes from the Latin non plus, meaning "no more," which landed almost intact in English as "nonplus," meaning "a state in which no more can be said or done." The standard definition of "nonplussed" is "bewildered, confused or perplexed." Got that?

"Nonplussed" should not be used to describe people who are calm during earthquakes, speakers who remain poised when confronted with hecklers, or zoo animals that aren't aware that video footage showing them playing with dog toys is on CNN.com's most viewed list.
Moreover, there is no such thing as the word "plussed" (unless you're one of those people who talks about mathematics in terms of "plussing and minusing," which I personally stopped doing in college) and, even if there were, do you really think it would mean "fazed"? Would someone really say, "When I spotted Lindsay Lohan at Applebee's, I was so plussed I could barely finish my Mini Chicken Ranchers."

Unlikely. But in the realm of vocabulary blunders committed by those who should know better, nonplussed is nonpareil. The improper use of "nonplussed" has managed to infiltrate not just everyday speech but any number of books and articles that were presumably copy-edited by someone other than the author's stoned roommate.

Is it possible that the real "nonplussed" has become a casualty of its own vernacular groundswell? Maybe it's fed up with all that puzzlement and ready to settle down into a quiet, unfazed life? Or, like a person who's born one gender but is completely convinced that he's really the other, perhaps "nonplussed" is simply transitioning into its authentic self.

I posed some of these possibilities to Mark Liberman, a linguistics professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the founder of a linguistics blog called Language Log. Liberman must have found the "nonplussed" conundrum particularly compelling, because after agreeing to respond to my questions by e-mail, he instead answered them in the form of a post on his blog. He cautions against the term "misuse," which he considers "loaded," and points out that dictionary definitions can evolve markedly over time.

The word "silly," for example, went through several definitions between 1200 and 1600 as per the Oxford English Dictionary, Liberman says. Originally meaning "happy or blissful," it took on a sequence of definitions ranging from "spiritually blessed" to "pious" to "innocent" to "pitiable" to "insignificant" to "feeble" to "crazy" to, finally, "foolish or simple."

As for "nonplussed," Liberman notes that the "unfazed" meaning, which he calls the "new meaning," has already made it into the online dictionary Encarta, which lists "cool and collected; calm and unperturbed" as the second definition (right under "confused").

In other words, it's dictionary survival of the fittest at work; may the best definition win, or at least the one that triumphs through proliferation. Consider "peruse," which technically means "to read with thoroughness and care" but in today's parlance has come to mean "pretending to skim magazines while waiting for someone you met on the Internet to meet you at the bookstore." It's a little perverse that one thing can morph into something like its opposite, but it would mean "nonplussed" isn't a victim of plebeian misappropriation but, rather, an agent of change.

As it turns out, it is popular among those who see themselves as such. It so happens that in a People magazine interview last month, presidential hopeful Barack Obama commented on his daughters' response to media scrutiny by saying "I've been really happy by how nonplussed they've been by the whole thing."

Et tu, Obama?

It seems so. On the other hand, Liberman noticed two Web comments about the story that pretty much say it all.

Comment One: "Wow, our possible president using a word like 'nonplussed.' What a welcome change from Dubya and McCain."

Comment Two: "See, Barack Obama is not a snob. Like most people who would ever use the word "nonplussed" ... he uses it incorrectly. ... Take that, Harvard!"

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Wal-Mart: you can't scan century-old photos of your ancestors because copyright lasts forever

Tstamps sez,

I was in Spring Hill, Florida visiting my grandparents, who have all the family pictures of great grandparents and great-great grandparents. Doing the good familial thing, I decided to take the albums and scan the photos so that the rest of the family could see them. I only had one day to do this, and the only place near them was Wal-Mart (the Supercenter by highway 19). So I take the (sometimes) 100 year old photos to Wal-Mart and begin scanning them on their machine.

After a while, a Wal-Mart employee accosts me and tells me that I can't do that because those images are "Copyright to the studios that took them." I look down at my pictures. The picture she is pointing to is one of my great grandmother, taken about 1925. She has been dead since 1998. The photography studio (assuming it was taken by a studio) is not marked, and is long out of business, and the person who took the photo is long dead, as are, likely, his children and all of his business associates. The only known copy of the photo is the one I'm holding, which is owned by my grandparents, who gave it to me to copy.

In disbelief, I point out that the photo is almost 100 years old and the people are all dead. Undeterred, the Wal-Mart employee informs me that "Copyright lasts forever. It's the law." My scans up to that point are deleted and I'm free to leave the store with my old photos unscanned. I guess I should be thankful they didn't have a portable shredder on hand to seize my photos and do away with them right then and there. Is that in the next set of magic federal laws?

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