How Joe Hochman Found Real Self Help

Here is a very interesting story of a long search for effective self help.

Forty years ago I was walking down East 7th Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan looking for self help when I read a small sign in the window of a brownstone that said "The human mind is capable of resolving the problem of the human mind."

I dared to hope it was true. If it was true it meant I might be able to get some help to figure out my own mind.

I had studied a lot about the mind: psychology, politics, Zen basketball, Tai Chi, meditation. I had visited a Hare Krishna office. The people there didn't look too happy. Not for me.

I had taken a lot of drugs by the standards of those days, anyhow, but after a while that became reshuffling the same old beat up deck of cards over and over.

I was 22. I had spent the winter the year before in Berkeley and the Spring and beginning of the "Summer of Love" in Haight-Ashbury.

I had driven my van to New York and found a place to live on the Lower East Side, and was walking down 7th Street when I saw this sign in the window that said "The human mind is capable of resolving the problem of the human mind."

I, for some illogical reason, still had a bit of hope to find real self help despite all the searching down blind alleys I had done this lifetime. But I was desperate.

After walking past that sign a few more days I decided to go up the steps and knock. Seeking after these answers was what I was doing with my life, anyway. I did not really have another avocation.

I moved people's furniture with my truck to make money when I needed to eat or pay the rent, but my "profession" was trying to find out who I was and what I was. Was I a brain or body or something else? Was there a way to be happy?

So, nervously with a little hope, I knocked. A fellow named Jim Zak came and let me in. He did not seem like a wise man or guru or intellectual. But there was something different about him. I didn't know what to make of it. He wasn't what I expected.

He played me some lectures on reel to reel tapes by a guy named "Hubbard", that did not seem to be an appropriate name for a wise man. On top of that, Hubbard had a Midwestern accent and "people from the Midwest were not wise men or gurus or intellectuals".

I don't remember what the lectures were about, but Jim told me I should go up to the organization on 32nd street. I walked in the lobby, went up the stairs to reception, and there at the desk was a girl I knew from Goddard College, Patty Kratman. (I had dropped out of Goddard a year before.)

Patty came around the desk and asked what I was doing there. I said something like I was there "to find out what this is all about."

She asked "Well, what's ruining your life?" I answered with no hesitation, "I'm afraid I'm going to get drafted."

She said "The Communication Course will handle that." I said, "OK, I'll do it."

The course started on Monday night the 22nd of January, 1968. There was this incredibly ebullient, pretty girl, Frannie DeVette, teaching the course. (I later found out she was only 19 but I figured she must be older than I because of all she knew.)

She told me I was a spiritual being, not a mind or a body, and had me look at a picture of a cat in my mind and said "the mind is made up of such pictures" and that I, a spiritual being, not a brain, was the one looking at it.

I had always hoped that I was something not material but didn't dare to believe it or suggest it because no one else seemed to have any agreement with that idea.

When I had asked my biology teacher in college "How do people think?" he had gotten irrationally really pissed off at me and never answered my question. Nor could I find any books in the college library that answered that question.

And here was this cute, 19 year old girl giving me real self help with the answers I had been seeking for most of this lifetime.

We did these communication drills.

I had done a lot of classes and courses and studies before and wrote senseless essays about the hidden meanings in books and "what the author was really trying to say".

But none of those courses had made a difference for me, how I felt about life, how I dealt with other people; and certainly no other course had given me any hope that I could become more able or actually made me feel better.

This one did.

I could now easily face people on the subway and street. I was far less introverted and withdrawn. I could help another person. I could talk to people. I could let them know they heard me and so feel better. I could handle their unexpected communications. I had found real self help.

I wasn't perfect at it yet, but I and my abilities had changed forever.

Then at the end of the week on Friday January 26th they gave me a certificate that said "Hubbard Apprentice Scientologist."

This was unexpected. I had gone to college almost 4 years and had not gotten a certificate. This certificate is far more important to me than any college "sheepskin" I might have gotten.

It hangs on the wall of my office to this day. It honors the first moment (in my endless history of getting less able, stupider, worse off) when my hope that there could be a way out was validated, the moment I first set foot on the actual Road to Truth.

It was the most important time of any lifetime because, at last, instead of becoming more and more trapped I was at the point where my downward slide turned around and I began to become more free.

By June of that year I was on staff at the New York Scientology Organization. After three years I became a professional practitioner in private practice in L.A. And I have been doing that full time professionally ever since.

Eventually I might even get around to writing that college senior thesis. I did find real self help and something worth spending a year on.

And what about the draft? Did the Communication Course handle that? Well, yes, it did and very well indeed. I did not get drafted and I did not go to Vietnam. But that is another story.

My wife, Annette, and I are trained and certified to the highest available levels of Scientology. For self help assistance or questions you can email us using the form below.

Joe Hochman