Tom Cruise

Thoughts on cults and pet grief

For the past several months, I’ve been taking part in a Tom Cruise movie marathon. As this has progressed, my respect for Tom Cruise as an artist has grown astronomically, alongside my appreciation for cinema at large. The only downside to this undertaking is that a good friend of mine was once in a cult, and she likes to remind me that Cruise is an active member of one. I’m not in denial of this, but I also want to get lost in the world of “Jerry Maguire” without hesitation.

This friend is hilarious and incisive, someone I count on for no-nonsense takes on my bullshit. She’s not the sort of person anyone would expect to fall into something both silly and dangerous. It would be less shocking to find out she was leading a cult. I would probably join. I get why she joined one in the first place well enough to say I’m a good recruit. Even when life is going well, there always seems to be some empty space inside of it. I don’t know what fills it, but belief seems like a good guess.

I used to serve a woman who led what seemed to be a small cult in Southeastern Michigan. She always wanted to talk to me, a dangerous path to take with a chatty waitress. One day, as I spoke to her at a million miles an hour, she grabbed the sides of my face.

“Inside of your brain is a knob, like how you control the volume of a stereo”, she said. “Right now it is turned up to a hundred. I’m going to turn it down. Picture me turning it down.”

I felt the frenetic energy of my thoughts dissolve. In that instant the pace of the world slowed enough to seem manageable. “That’s better, isn’t it?” She asked. I understood how she had built a following.

I served her whole cult for her birthday the following month. No one ordered more than green tea or oatmeal, and no one tipped.

Another way to slow down time is actually to engage in a Tom Cruise marathon and force yourself to watch his early work. Ten minutes into “Losin’ It!”, you’ll notice time bending in your favor. There are some real duds in the canon, and Tom Cruise is by far the best part of many Tom Cruise movies.

His first on screen role is 54 seconds of the film “Endless Love”. This movie is one of the worst things I’ve ever seen. Not just one of the worst movies. It is the worst out of everything.

But Tom Cruise is electric. He literally somersaults into action, clad in tiny denim shorts, to declare his affinity for arson and set the plot in motion. Had any other actor been in that role, I would have thought, I can’t watch this movie for another second, let alone 54 of them.

But it wasn’t another actor, and I didn’t think that. All I thought was, who is that? Even though I knew exactly who it was. I think even if I had seen "Endless Love” in theaters in 1981, I would have known in those 54 seconds that this was the only reason I was there.

I read a small interview with him in which he describes the excitement of filming “Taps”, only a few months later at the age of 19:

“I couldn’t believe I was making a movie. I’m laying in bed and I’m so excited and so tense. I remember talking to myself going, ‘Just relax.’ I didn’t want this to ever end.”¹

Tom Cruise shows us all what it means to have passion.

This is the kind of purpose that I envy, one so refined and direct that the path of life unfolds clearly in pursuit of it. I’ve tried my hand at many creative outlets, some for years, but never had one thing that burst unavoidably from my soul. I think if one is destined to have that sort of direction, they don’t need to look too hard for it. I had to look to fill that empty space of life elsewhere, and I often looked towards my dog.

I got Brady when I was an awkward and angry 15 year old. He was a little bit different, an almost-show dog who was rejected for his undescended testicles and emerging imperfect features. He had a sharp bone at the top of his skull which pressed his fur up in a spiky tuft. He was big-boned, heavier than the average spaniel, but not particularly muscular or athletic.

At some point with his first owner, he’d been made aware his abnormalities and internalized a deep insecurity. Walking with him, he’d often stop and look up at me until I knelt down to pet his ears and tell him how perfect he was. He never made friends with any other dogs, and found no pleasure in human connection apart from his family. He’d bark and chase away nearly everyone, but with me he’d throw his paws over my shoulders and, with his large barrel teetering on scrawny legs, flex his paws to give me a perfect imitation of a human hug.

Brady’s professional headshot

He died this year on the last day of February. When he passed, the space in life that looms empty grew larger. He was 13 years old, and had lived a long, happy life. I was 28 and had long been off living my own life. Though I had returned home for weeks and months over the years, I had largely been gone for a decade. Still, my concept of home was tied up with Brady. Home was coming home to him.

A pet bond holds none of the let downs and disappointments that stack up in even the best of human relationships. It’s blind and it’s perfect. Brady may have terrorized elderly hikers, but he never let me down. And to Brady, I was never a surly teen, or a floundering adult returning home in confused intervals. He was just happy I came home.

I wondered briefly if the love of a pet could have kept Tom Cruise from falling under the spell of Scientology. However, research revealed that Tom Cruise has had many dogs over the years, including Spinee, a bizarrely named Labrador, and Sugar, a boringly named Schnauzer.  With both beloved pets and incredible artistic career, I don’t understand what more he was searching for. My only guess is that Sugar and Spinee passed long ago, and Scientology took their place.

An off the record dog he may have owned

I read an article that said pet grief can last up to 19 months. But most of the people I’ve spoken to about it have said they never got over their pets. Not after months, not after years. Never. When you get a dog, you accept that they die too soon. But what no one is prepared for is that them passing may cause you to become an outspoken advocate of a cult.

Recently, I took part in a guided meditation. Over half an hour, I was led into what was described to me as a “theta-state”, which is like being suspended in the moment between sleep and waking up. Once there, I floated in dark tranquility, dipping in and out of the conscious world. Then I felt Brady. It wasn’t a vague “he’s always with me” sensation, I physically felt him in my arms, reaching his paws around me and giving me a hug. It felt as real as a dream, or as real as life. Caught between the two, I didn’t know. But I felt him. Tears streamed down my face as I held his heavy body and felt the soft fur around his nose nuzzle against me. I knew I couldn’t stay in this place forever, but for that moment I was there, and for that moment it was real.

After the meditation, the pain of pet grief subsided. The feeling of reunion was lodged deeply in my heart. It’s can be a bit risky to talk about spiritual experiences, especially raw ones such as this. But I did feel inclined to share what happened with an acquaintance of mine who has begun to dabble in different healing practices. I described to her theta-waves, and began to lay out the meditation when she cut me off.

“That’s Scientology,” she told me.

I was alarmed, and disagreed, but she wouldn’t hear it, clearly suspicious that I was trying to convert her.

“I’m not a Scientologist,” I told her. “Maybe it’s a meditation for a different cult.”

I told her about the volume knob mediation that had been used on me years earlier, and she looked at me shocked.

“That’s Scientology too!”

Later, I searched the web for any connection, and found nothing conclusive. I’m pretty sure that my acquaintance was wrong, but Scientology is shrouded in secrecy so there’s no way of knowing. Perhaps one of the Scientology training routines involves exactly what I did. If that is the case, then I do think it explains a lot about Tom Cruise. I won’t make excuses for him, no matter how much I love “Vanilla Sky”. The Church of Scientology is dangerous. I am firmly against it. But a very small part of me wonders if Tom Cruise really does care about thetans, or auditing, or if he’s even being blackmailed. Maybe he has chosen this path for the moments when, alone in his mansion, he enters a state of half-wakefulness and feels Spinee and Sugar come home.

1. https://people.com/movies/tom-cruise-first-movie-taps-19/