The Prescription for a Superior Existence grew out of an incident that occurred ten years ago when I was recently out of college and planning to become an editor. After months of searching for an entry-level position, I got an internship over the phone at "Rapport," a book and jazz review magazine whose tiny budget and mostly imaginary subscriber list were, upon my arrival at its shambolic office in East Hollywood, a terrible surprise. I wanted to leave and never look back. But given how hard it was to break into the profession, I stayed for six months with the hope that it would lead to a paying job at a respectable -- or at least recognizable -- publication. Los Angeles at the time was a city of fantasy.

My commute to work every day ran along Sunset Boulevard, where at the corner of L. Ron Hubbard Boulevard I'd see the Church of Scientology, a gleaming blue complex with a half-acre parking lot and a massive electronic sign that offered passersby wisdom and empowerment and free personality tests. At first I didn't think much of it other than to wonder what could be learned about our personalities from a test; the great problem of being human, I thought, was that from an early age we knew ourselves too well and so should avoid rather than focus on the subject.

But soon I began hearing interesting rumors about the Church -- that it charged thousands of dollars for bizarre weekend "auditing" sessions, disciplined questioning members by shipping them to off-radar detention centers in Middle America ("somewhere near Omaha," went the story), and aggressively attacked its critics (its 1990 lawsuit against The Los Angeles Times for running an unflattering profile was notorious) -- so one day after work I stopped in to see it for myself.

The main building's high-ceilinged foyer was full of natural light but empty of people besides an alert receptionist sitting at his desk. I walked over to a wall covered from floor to ceiling with books and pamphlets written by the Church's founder, L. Rob Hubbard: Dianetics, "The Way to Happiness," Clear Body, Clear Mind, "On Psychiatric Subversion," "Cocaine: A Deadly Road to Personal Ruin," etc.

"Can I help you?" asked the receptionist, a well-groomed man in his mid-twenties who had crossed the room to join me. He nodded at The Fight for Freedom in my hand.

"I'm just looking around, thanks," I said.

"Are you new to Scientology?"

"Yes."

"Would you like to see an introductory film?"

I looked at my watch. "When does it start?"

"Right now."

What seemed to be fortuitous timing was not. There were no regularly scheduled screenings, but rather spontaneous showings for drop-ins like me, so I followed him down a long hallway to a 75-seat theater and then sat alone as the lights dimmed and onscreen another twenty-something well-groomed man -- there being safety in numbers -- said, standing in a beautiful leather-volume-bound library, "Welcome to the Church of Scientology. Let's begin by talking about the most important person in your life." There was a pause and I feared he would say what he then did, with a finger pointed at the camera: "You." Instead of criticizing his audience's (my) self-preoccupation, he spent the next twenty minutes explaining how the Church could heighten and justify and strengthen it. We possessed, he said, special qualities -- limitless intelligence, charisma, generosity and competence -- that could be fully developed through rigorous study and openness to the Church's teachings.

After this warm bath of promise and affirmation, it was time for us to dry off with the truth about Scientology. To replace whatever innuendo and scuttlebutt we'd heard with the real story. Because we might have been told by deceivers (blackguards the Church labeled "Suppressive Persons") that it was not a real faith and that Hubbard had simply made it up. Untrue. A list of the many countries' governments, including the United States', that had officially recognized it as a bona fide religion -- Albania's and Costa Rica's and New Zealand's and others' -- floated triumphantly up the screen. Nor should we think that its auditing sessions and weeklong retreats were a scam: a montage followed in which men and women from all socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds, as well as several minor celebrities, described the turnaround their lives had undergone after they'd joined Scientology. Genuine, palpable improvements. In one case, financial security. In another, independence from drugs. In a third, marriage. The message was clear: whatever your problems were, this certified religion had solutions that worked.

As the film went on, I felt increasingly uneasy. It was too eager, too adamant, too defensive, and I realized that no one knew I was there. In a spasm of paranoia, I thought that the building could be a kind of spiritual spider's web that held people hostage until they accepted Church doctrine. I was twenty-four and well-groomed. An institution as headstrong and survivalist as Scientology might think nothing of the occasional forced convert. By hook or by crook. I knew my worry was probably irrational -- I wasn't Patty Hearst -- but when the movie ended I got up quickly and jogged through the foyer to my car and felt inordinate relief when I was buckled in with the engine on. Safety.

Then there was movement in my peripheral vision.

"You left so quickly I didn't get a chance to ask what you thought of the film!" The receptionist stood beside my car, smiling.

"It was interesting," I said, rolling down the window a crack. Given how few people had been in the Church, a surprising number of cars were staggered around its parking lot, blocking the line of sight between me and the traffic on Sunset. I was hidden from view, still abductable.

"Could I get your name and address, so we can send you some follow-up literature?"

My instinct was to roll up my window and race out to the street, provided the exits hadn't been blocked; instead I recited the information and watched him write it down, wondering what chord of obedience had been struck in me and how I could silence it forever.

Luckily, no one later came to my house or contacted me, and I didn't have anything more to do with the Church beyond reading headlines about German protests at Tom Cruise movies. But I did go on to think about why someone in the modern era -- Hubbard had published Scientology's introductory text, Dianetics, in 1950 -- would build a new religion. Besides the cynical answer, that he did it for money and power, which was predictable and uninteresting, I considered the possibility that he really believed in Scientology and wanted to spread the word with the same impetus to save others that had fueled Moses and Jesus and Mohammad. Or that Scientology was in fact the ineradicable truth.

Being an agnostic, I discounted the third possibility but considered the second, in which a man had acted munificently but mistakenly for the good of humankind, fascinating. When I first envisioned The Prescription for a Superior Existence, therefore, and its religion-founding antagonist, Montgomery Shoale, I saw the PASE as springing from the same genuine, helpful, megalomaniacal, deluded impulse that had animated Hubbard, which seemed the best approach to what in the book is viewed by some as plausible and attractive, and by others as fraudulent and repellant.

In most ways, though, the PASE bears little resemblance to Scientology, because the latter's focus on self-actualization was less compelling to me than a new religion's approach to good and evil, the dichotomy that despite Nietzche and a century of European moral relativism hasn't lost its potency in the United States. In imagining the PASE's cosmology and ethical teachings, I thought about how powerfully concepts of good and evil undergird our foreign policy, and our wars on crime and drugs and immigration and sexual plurality, and the stories we tell ourselves. Hollywood's production of heroes and villains, for example -- the stark black and white of its moral universe -- suggests a deep yearning in us for what religions have long provided: a clear-cut division between right and wrong, and an instruction manual that if followed will lead to salvation and if ignored will lead to ruin. I decided that a homegrown belief system still in its infancy (the PASE) would likely emulate successful religions by conflating evil with desire, and that it might, as a logical extension of this practice, take a hardline stance against desire's most sensational form, for sex.

After a moment's hesitation this seemed inevitable.