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Copyright 1996
All commercial rights are reserved to the author, who currently wishes to remain anonymous and therefore is writing under the pen name of "The Pilot". Individuals may freely copy these files on the internet for their own use and they may be made available on any web server who does not charge for them and who does not alter their contents.
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This document attempts to confront various things which are wrong with Scientology. It is not idle natter or an unjustified viscous attack. I believe in the stated goals of the subject and wish to see them achieved. To some degree, the subject has become its own worst enemy and this needs to be handled so that forward progress can be made. It would be wrong of me to simply shoot without offering something positive as well. For this reason, I ask that anyone making this document available to others should also include the remaining, more positively oriented, documents in this series.
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WHAT IS: That Hubbard was a self educated intuitive genius capable of great leaps of inductive logic.
WHAT ISN'T: The supposedly thorough research. It did not happen that way. LRH assumed that if something worked once, it would work again. He wanted to learn what he could from it and then go on to something else. Once the early Dianetic boom petered out, he was generally only teaching small classes of 10 to 20 advanced students and they jumped from one process to the next like jackrabbits. The techniques of one month were old in the next. The collection and codification of this material was left to others. Later, when there were thousands of practitioners, there was no room left for criticism of his words. He accepted little feedback from the field. In later days, backwards rundowns would be in use for years before any hint of failure filtered back up to the top.
WHAT IS: Scientology is a study of the mind and spirit.
WHAT ISN'T: Scientology has not really earned its claims of being a science. It might best be described as an "alchemy" sitting on the border between superstition and real understanding. Scientology works often but not always. The discrepancies are forced to fit by "Making it go right" and the failures are blamed on "out-Ethics" and hidden under the carpet least they blacken the reputation of the subject and thereby deny freedom to all mankind. This is a fanatical rather than a scientific approach.
WHAT IS: A science is the work of many individuals, each working independently. Hopefully there would be a free interchange of ideas but progress can occur even when this is absent. For example, Edison and Tesla were notorious enemies and yet the electricity in our homes depends heavily on both of their discoveries (Edison for the lights and motors and Tesla for the generators and transmission system).
Progress does not come from committees. Ideas, inventions, techniques, and discoveries do indeed originate from singular and individual sources. I have been on software design committees that achieved less than any of the individual members could have done alone. But this does not mean that everything comes from one single source.
WHAT ISN't: A complete science has never been originated exclusively by a single individual. In attempting to deny any possibility of other researchers, Hubbard has barred the road more thoroughly than any of the closed minds who reject the very existence of a spirit.
WHAT IS: The original foundations of Dianetics was in regression therapy. Ron made improvements, but the majority of the valuable enhancements came out in later years and are the valid product of years of running engrams on people.
WHAT ISN'T: The research line of regression therapy was never followed up properly by the professionals in psychotherapy. The problem was that regression therapy will quickly open up past lives. This made it obviously false to anyone who had the average scientist's anti-religious bias. In modern times, this prejudice has faded and you will find some psychotherapists practicing regression therapy, and it is almost always referred to as past life regression because that is what it inevitably leads to.
I doubt that Ron knew about this "bug" in regression therapy when he was writing DMSMH (Dianetics the Modern Science of Mental Health). He certainly doesn't mention it in the book and in his early lectures and taped demonstrations (1950), he forces the PCs (Preclears) into prenatal incidents as a solution to the inability to find basic incidents in the current lifetime. These prenatal incidents almost never show up in modern Dianetics and can safely be discounted as trivial and unimportant in most cases. This puts the entire Dianetics book in a bad light as far as any claims to producing real results or having been researched thoroughly.
Actually it was probably a lucky break for us (except for those who hate the subject) that he didn't do extensive research before he wrote the popular book and found himself committed to a supposedly invalidated technique. He opened his eyes, accepted the past lives, and ran with it.
WHAT IS: Many of the ideas and techniques in Scientology stem from earlier sources. Ron would say this quite freely in the early days. The Dianetic breakthrough into past lives (which strips away all the usual BS about everybody having been Cleopatra that comes up in many mystical circles) provided an organizing point (a stable datum) around which all the existing data in metaphysics and philosophy could be aligned. Scientology was originally a system for separating the wheat from the chaff (see the 1952 lecture "Scientology: Milestone One").
Ron pulled together stuff out of everything from General Semantics and Magic to Krishnamurti and the Tibetan materials. He distilled out the essence of what he saw as true, discarded the old superstitions that were mingled in, and pulled it together into what he considered to be a cohesive whole. Even as late as 1955 he talked about himself as being the great organizer rather than an originator.
From magic and Crowley he deduces that the one thing they were doing that worked was to practice clearly visualizing the effect of a spell before trying to cast it so as to avoid the spell going wrong and backfiring. Ron realized that when these spells work, it was this visualization and "The Will" which created the success rather than the mumbo-jumbo rituals. He distills this down to the mockup processing which is the mainstay of the Philadelphia Doctorate Course and he refines Crowly's idea of "Will" into a much more clearly defined concept of "Intention".
Early in this century, self hypnosis and auto-suggestion were in vogue and according to the unauthorized biographies, Ron jumped on the bandwagon with his "affirmations". This makes total sense because if you drop out the hypnosis (which Ron turned his back on fairly early) and evolve the concept into its highest imaginable form, you find yourself with the Scientology concept of making postulates. And that's quite a step above positive thinking (which also evolved out of auto-suggestion).
You'll find the "Yoga of the psychic heat" (see Evan's "Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrines") in a vastly improved form among the Route 1 drills in Creation of Human Ability and you'll find that the "Meditation on a Breathing Object" is the forerunner of TR0. But the improvements made are vast and show real brilliance. He got very good at this over the years.
WHAT ISN'T: The subject of Scientology did not spring out of thin air. Hubbard didn't come from some advanced Galactic Civilization to teach us poor yokels. This is a weird idea that has gained popularity on the dumb rumor line within the subject. Of course he jokingly says that he's not from this planet, but neither is anybody else according to Scientology theory. He certainly never says that the subject came from off planet. In fact he says the exact opposite.
The subject evolved. It must continue to evolve.
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WHAT IS: The Mind's Protection. If you read or talk about something, or even if you engage in consciousness raising techniques or processes, it is nearly impossible to do any lasting harm. If an idea is too dangerous to the person's current mental state, he will tune it out, misunderstand it, or simply consider it to be ridiculous. "They have ears that hear not" is basically a protective mechanism, and it works. LRH was a strong proponent of this idea.
WHAT ISN'T: The mind's protection does not work in the presence of duress or high pressure techniques. Brainwashing, hypnotism, and even the implants (electronic implantation of hypnotic commands as done in advanced space traveling cultures found in past life incidents) described in the Scientology literature illustrate this quite clearly.
Sea Org training techniques intentionally bypassed the mind's protection and made robots. Consider, for example, the early FEBC (Flag Executive Briefing Course) students studying with poor food and sleep in a dangerous environment (Ethics etc.) under heavy time and peer pressure with literal minded instructors and occasional bouts of physical duress ("run around the deck 10 times"). Listening to the course tapes in a reasonable environment, you might actually learn something from them. But most of the original students came back crazy as loons and acted like dramatizing psychotics.
Most auditing is light enough in its methods that the mind's protection concept is effective and keeps you from doing any long term damage. The rule against evaluating for the PreClear and telling him what to think rules out many of the potentially dangerous pressures that could be brought to bear. But there are exceptions. The most notable is listing techniques where the PC gives answers to a listing question (such as "What do you use to make others wrong") in an effort to find "The Real Answer". When the PC finds the correct answer, the auditor gives it back to him indicating that it is the correct answer. The technique is very powerful and can produce fantastic results. But the auditor can make a mistake and jam a wrong answer down the PCs throat. The questions are generally so hot and the answers of such importance that this puts significant pressure on the PC and the mind's protection idea ceases to work. Goofing this up can make the PC worse. There was an HCOB (Hubbard Communication Office Bulletin) to this effect at one time but it dived out of sight and is not in the Tech Volumes.
WHAT IS: The lower level grades of release can produce marvelous results. The grades 0 to 4 address communication, problems, overts, upsets, and fixed ideas. This was probably the cleanest and most thorough research done in the subject.
WHAT ISN'T: These grades were not well planned out and designed. Instead, they evolved on a hit or miss basis. They began as a hodge-podge of processes that handled things that Hubbard kept running into while trying to research the areas that he was really interested in. Eventually he packaged these up into the grades in 1965. But there were errors and mistaken assumptions and it wasn't until the 1970s that these were knocked around into a really workable form. Much of the compilation and even the process commands were put together by others and apparently not even reviewed by Ron because years later he was shocked at one of the processes being used (a particular grade 4 technique) and issued a bulletin saying that it was a dumb idea.
WHAT IS: These grades do work (unless grossly misapplied) to produce a state of release on the topic addressed so that the person not only feels better about the specific thing handled but also becomes free of the accumulated weight of the entire topic. For example, problems are handled until the mass of past problems that he is still carrying around suddenly falls away and leaves him much relieved.
WHAT ISN'T: The grade releases are known to be unstable. What was handled generally remains handled, but the extra effect of being free on the entire subject (e.g. can make problems vanish at will etc.) is a temporary condition. The area is not actually erased, it is only "keyed-out". If it later "keys-in" again, more processing is needed to rehabilitate the release.
WHAT IS: Ron believed that the "reactive mind" underlied the grades of release and that when it was erased by going clear, the underlying source of these grades would be gone and they would be automatically erased as a consequence.
WHAT ISN'T: This is obviously incorrect. All auditing sessions begin with handling any problems, upsets, etc. that have newly arisen. This is done even on Clears and OTs. You can see the effect of a grade release in that the PC doesn't come up with new problems for awhile after a problems release etc., but they certainly come up with them eventually even if the person is Clear or on the upper OT levels.
WHAT IS: The latest effort to explain why a clear has problems is to blame it on OT III or NOTs.
WHAT ISN'T: Again this is a mistake, and a bad one. The person is the source of their own problems. There is nothing on the upper levels which shows them to be a primary source and there is plenty of material on the grades themselves which logically speaking could be viewed as a primary source for aberration. The person does become free of problems by running Grade I and he does not do so by running OT III.
WHAT IS: The theory of the grades is stand alone and does not include anything which requires the prior existence of engrams, implants, entities, or anything else. The grades contain factors which could be operative on a god-like thetan who was incapable of being hurt whereas things such as implants and engrams require that the being has already sunk low enough to be kicked around. The idea of an upset god wildly committing overts is quite common and probably rests on real buried memories.
WHAT ISN'T: We've got it backwards. The grades are the ultimate OT levels. They are what was really wrong in the first place. Nobody in Scientology has ever erased the basic material on these grades. Total cause over communications would include the ability to acknowledge a speeding bullet and have it vanish.
WHAT IS: All that other stuff on the upper levels is there to be audited out. But it's minor stuff. A mere distraction which is in the way of getting to the basics on the grades.
WHAT ISN'T: It is not practical to try and erase the grades at lower levels. People are nowhere near being able to reach the original problems, overts, etc. which they had when they were early god-like beings and which caused them to postulate their own downfall. They can't even visualize the multi-dimensional realities that had to be present early on. They are fixated on an Earth-like three dimensional existence and you can only expect so much of them. So the right approach would be to get a release on the grades (the basic aberrations), then fool around with all the other stuff to get it out of the way and raise the guy's awareness, and then get back to the grade materials and really erase them in the basic area of his past existence.
WHAT IS: There is a state of Clear. It might be described as regaining control over painful mental pictures. Even the psychiatrists recognize that a person can get flashbacks of a violent incident. It is attained either by gradually accustoming the PC to recalling painful incidents (as in Dianetics) or by repetitive spotting of commands implanted with heavy force eons ago (as is done on the Clearing Course) until the person can confront the force in mental pictures without being bothered by it.
WHAT ISN'T: The wild ideas and sales talk about the state of clear in Scientology is mainly advertising and wishful thinking. The description of a Clear in the Dianetics book is an impossible condition since it assumes perfect recall etc. in one lifetime without any spiritual awareness or knowledge of earlier lives. It was never possible. If you extend the definition out into the realm of Scientology and expect full recall across the whole course of a being's existence, then we are talking about an ultimate super OT condition that Scientology is nowhere near achieving at this time, but which might be the ultimate target that we are working towards.
WHAT IS: There is a CofS policy to the effect that invalidating the state of clear is a suppressive act.
WHAT ISN't: The shortcomings of the definition of clear are not generally talked about among Scientologists and nobody dares say anything to mitigate unrestrained sales hype on the subject because that might well get them kicked out. People who have gone clear know what they did and didn't get from it but keep their mouths shut because it really is a wonderful state despite its limitations. The unfortunate side effect is that many who do achieve the state then look at the definition and invalidate themselves because they don't match up to what the book says. And so they have an entire auditing rundown (the CCRD - Clear Certainty Rundown) to cure the harm done by this wrong information.
WHAT IS: The clear cognition is the awareness that the individual is mocking up his own bank (reactive mind) and pictures.
WHAT ISN'T: Knowing this in the abstract is not the same as being aware of and in control of it. The cognition is not confidential and is mentioned often on Ron's Tapes. It is generally helpful for someone who is not clear to know it because it encourages them to take control over their reactive mind. It was common knowledge among most Scientologists in the 1960s. When they started letting people attest to Dianetic Clear, there was a technical bulletin saying not to push people into falsely attesting to the state by feeding them the Clear cog. This is commonly (but not always) misinterpreted to mean that the cog is confidential and so the cog has ceased to be common knowledge among lower level Scientology public.
WHAT IS: The Church's polices on confidentiality of upper level materials are quite drastic. Lose a piece of confidential paper and you may be disbarred from upper levels for life. Breath a word of it in casual conversation, even with others who have done the level, or forget to lock a briefcase, and you may be doing a substantial amends project.
WHAT ISN'T: The policy isn't successful except to harass their loyal members and generate a big mystery. Back in the 1950s, Ron used to talk jokingly about the cults which kept big hidden secrets in their inner sanctums so as to keep the bucks flowing. Just check out the introduction to Dianetics 55 ("Secrets, Secrets, Secrets) for a sample of this. As far as keeping anything out of the hands of their enemies, the confidentiality seems to have caused a publishing boom in unauthorized copies.
WHAT IS: In the early days, when Ron was digging up material on implants, issuing OT drills, and even coming up with early versions of the NOTs techniques (1952-1953), some of the students asked if this stuff should be confidential and he said that it must not be made confidential and hidden because then it will fall into the wrong hands and be used against people who are unaware of it. He said that the only safety was to shout this stuff from the rooftops and publish it broadly. The only real danger is in keeping it secret.
WHAT ISN'T: The horrible danger of seeing the confidential materials without proper preparation. It just doesn't happen that way. The mind's protection is at maximum when somebody is safely reading something on their own. You can sometimes get somebody sick by jamming this stuff down their throats, but that's true of force feeding any Scientology process or, for that matter, the techniques of other practices as well.
WHAT IS: The idea that entities are the source of bank, aberrations, and somatics is currently believed in the upper levels of the Church. Ron certainly ranted and raved enough about it in the Class VIII Course lectures and he theorized it as the source of somatics.
WHAT ISN'T: This is totally contrary to all basic Scientology theory. The whole reason that auditing works is that the person himself is generating all of his own ills.
WHAT IS: There is a benefit to running NOTs. The BTs (body thetans - entities) get in the way. They are a bit like a boat anchor that makes it difficult to build up any horsepower. They will amplify your pains and aberrations. But they are never the source. They are not worth bothering about while you have things to handle which are closer to home (such as problems, upsets, etc.) but eventually they need to be knocked out of the way. Blaming stuff on these guys is the exact reason that the org has trouble if a PC finds out about them at lower levels. It's a license to blame somebody else for your overts and problems and that has always been known (at least in Scientology) to be a sure way to get worse.
WHAT ISN'T: Most of the BTs are not independent beings. That is simply a mistaken idea. We all put pieces of ourselves on each other. Joe puts a bit of himself on Bill to keep Bill in line. Parents will instinctively shove a bit of themselves into their kids to keep tabs on them. The child would find these as "BT"s. The big mass implants were to make us do this compulsively and unconsciously so as to keep each other obedient and human. The implants didn't reduce the population at all.
WHAT IS: The solo nots technique is simple and useful. Everybody should know that you ask "What are you"/"Who are you" if an entity of some sort does pop up, and to encourage them to answer "Me" until they do so and stop fooling around with mocking themselves up as demons or whatever. This stuff does show up on rare occasions at lower levels, and the org leaves you stumbling around in the dark when an easy trick would handle it.
WHAT ISN'T: The idea of handling court cases by fooling around with the opponent's BTs at a distance was ridiculous. Maybe it would have worked if entities really were the source of all aberration, but they're only a minor factor. The auditors would have been better off visiting enemies in their sleep and trying to give them nightmares. But Ron used to joke about his students doing that to him, he just though it was funny and not very effective.
As a little aside, there is also an old Tibetan technique for handling demons. This is from the Book of the Dead. If a demon shows up to scare you, you mock yourself up as an even bigger and more horrible demon and scare him right back. If you really get in trouble with an entity of some sort haunting you, this does work as a last resort. Its not very nice so don't use it without just cause.
WHAT IS: The idea that if the specific details of implants were not kept confidential, they would be used in advertising etc. This was being spread about as one of the reasons for confidentiality.
WHAT ISN'T: It's just not an important point. Madison avenue has already found all the hottest buttons on people. They would laugh at using Scientology's stuff for this. If you find some really early implants, you will often find Gorillas, Tigers, Bears, Planes, Trains, Automobiles, etc. These are the hottest buttons. That's why this universe is so solid. Its all around us. Madison Ave. might not know about implants, but they sure do know about the key buttons and they push them with great vigor. By this time, we have become so thick skinned that we just shrug this stuff off with hardly a quiver.
By the way, the hotter TV commercials are good ways to spot implanted buttons. The advertisers do all the surveys for you and then you just notice what item had to have been implanted for the commercials to work. For example, "To be everybody" is not very hot as a sales button but "To be just like everyone else" is pretty good and is a popular underlying button in advertisements. Guess which one has the bigger kick on an E-meter. Of course the opposite was also implanted (implants often use positive/negative pairs) so that "To be different" is also a hot sales button and implant item.
WHAT IS: XENU (or XEMU) is a bad guy mentioned in the confidential literature. He's a villain comparable to Hitler except that he had a higher level of technology to kick people around with.
WHAT ISN'T: Scientologists who have done OT III don't have any particular flinch at this guy. Its not like you're talking about Satan or some evil god who can reach out and get you. He was just a bad guy. The flinch that you see when the "dreaded" name comes up is not fear of Xemu. It is fear of Ethics. I would not be surprised if you saw an OT turn green at the mention of him. But it's visions of being put on thousands of hours of amends projects or being permanently barred from upper levels that is scaring him.
WHAT IS: Ron was all excited about writing and filming a popular movie about Xemu. It showed him (Xemu) shipping all the malcontents and minorities to Earth and then bombing the volcanoes and ended with the brave fight of the loyal officers to bring Xemu to justice. It centered around a particular loyal officer and (for a sexy heroine) a movie starlet who find out about the plot but are too late to stop it. But they lead the revolution that overthrows Xemu. Of course there is no mention of BTs or past lives. The story is presented as a record left for future civilizations on Earth so they can know what happened when the dinosaurs died out. It is found by archeologists or something like that and shown to the president of the US who promptly has it destroyed.
WHAT ISN't: This movie, which was called "Revolt in the Stars", apparently isn't going to be made. There was an unsuccessful attempt to film it in the late 70s and a second try (which I think never got past the financing stage) in the early 80s. The screenplay circulated quite widely, being given out to anyone who they were trying to talk into taking a share in the financing. In the late 80s the SO got scared about this film (I can hardly imagine why) and started trying to gather up all the copies and jumping on anyone who had ever had their hands on the screenplay.
Maybe their attitude will change eventually. It wasn't a bad screenplay. Nowhere near as good as "Total Recall" but better than "The Black Hole". Maybe with all the ARS publicity (the alt.relegion.scientology newsgroup on the internet) it would do better if it was retitled "XENU, The Movie". I think LRH would have liked that.
WHAT IS: There are all sorts of parody's of Xemu and various OT levels floating around on the net.
WHAT ISN'T: I can't see the harm in this. Not only is it funny, but it helps you get exterior to the whole mess. By placing such fantastic importance on a few incidents and making them confidential, and furthermore loading them all with tons of sales hype, we have actually created a great deal of mental charge on this stuff and given it more power than it has. A few jokes can blow off this artificially built up charge and get the whole thing in perspective.
I particularly liked the parody of Incident One where a Ford Mustang comes out and turns right, then left, followed by the sounds of Snap, Crackle, and Pop, and then the being is overwhelmed by waves of soggy Rice Crispies.
WHAT IS: There is a Scientology policy against jokers and degraders issued around 1969 or 70. It basically makes it a suppressive act to make fun of the subject.
WHAT ISN'T: This is not a good policy. Humor is more than just entertainment. The ability to laugh at ourselves is a mechanism for social change. It is one of the few ways to relieve charge outside of auditing. It even works on groups, and relieving group charge has always been one of our biggest problems in Scientology.
WHAT IS: There used to be many jokes within the organization. We enjoyed laughing at ourselves. How many OTs does it take to change a light bulb? Seven. One to hold the light bulb and six to turn the universe around it. One of our layout artists once made up an ad about how the R6 course enlarged breasts, complete with before and after pictures. She pasted this into a ladies magazine in a vary professional manner and we used to hand it to unsuspecting students and staff members and tell them to look at the exciting new ad from St. Hill (the advanced training center in England).
One time we drew up an org board (Scientology organization chart) for a Scientology whorehouse. The examiner would check that the "session" went OK. There would be success stories, etc. We figured that it would be light years beyond the competition. There were slogans like "The Golden Age of Standard Screwing".
WHAT ISN'T: This kind of stuff is now forbidden. That, all by itself, I consider to be a key characteristic of a suppressive group.
WHAT IS: There are "group engrams" discussed in the early tech. Ron saw that groups did have many of the characteristics of individuals and could be bent out of shape by external impacts (or for that matter by committing overts etc.).
WHAT ISN'T: All attempts at group engram running failed. Ron finally concluded that it couldn't be done with the existing technology. He never got back to this topic and its still an area that is in desperate need of research. As a stopgap measure, he offered the idea of writing honest histories as the best way of blowing group charge. At one time he considered this to be of tremendous importance in keeping a group sane and true to its original goals. Now, unfortunately, the real stories of what happened are hidden and buried under a tidal wave of PR.
WHAT IS: To publish or even say anything publicly about Scientology, a Scientologist must first get "Issue Authority". This doesn't apply to talking to friends, which is dissemination, but it does apply to anything which reaches the public at large. This was the way it was in the sixties and seventies. They might call it something else now. One guy I know was all excited about Scientology and planned to give a little speech about it as part of a presentation he was doing at a computer conference and was stopped by the GO (this was late 1970s). Someone like Travolta would have to rehearse and clear exactly what he was going to say about the subject before making any statement on TV. But sometimes if they trust the guy's judgment (and maybe put him through some training) they will give someone a blanket OK to say things publicly, but even then the ethics officer will be looking over his shoulder to be sure that no out-ethics occurs, and anything that puts the subject in a bad light is considered to be out-ethics.
WHAT ISN'T: There isn't a lot of real communication from Scientologists on the internet. Of course they will let an innocent beginner blabber about how wonderful it all is and there are real professionals hatted up to handle the internet, but anyone else better be careful what they say or they'll end up in Ethics. You might still have a gutsy OT who takes his chances, but it would be rare. Also, since there is NOTS material on the internet, anyone who has not already started NOTS would be risking terrible amends projects or disbarment by reading ARS.
WHAT IS: The book "What is Scientology" and the other stuff that has been put up at the church's website obviously has issue authority. Therefore any member will be allowed to freely copy and spread this stuff around. I'm talking now about internal Church policies rather than copyright laws.
WHAT ISN'T: They can't normally say anything else. Even quoting an innocuous line from a technical bulletin might get one in deep trouble. Getting issue authority used to take many months and endless hassles and arguments. It puts a big stop on the communications. Their horrible spam (flooding the newsgroup with messages to drown out the opposition and break the communication line) might actually have been interesting and of use to some people if they had dumped megabytes of real material (maybe tape transcripts) onto the internet. There are about 3000 hours of taped lectures and most of them have been transcribed. They could have gone on for weeks without ever repeating themselves. Instead, they couldn't say anything worthwhile and had to keep repeating quotes from that shallow book which isn't even by Ron and is hardly more than a collection of sales hype.
WHAT IS: Some of LRH's most famous lines were "When In Doubt, Communicate" and "Communication is the Universal Solvent".
WHAT ISN'T: Current policy apparently frowns on applying this. But as is often the case, Ron's early statement was correct and the later policy is self-destructive. They have been trying to stop communications on the internet and it has been rebounding against them badly.
But they are not all stupid, and some of them know the early tech. I believe that there has been an internal push for many months now to give at least a few trustworthy OTs a blanket OK to really talk on the internet. The terrible failure of the existing effort to handle the net by spamming (which lead to all sorts of "horrible" consequences such as the Xenu message headers etc.) has probably caused enough of an upheaval internally that this OK may have been issued.
I believe that this is the status of "Clear Baby" who has shown up on the internet lately. I don't know for sure, but she does seem to be communicating rather freely without looking out for the Ethics officer. People like this will probably communicate honestly as long as you don't push them too hard on delicate issues or try to pull the Church's withholds. They might not even know anything about Flag Orders or the Church's internal operations. If OSA was smart, they gave this OK to devoted public rather than SO staff and are trusting to the person's love of the subject rather than trying to control the communication.
(Update: Clear Baby's identity was exposed and she now seems to be headed for the freezone).
Needless to say, I don't have any such OK. If you said the kind of stuff within the Church that I've been saying here, you'd be in Ethics the next day. That would happen even if you only said it in a confessional, nothing to say of blabbing it all over the internet.
WHAT IS: In the old days, Ron was basically honest with his course students. Occasionally he exaggerated or got carried away with himself or downplayed something, but he was not busily concocting lies or making up stories.
WHAT ISN'T: The various little biographical sketches placed in the books were highly inaccurate and were not written by Ron. His overt was in ignoring all the stuff that his staff was putting out. He really didn't care what they told the public. He was annoyed at society for ignoring his big discoveries and saw himself in competition with the heavy outpouring of false advertisement from big business.
The "Story of Dianetics and Scientology" tape that is available at the Scientology website is just one example of what he would really say to his students. Of course he shows himself in a good light, but he doesn't make false claims about having a degree in Nuclear Physics either. Quite the opposite.
Concerning that silly Nuclear Physics degree, someone in the org's PR department got the Academy of Scientology to issue an honorary degree in Nuclear Physics to Ron when they put out the Radiation book. He thought it was very funny and makes jokes about it with the students in his next lecture.
Concerning "Snake" Thompson (the unauthorized biographies claim that he was made up by Ron), the guy really did exist and he wrote a book called "The Navy Operations Manual on Psychoanalysis". It was used in the Navy in WW2 and is probably the underlying source for the popular picture of pleasant and sensible Freudian analysts in the military which we get from shows like "MASH". It was a very good and practical book and was reprinted as a popular paperback in the late 1950s. I think it even uses phrases like "This is an operation manual for the human mind" and includes techniques on regression therapy etc. I had a copy back around 1963 and it was the best book on psychoanalysis that I have ever read. Unfortunately, it was tossed along with loads of other psych books when I became fanatically inspired by LRH tech a few years later. If I'd known, I'd have hung on to it.
In the book, the commander discusses studying with Freud in Vienna and then going to various military bases in Asia to experiment with the techniques. I think that the timing was right for Ron to bump into him while sailing back to the US.
The org doesn't seem to be digging out this book and holding it up to prove Ron's story. Perhaps it has a bit too much of early Dianetics in it. Or more likely, he got the guy's name wrong. It has been over 30 years since I read the book and I'm not sure but it could have been by Commander Thomas something or other ("Snake" is obviously a nickname). The org wouldn't dare bring it up if Ron misremembered the man's name since a Clear should have perfect recall and since Ron was supposed to have studied with him instead of simply talking with him a bit (and maybe getting a copy of his book) during a long sea voyage.
WHAT IS: The unauthorized biographies of LRH are generally accurate as to verifiable facts but are badly slanted in terms of the stories they contain. Much of the material came from people who were very upset and pissed off at Ron and Scientology. They often had been abused and mistreated, but this makes them a very biased source and there is a tendency to exaggerate, make up things, and only tell one side of the story.
WHAT ISN'T: The SO can't really correct any of the inaccuracies or tell the other side of any of the stories because then they would have to admit all the bad things that really did happen.
Let's take, for example, Otto Roos' story about Ron demanding to see his own PC folders. Its not quite right. Ron ordered that his PC folders be taken away from Otto and carried to the Qual Sec (the Scientology name for the chief of quality control in a Scientology organization) for her to examine rather than looking at them himself. You might not think this is a big point but it is of significance to church members because the inaccurate story makes Ron seem hypocritical (PCs aren't supposed to look at their own folders).
However, Ron did indeed punch Otto and he did indeed have Rock Slam type discreditable meter reads (he freely talks about this on earlier Briefing Course tapes) and the org doesn't want to confirm any of that.
WHAT IS: In later times (1970s), Ron was notorious for his screaming rages.
WHAT ISN'T: This was not purely reactive. He had it firmly under control. There are many stories where somebody else would walk by and Ron would break off in mid-yell to give them a soft and pleasant "Hello, how are you" before jacking the decibels back up and resuming the attack.
I don't think this was a good way to handle people. It was based on a mistaken idea that you handle other people's bank (meaning the reactive bank or reactive mind) by exerting more force at them than the bank does. He would never have said that in the early days. Force begets force and causes the target to key-in more heavily. If force helped people, police states would be therapeutic. This wrong idea was simply his way of justifying to himself that he was correct in launching these tirades.
Here we see the real difference between a cleared and an uncleared individual. Before clear, the rage would have been a stimulus response blind rage that was out of control. After clear, it is all quite conscious and supposedly well thought out and is actually under the individual's control. None the less, the desire to throw that shrieking fit is not at all handled by going clear, and the impulse is quite abberated. In this case, I see the aberrations as coming from the mental charge that was bypassed by making errors in researching what, after all, is one of the most difficult subjects to figure out correctly.
WHAT IS: The first Clear to graduate the clearing course in the mid-1960s was John MacMasters (affectionately refereed to as "John Mac"). He had had cancer and had his stomach removed and was told that he only had a year to live back around 1960. He responded by getting into Scientology and auditing and training as hard as he could and was in much better shape and even capable of eating real food instead of gruel by the late 60s. He used to go around on world tours promoting Scientology and the clearing course.
WHAT ISN'T: He didn't like the Sea Org. They mistreated him. He had other interests. They called this "other intention-ness" and tried to put him in lower ethics conditions. He walked out. They declared him suppressive. He had been a known homosexual, but they could not use this directly at that time because there were many homosexuals in Scientology. So instead, they declared him for putting himself in a position where he could be blackmailed (supposedly for being a secret homosexual even though that was an "everybody knows" situation) because they didn't want to talk about his real reasons for leaving. This was sometime in the early 70s.
Later he became very bitter and said nasty things about his earlier experiences with Hubbard, but in the 1965-68 period he really loved the subject and would do anything for Ron. The love turned to hate after too much contact with later Sea Org craziness and that's what we hear in his later statements. He did well for quite awhile after leaving, but eventually he passed away. He used to talk about how he really wanted to drop his surgically mutilated body and go find a teenager in a coma in a hospital (because the thetan would have left) and pick right up again without all the troubles of having to reincarnate as a baby.
WHAT IS: The CofS is currently anti-homosexual. Practicing homosexuals are currently blocked from upper levels.
WHAT ISN'T: This was not the case until sometime in the 1980s. The only early reference by Ron was that thetans basically don't have a sex (there aren't male and female thetans). It was believed that people became homosexual due to mental charge of some sort (such as a bad incident that might need to be run out), but when this charge was removed, they tended to become bi-sexual (no longer blocked from heterosexual relations) rather than abandoning homosexuality.
There was even an idea circulating among staff in the 1960s that everyone should try a homosexual experience once just to get your TRs in on it (in other words, get your confront up on it). I know a few who tried it on this basis, and even one girl who decided that she liked being gay better. However, most of us (including myself) felt that just because you hadn't screwed a gorilla, it didn't mean that you had to go and do it just to get your TRs in. Even so, the place was liberal and safe for alternative lifestyles. The idea of removing mental charge was that nobody would be prejudiced or much bothered by anything as long as no one was getting hurt.
WHAT IS: The Sea Org is currently pushing a very conservative sexual morality. SO members can be put into liability (a lower ethics condition with amends projects etc.) for sleeping with someone outside of marriage.
WHAT ISN'T: This is again the reverse of the early attitude which was exceedingly liberal. Basically, there were no rules until the 1965 policy "Student's guide to acceptable behavior" and the sexual rules in this were canceled in 1967 by the policy "New Second Dynamic Rules" (the first dynamic is self, the second dynamic is sex/family/children, the third dynamic is groups, etc.) which says there are no rules except that ethics can hold you responsible if you mess up somebody's case.
Sometime in the 1970s, a Flag Order came out forbidding extra-marital sex by SO members. This was probably issued originally for reasons of PR, but since they are under these restrictions, they try and use this flag order on non-SO Scientologists. The result is a confusing mixture of the Flag Order, the 1965 policy, and the 1967 policy (which was never canceled but tends to be hidden from the membership).
Interestingly enough, when they started pushing strict sexual mores, an LRH technical bulletin came out called "Pain and Sex". This is actually from the 1952 tapes (see the technique 88 lectures) and is out of context. Pain and sex were indeed bundled up together by implants and thetans have committed many overts in the area, but Ron's advise at that time was not to abandon sex but simply to run out the incidents.
WHAT IS: The E-meter (a sort of lie detector) is used to do security checks on Scientologists. These "sec checks" are lists of possible overts (crimes etc.) which are called off while watching the meter for reactions so as to discover anything the person is withholding.
WHAT ISN'T: This wasn't designed to gain blackmailing material or to find out what a bad guy the PC was so as to bar him from further services. It was actually indented as a means of finding out the guy's overts and processing them to relieve the mental charge and free him from the overt/motivate sequence (the Scientology equivalent of Karma). Even in modern times they try to clean up the charge rather than simply finding out what he's done. On this basis, this could be considered to be a positive auditing action meant to better the person.
I personally had an extremely big gain while being run on a sec check once. The topic that produced the big result was implanting others. All of the current OT levels are highly motivatorish (a motivate is what happens to you as a result of the overts you have committed - a sort of karma). They address what has been done to the person instead of what he has done and this was known to be a mistake as early as 1952. A thetan could never have been implanted in the first place unless he had intentions to implant others sometime in the past (perhaps to make others good or keep them under control). The smart thing to do would be to have the PC run something like "Recall implanting another" somewhere on the OT levels. Since this is not done, the deficiency is to some slight degree remedied by means of sec checking. But its going the long way around. There are much better processes on grade 2 for handling guilt and overts. Instead, they hound people endlessly with these sec checks.
WHAT IS: In the 1960s, the sanctity of the confessional and the confidentiality of PC folders and the idea that whatever had been run out was therefore gone and should not be held against the person or even considered were all pushed as being of absolute importance. In ancient times, priests have let themselves be shot and their churches burned down rather than ever reveal or use anything told in a confessional. In the old days, we saw this as being more important than the survival of any Scientology organization because it was a key point in the survival of the entire subject. You would let an org collapse rather than using anything revealed in PC folders because if you did violate this, it would become unsafe for the PCs to run out their overts and it would permanently block the entire subject.
WHAT ISN'T: This has been grossly violated in modern Scientology. The first mistake was the idea of looking over the PC folders of someone who was being declared suppressive to see if he had made any gains (because no case gain was a suppressive trait). This evolved into checking the folder's of declared SPs for overts and withholds (this was considered acceptable because of the Fair Game law). It kept getting worse. Eventually, even the registrars (the org's salesmen) began looking through folders, supposedly with the excuse that they were double checking that the person had gotten all the hours of auditing they had paid for but really to get buttons to push on the person to get them to buy their next service. If there was ever a justifiable reason for declaring someone a suppressive, this would be it (just kidding, I really think you should straighten people out instead of throwing them out).
WHAT IS: Sec checks are often mis-audited, mis-used, and overrun endlessly when they are not the correct case action for the PC. There are times when they can do somebody some good, but not when they are run unnecessarily (especially at high prices) or audited in an accusative manner (which seems to be popular these days), and most especially not if you then send the person to ethics and "handle" the overts that have already been erased (that almost guarantees that the person will start committing overts). Because of this, the technology itself is unpopular and keeps being renamed, being called, at various times, Hubbard Confessionals, Integrity Processing, and the False Purpose Rundown.
WHAT ISN'T: Nowadays, they tell the PC "I'm not auditing you" in a ridiculous attempt to keep the PC from feeling that the safety of auditing has been violated. Maybe I'll put on a sign that says "I'm not really driving" the next time a cop tries to pull me over for a speeding ticket.
Sometimes something would come up that really would have to be handled in Ethics. For example, the PC has a kilo of pot in his closet and now that we have gotten him to swear off drugs, he's going to start selling it on the street to pay for his auditing. In such cases, I would hand carry the PC folder over to the Ethics officer myself and give him a lecture about maintaining the safety of auditing. The PC must not be made wrong or told to make amends. He should just be talked to in a reasonable way and coaxed into doing the right thing. You would expect a good ethics officer to know this, but often they did not have enough auditor training.
WHAT IS: Scientology administrative staff are not trained in the technology of Scientology. They are trained in organizational policy instead. An early 70s Policy letter started this. Sometimes you do get someone who has trained on both sides of the fence, but its contrary to the normal way things are done.
WHAT ISN'T: Most Scientology staff (only a small percentage work as auditors) have no real idea what Scientology IS except for some shallow beginner's level stuff and promotional BS. They are working on some sort of a vague purpose to save the world without having much of a clue as to what it is all about.
In the old days, an organization would often boom when they made all their staff train as auditors. Of course you can't just take an auditor who knows nothing else and put him on a management post without any training in his job. But knowing the technology of the mind is what Scientology is all about. As far as I'm concerned, a Scientology executive who has not also trained as an auditor isn't really a Scientologist (in the fullest sense), doesn't have any idea what he is doing, and tends to screw things up. On a new staff member, the lack of training in the subject is understandable, it takes time to learn things. But if he isn't studying the technology like mad, then what is doing there? The only answers are religious fanaticism (big Ron in the sky will solve all the guys problems for him?) or he's hoping to gain money or power or something.
WHAT IS: The org's registrars are really big league salesmen with worse behavior than the most extreme of the used car salespeople. They push buttons endlessly, hound people and threaten them with ethics, make false promises and try to get people to mortgage their lives away to raise the money to pay the orgs high prices. There are exceptions, especially when you get far away from the Flag organization (the closer they are to "Source", the worse they get), but they live on big commissions so that ethical behavior is invalidated and out-ethics is praised.
WHAT ISN't: It doesn't have to be this way. At one time there was a policy that "Only Accounts Talks Money" and the regs were forbidden to discuss it. Also, they did not receive any sales commissions. This kept them a bit more honest. The better ones stuck to their real job which was to explain what services where available and encourage people to do them.
By the way, standard org finance policy is to never borrow money but always pay cash (except that you may have to borrow money to promote with to get a business out of emergency, but you don't borrow for anything else). This is a good policy. Its an overt to talk people into doing the opposite.
WHAT IS: To complete a service at the org, you must write a success story. If you refuse or write one that is negative, the standard action is to handle you, either in review or ethics, to fix what is wrong. There are cases where this fix up does indeed correct something that was done wrong and which was contrary to standard tech. However, there are cases where the thing done wrong was correct per standard tech and is therefore unremediable, and cases where the course or auditing action was either unnecessary or not of great interest to the person. In these situations, a bad success story launches one into endless unnecessary or upsetting repair or ethics actions. So you always find something nice to say and write a PR success story unless you know that you're on firm ground in complaining that the auditor or supervisor has violated standard tech.
WHAT ISN'T: There is no way to evaluate the quality of service being delivered or even to determine if an action is positive or detrimental based on these enforced success stories. You'll get glowing success stories even on backwards or unnecessary actions unless the person is so upset that he doesn't give a damn anymore. There are real success stories, both unsolicited ones and ones that are written on completing something which really did have a magical effect on the person. But there is no way to separate out the wheat from the chaff.
It would not be a bad idea to have people rate the quality and effectiveness of the services delivered, like they do at some restaurants. Perhaps this should be done by checking boxes on a slip handed to you by the success officer and then placed into an anonymous voting box. Maybe the success officer should ask the person if he was happy with the service or wants something handled without pushing at him or insisting on anything. And then maybe he should ask the person if he feels like writing a success story, and should also have a big sign posted behind him saying that people are never required to write success stories.
With this, the success stories you got might really mean something. And if the voting slips were compiled on a weekly basis and the averages were computed, you would have a real gauge of what the public thought of your services.
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WHAT IS: Per Scientology Policy, managers must manage exclusively by statistics. If the courseroom ceiling has caved in and the students are bleeding on the floor, the solution is to have them stay late so that the Scientology Academy will meet its quota of student points and course completions. Well, perhaps I am exaggerating. Most instructors would indeed put aside their fixed ideas and work like mad to care for their students in an emergency. But the stats would indeed go down and somewhere in upper management, there would be an executive who would refuse to be reasonable about any justification for downstats (as per policy) and some heads would roll.
WHAT ISN'T: Management by statistics alone is basically insane. It is a fixed idea that interferes with looking at what you are really doing. Its not that you shouldn't watch the stats, every successful corporation knows that you must keep graphs of production, encourage the uptrends, and remedy the downtrends. You can really make an organization fly by finding out what changed just before a radical shift in a graph. But it is only one of many indicators that monitor the performance of an organization and predict its long range expectations. Things such as employee moral, customer satisfaction, the potential depletion of non-renewable resources, and improving the product are all highly important.
As a staff member, every problem you can't solve or situation that you can't confront is handled by getting the stats (statistics) up with the idea that this will lead to the expansion of Scientology which in turn will result in the eventual solution of all problems and social ills. This is then used to justify committing overts on public and other staff members and that leads to the idea becoming fixed because they would have to face the overts if they let go of it.
The biggest mistake is to force the stats up when they start to collapse because this hides the real reason the stats are collapsing and eventually makes it impossible to spot what was messed up. For example, when the insane idea of harassing the student for MUs (Misunderstood words) every time he moved an inch while studying in the course room was put in, the academy stats collapsed. If they had been able to confront a down stat and tried to find out what had changed, they could have spotted this error right away and fixed it. Instead, supervisors got the stats back up by making the remaining students stay late etc. Of course the stat went into a slow downward collapse anyway so it didn't even work in the long term. A cute side note is that Ron used to tap his foot while studying, so in the Flag courserooms, this was known as the one body motion you could do without the supervisor hounding you to death.
WHAT IS: The supervisor isn't supposed to evaluate, interpret, or explain the course materials to the student. This is a reasonable idea. The student should find out for himself.
WHAT ISN'T: Per current policy, the supervisor does not need to be trained on the materials he's supervising. He often has no idea what the students are learning. If the student needs help, all the supervisor can do is robotically ask for MUs, often on words he himself does not know the meaning of. This is pure idiocy.
In the old days, we had instructors who knew their materials backwards and forwards and who cared about the students. The rules kept them from spouting off and overwhelming the student with too much evaluation but they weren't taken absolutely and the supervisor could help a lot, finding other references, giving examples from his experience, explaining lightly about things that weren't on the students course etc. If the student is studying, for example, level I (problems processing), the instructor should not be telling him the theory of the level or how to run the processes. It's in the students materials and he really should study it for himself. But the problems material also mentions GPMs (Goals Problem Masses) and that's not on the students level and he's not going to be auditing it without much more study, but he may need a few words of explanation and a pat on the back to get him going again on the materials that do pertain to his level.
WHAT IS: Current Scientology study technology tends to specialize in handling MUs and doing demonstrations of things in clay. These are useful techniques. Sometimes its enough, especially for adults who already have a great deal of knowledge and are doing a course with a great deal of enthusiasm.
WHAT ISN'T: This is totally inadequate for use in schools. The 1950s view was much broader and actually highlights how bad the current approach is. The basic Scientology idea on the whole topic is that understanding comes from affinity, reality, and communication (ARC). They still know this, but they have forgotten how to apply it. First and foremost, you need to get the students to like a subject. An interested student will learn the subject despite a bad teacher. You need to promote free and open communication about the subject, especially between the students (currently discouraged in the CofS). You need to see and examine things and try things out to build reality. You need to look through the materials multiple times rather than just working forward through a checksheet robotically. As a substitute for experience, you need to sit and imagine what you're going to do and how you're going to handle anything that could go wrong. And you need to decide that you invented the subject to make it your own and get it fully into your own universe (yes Ron actually tells students to do this on a 1954 tape).
WHAT IS: Training people with force makes robots who can't think with the data they have learned. This was well known in the 1950s. Pounding the data into the students head is totally contrary to all Scientology basics. But the original Class VIII auditor's course was taught by tossing the students off the side of the ship whenever they flubbed. "The auditor is trying to kill the PC, OVERBOARD 3 TIMES" was a common CS (Case Supervisor Instructions after reviewing a session done by the auditor).
WHAT ISN'T: The impact of these overwhelmed and unthinking CLASS VIIIs pretty much destroyed the subject within a few months. The entire backbone of trained auditors and old timers in the subject was destroyed. One org had about 50 trained auditors on staff (both shifts, including trained auditors who were doing other posts) just before they arrived (fall 1968) and only had a handful by mid-1969.
These original Class VIIIs, by the way, were not evil people. They all had intentions to help and to save the world. They had simply been turned, temporarily, into dramatizing psychotics. Most of them regretted it later. Some of them are busily sacrificing themselves for the sake of Scientology in a misguided effort to make amends (Artie Maren for example). Others started running freezone splinter groups. Many of them don't audit anymore.
WHAT IS: Standard Tech (everybody doing the same thing the same way without variation) was introduced by the Class VIII course. It is continually promoted as the ultimate in technical perfection.
WHAT ISN'T: Standard Technology does not mean the same thing as either correct technology or high quality technology. What standard tech really meant was that the same error was repeated consistently on everybody. This does have benefits for research since it makes it easier to see what is wrong with the tech. Unfortunately, this research gain is mostly wasted if you have a fixed idea about the tech already being perfect.
The introduction of standard tech caused a total collapse of Scientology in 1969. Luckily, it did make many of the basic errors visible so that eventually, when the screw-ups could no longer be ignored (late 1970), the worst faults were corrected and the subject rebounded.
They should have put standard tech in carefully and watched it with an eagle eye. If we hadn't had the fanaticism and the insistence on being right and the training by force, we could have spotted the errors in the tech within a few months and retained our backbone of sane and experienced auditors and executives. Instead, the subject fell into the hands (by and large) of fanatics and incompetents.
Even as the theory of auditing was getting straightened out and improving in the early 70s, the skill level of auditors was crashing because of the disappearance of the old timers, the gross mistakes on how to run a course, and the heavy threats and invalidation which were being brought to bear on students and auditors. The TRs and metering skills of an old Class IV cannot be found short of Class XII (if at all) in modern Scientology.
I remember doing the "dating drill" one time in the late 70s. This drill has nothing to do with picking up girls. It consists of the coach writing a complex date on a slip of paper and hiding it and then you try and find the precise date through e-meter reactions alone. I tossed the coach in the chair and pretty much read the date straight off of her with total accuracy in less than a minute. The sea org instructor didn't like this. I looked at the PC instead of the meter. I pleasantly asked questions instead of barking at the PC. I looked at her with a friendly and confident manner instead of drilling her with a death stare. These were all grievous faults. It took weeks for my skills to recover after having one of those incompetents on my back for five minutes.
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