(definitions and contents given below)
Yes Ron knew that eventually Scientology would have to be reformed.
Yes you will be expelled from orthodox Scientology if you attempt to reform it.
Handling this is indeed The Supreme Test Of A Thetan.
This page is dedicated to reforming Scientology so that it may honestly achieve its lofty goals.
I have been a Scientologist since 1965 and a Scientology auditor since 1966. I will remain in good standing only so long as my identity remains anonymous. Therefore I have written this under the pen name of "The Pilot" and inserted it into the internet newsfeed so that others might pick it up and make it available on the web.
I would like to express my appreciation to "Michael Voytinsky" (michaelv@igs.net) for hosting this page.
Written June 1997. Last Updated Jun 9,1997
(These are unofficial and based on my own interpretation).
Dianetics = a practice of discharging mental recordings of painful incidents (called engrams) to relieve the person of mental stress and aberrations.
L. Ron Hubbard (LRH) = the founder of Dianetics in the late 1940s (popularized in 1950) and subsequently of Scientology (1952). All quoted materials referenced on this web page are by LRH unless otherwise noted.
Scientology = a study of the mind and spirit. It was originally addressed to solving the problem that tracing back chains of Dianetic engramic recordings continually yielded past life incidents instead of the prenatal incidents originally predicted by Dianetic theory.
thetan = a spiritual being, the person himself instead of his body.
clear = In theory, a person who has been cleared of his aberrations. In practice, a person who has run Dianetics sufficiently to cease reacting to or being effected by the pain in mental image pictures (engrams) or somebody who has achieved the same result by doing the Scientology clearing course. This was the original goal of Dianetics.
auditor = one who listens. The Scientology term for a spiritual counselor. These are the practitioners of Scientology. The equivalent of a psychoanalyst except that they don't psychoanalyze, instead they run Scientology processes and listen to the person's answers.
auditing = spiritual counseling. The action of running processes (enlightening questions) which will help the person find out more about himself. This includes both Dianetic engram running and Scientology processes.
certs = auditors certificates which designate that the auditor has officially completed various courses of Dianetic and Scientology training.
preclear (PC) = Somebody trying to become cleared of his aberrations. In practice, this is used to refer to anybody who is being audited even if they are "clear".
operating thetan (OT) = a person (thetan) who is capable of operating without a body. In practice, the term is used to refer to people who have been audited on the OT levels after achieving the state of clear even though the current OT levels have been designated as PreOT levels because they are only stepping stones towards a true achievement of the OT state.
HCOB = Hubbard Communications Office Bulletin - these are bulletins generally written by LRH which contain Scientology tech. In later years they were often written by others and issued in LRH's name.
HCOPL = Hubbard Communications Office Policy Letters - these are organizational policies issued by LRH. As was the case with HCOBs, the later ones are often written by others and issued in LRH's name. Note that up until the late 1960s, Ron lectured intensively (there are over 2900 taped lectures) and wrote endless books, bulletins, policies, etc. Subsequently, he delegated more and more of this to others, telling them to write a bulletin or policy on such and such a topic. There were only 48 lectures given from 1969 to 1972 and only a handful thereafter.
If you are a Scientologist in good standing, please be warned that you read onward at your own risk. This page will endanger your safe solutions and your belief in the orgs and in "Command Intention" to solve the problems of this planet.
I am not a rabid critic who thirsts for the destruction of the subject. I believe deeply in the tech and the expressed purposes of Scientology.
I do not, however, believe in International Management or the RTC, and I feel that there are a number of policies in effect which are truly wrong and harmful.
I remain, at this time, in good standing within the Church of Scientology, but that will only last as long as I remain anonymous because it is a high crime to attempt to reform the organization or to save Scientology from itself. But what if it has to be saved? What if it truly needs reform?
And so I have been writing anonymously, using the pen name of "The Pilot".
Some might claim that this is covert and irresponsible. But it is traditional within the Sea Org to remain Fabian (hidden) when dealing with large suppression (see "Welcome To The Sea Org" LRH tape lecture of 15 Oct 69).
And in attempting to make it go right despite the fact that every friend might turn against me, I think that I am taking more responsibility than anyone who is blindly and robotically supporting out-ethics policies without consulting their own ethics and integrity.
The only real crime in this universe is being there and communicating. Read on and join me in this most dreadful of crimes.
Before I launch into an extensive criticism of the current operating practices of the CofS, let me advise you that there is much that is good in Scientology.
I believe that the auditing (spiritual counseling) technology of Scientology is helpful, valuable, and increases one's ability and awareness.
Just as you would not judge Christianity exclusively by the behavior of the Spanish Inquisition, please do not judge Scientology exclusively on the abuse and misuse currently practiced by Scientology management.
I really wish that I could tell you to run down to your local Scientology org and take some classes. Unfortunately, I have some ethical reservations about doing that right now. Instead let me suggest that you read some of the basic books such as "Fundamentals of Thought" and wait avidly on the sidelines for sanity to be restored within the organization.
Or study the subject intensively on your own. If you know the subject well enough, you can safely negotiate the traps. The tech is very powerful. If you do not know it, the current organization will use it to manipulate you. But the average staff member only has a very shallow knowledge of the subject (only the auditors actually study it). You can easily surpass them.
I am not going to present a positive case here because that is not my purpose in creating this page. But a positive case does exist. You can find it at www.scientology.org I wish that it contained more meat (real tech) and less PR, but they are afraid of revealing too much of the tech without payment. Perhaps someday things will be better.
Meanwhile, you can encourage any Scientologists that you know to read this page and to push for ethical reform within the CofS.
You are welcome to read on, but the rest of this webpage is addressed to people who are already involved in Scientology.
Yes, "When in doubt, communicate" is one of Ron's most famous lines. So is "Communication is the Universal Solvent".
Now I'm going to ask you to evaluate the relative importance of the tech on communications verses the policies currently used by admin and ethics in the organization.
I would propose that the development and dissemination of a workable technology of the human mind and spirit with the goal of attaining spiritual freedom for all mankind is the basic goal and purpose of Scientology.
Per HCOPL 1 SEP 65 "Ethics Protection", ethics primarily exists to get tech in.
Per HCOPL 13 Mar 65 "Structure of Organization: What is Policy", Policy is a guiding thing. It is not an absolute or guaranteed to be correct. Simply a way of trying to get the job done.
This would mean that the tech is senior.
And if we examine the grades of release (the basic auditing technology used to release the basic aberrations), we find the following:
Grade 0, Communications, is dedicated to dissolving communication barriers.
On Grade 1, Problems, one finds out that incomplete communications are one of the major sources of problems.
On Grade 2, Overts and Withholds, one discovers that misunderstoods are the basic source of overts. It should be obvious that misunderstoods can only persist in the absence of communication.
On Grade 3, Upsets, the source of upsets is identified as the enforcement and inhibition of Affinity, Reality, and Communication. For this reason, we refer to upsets as ARC Breaks (ARCXs).
On the suppressed person rundown, basic processes (problems, overts, etc.) are run until the supposed "suppressive person" opens good communication with the person who is being "suppressed".
And in the 9th Advanced Clinical Course (currently available as "The Solution to Entrapment"), Ron states that the key to escaping from a trap is being able to communicate with the trap.
Based on this, I would propose that communications is one of the senior datums of Scientology. It is an underlying basic that appears everywhere including the Axioms of Scientology. This would make it more important than anything written in Policy.
Now let us look at current policy:
Every one of the following points represents a severely inhibited communication line. Based on the technology of Scientology (which does indeed work), that means that each one of these is guaranteed to act as a chronic source of problems, overts, and ARCXs.
1. You must not communicate publicly about Scientology without getting "Issue Authority" (which requires months and involves censorship).
2. You must not say anything critical of Scientology or else you will end up in Ethics.
3. You must not discuss the tech of Scientology.
4. You must not joke about Scientology (the "Jokers and Degraders" policy).
5. You must not discuss your "case".
6. You must disconnect (not communicate) with anyone who is labeled as a suppressive person. If it is only you who feels that they are suppressive, you are allowed to handle instead of disconnect. But if the org has decided that the person is suppressive, you have no choice in the matter and must disconnect.
7. You must disconnect from anybody who has been labeled a "Squirrel" (which means anybody who tries to practice Scientology without the expressed permission of the organization).
8. You must never ever breath one word of confidential materials.
9. You must not read anything from an "entheta" (enturbulated theta) source.
10. You must not read or have anything to do with any other practices (known as "Mixing Practices").
11. Sea Org members who are being punished in the RPF (Rehabilitation Project Force) are not allowed to originate communication (may only speak if spoken to - 24 hours a day).
12. Course Supervisors may not answer students questions except by asking "What does your materials state".
13. Anyone being handled on the Introspection Rundown may not be spoken to.
14. The organization hides anything that is "out-PR" from the membership, whether it is due to its own overts (such as the credit card fraud which got many Sea Org registrars sent to the RPF) or abuses (such as the RPF itself) or external problems (they will promote how they took down a few critical websites and neglect to mention that a hundred sprung up to take their place in a horrible backlash).
Furthermore, in regards to non-members,
15. The organization viciously attacks anyone who says anything about Scientology that is not "good PR".
16. The organization vigorously sues anybody who quotes anything from Scientology materials, even "Fair Use" quotes.
17. Instead of being happy that the material is being disseminated and taking a lax attitude towards copyright violations, the organization pushes copyright and trade secret laws to the hilt and sues everybody continually.
18. The org conceals its operations as much as possible and ducks answering reasonable questions that might be embarrassing to it.
And then there are the areas of enforced and messed up communications. You can destroy a comm line by overloading it just as well as by cutting it.
19. The registrars and recruiters continually hound people, and you must be nice to them or you might end up in ethics.
20. The endless waves of promotional pieces, often 3 or 4 copies deep due to incompetence in managing the mailing lists, exceed all good sense and reasonable promotion and rarely contain any significant amount of real communication.
21. The continual attacks against anyone else operating in the field of the mind, whether psychs, squirrels, or metaphysical practitioners. It is not that these are all good guys, but the org attacks indiscriminately on the assumption that they are all evil without even finding out who might be making an honest effort to help people instead of harm them.
22. The refusal to even sell any materials to anybody who is operating independently ("Squirrels"). In fact, they even try to repossess materials (without compensation) that were honorably bought and paid for before the person was labeled a "Squirrel".
23. The spreading of false lies and rumors, known as "Dead Agenting", against anyone who is considered to be a critic or enemy.
24. The recent "war against the internet" where enormous numbers of trivial messages were machine generated to flood the system and drive off any critics. The end result was to add a large number of previously impartial webmasters to the ranks of the critics.
If you met a person with this many communication stops, they would be severely abberated. Per "Science of Survival", you would expect them to self destruct. The behavior is 1.1 (covert hostility) or 1.5 (anger) at best (these are levels on the Scientology emotional tone scale).
And indeed, the organization does appear to be self destructive, creating enemies where there were none, producing fewer and fewer real products (at higher and higher prices to mask the sinking statistics), and losing court battles left and right (while lying to the membership about winning them).
"Let's look at the harsh look - let's take the harsh look at all this. The cold scientific, pitiless inspection
of what is actually going on. And that is that a thetan creates his own bank. It isn't that he HAS created his
own bank, he IS creating his own bank".
- LRH tape lecture of 22 OCT 1963, "The Integration of Auditing" SHSBC-316 renumbered SHSBC-347.
(Note that "bank" is Scientology slang for "The Reactive Mind" which contains the engrams etc. that are considered to be the source of aberration).
And from later in the same lecture:
"Anything that's wrong with him, he is creating at this very moment. Anything that's wrong with an organization is being CREATED NOW, in the organization".
In other words, you are totally responsible for the condition that you are in. This is well known in Scientology. You are the source of your own problems. It is you who pull in motivators for your overts (the source of karma is internal, it is not imposed from outside). And it is you who brings your own opposition into being.
Now let's apply this to organizations. If the organization is being continually and chronically attacked, then maybe it is doing something to create those attacks.
Let's say that you go to school and there is a bully. Now there are bullies, and maybe you have to handle this one. That's fine. But then let's say that you go to school after school after school and at every one there is the exact same problem with bullies and you are the only one who is being picked on.
Is this because there is some secret world conspiracy of bullies and they're running around behind your back setting up the exact same attack at every location?
Impossible. You could run into different troubles at these varying places. Or there might even be a singular enemy, but any conscious enemy will vary his attacks. There is only one common denominator who could be going around to each place that you are at and create the exact same trouble. And that common denominator is YOU. You are doing something which is bringing on these attacks. And unless you enjoy being attacked, maybe you had better find out what it is that you are doing and handle it.
This doesn't have to be very esoteric and it doesn't mean that the bullies have no responsibility. But if it is happening over and over again no matter where the kid goes, then maybe he is teasing these bullies and encouraging their attacks.
There is a time to defend yourself, and there is a time to step back and take a look at what you are doing. And we have long since past the point where we should have shifted over to the latter action.
So what overts might the org be committing that are bringing on these attacks?
"Now, we in Scientology today, all of us, are setting up something. You realize that? This thing has probably
more horsepower than anything that's been put on the track for a very long time. As long as we play it straight
to set people free, its okay. And as long as we make sure that it goes on in that tradition, it's okay. But the
moment it doesn't, every one of us is guilty of an overt act - not just me. Get the idea? Because it becomes a
Frankenstein monster".
- LRH Tape of 27 Nov 59 "A Brand New Type of Auditing" 1MACC-29 (original title "Clearing up
the whole track").
"The principle of the introduction of an arbitrary should be thoroughly understood by a group. Because
of an emergency, or because of some past engram, there may exist within or around the group sources of continual
arbitrary orders. An arbitrary is an order or command introduced into the group in an effort to lay aside certain
harm which may befall the group or in an effort to get through a period of emergency and foreshortened time for
a certain action. Subsequent arbitraries issued by any member of a group not during periods of emergency can be
considered to be locks or dramatizations of the engrams of the group. Each time an arbitrary is introduced it has
the effect of reducing the rationale and tone of the group as a whole and will lead to the necessity to introduce
two or three more arbitraries".
LRH Article of 11 Dec 1950 "Group Dianetics" (p. 261 in the first edition of R&D Volume 5).
"The tone scale of the group can be estimated by what the group does with affinity, communication, and
reality within itself"
- LRH tape of 17 Jan 51 "The Third Dynamic".
There was a time when I belonged to an organization which maintained extremely high ARC (Affinity, Reality, and Communications) and worked towards very high goals of bringing about freedom, awareness, understanding, and ability.
The hours were long and hard. The pay was extremely low. But there was a lot of communication, a lot of caring, and a great deal of mutual help and support. It was tough, but I believed in what we were doing and it was not entirely self sacrifice because there was some return in the form of the training and co-auditing that we were doing.
There was an idea of being tough and unreasonable as to the standards we were working towards and the level of ability that could be attained. But this was not applied in a forceful and viscous manner. It was done with high ARC, coaxing and patting people on the back while insisting that they were capable of achieving far more than their mundane expectations. In other words, an uncompromising standard for excellence rather than a reign of terror.
There was also the concept of being willing to confront and use force if necessary and never flinching. But there was also the balancing idea of never introducing force needlessly and the awareness that only a minimum of effort is needed if you are doing the right thing. In other words, a balance of force and intelligence. You turn the doorknob rather than breaking the door down.
Unfortunately, there was a problem in the technology itself. Thanks to various mistaken ideas introduced by Ron himself around 1965, we were only allowed to do a small amount of auditing on each grade of release. The total of all lower level auditing was generally less than 20 hours, after which a person would do the clearing course and supposedly become free of all aberration. This did not work in practice.
The mistake had come about because Ron and a number of long time auditors had run and been run on thousands of hours of auditing on various things such as problems, overts, and upsets. When this new simple procedure for going "clear" on the clearing course was done, they felt that they had finally made it and thought that anybody could simply do the clearing course and achieve the same thing without realizing that problems, overts, etc. had to be addressed independently. This mistake is discussed (but blamed on others) in CS Series 13 "VIII Actions" of 30 JUN 1970 (good luck finding an unrevised original).
Concurrently with this, the organization had already been under attack, including the 1963 FDA raid on the Washington org and the ban on Scientology in Victoria, Australia that was in effect at that time. Eventually (1968), there would even be a ban on Scientologists immigrating into the UK. These problems are all long gone, but consider how the Scientologists at that time must have felt.
Any attempt to point out flaws in the current tech lineup was seen as being part of these attacks. And the clearing course, although it did produce its own wonderful result, did not undercut the grades of release. And grades done with only a few hours of auditing are notoriously unstable.
The attacks and the internal complaints restimulated the earlier failures of 1951 when Ron lost control of the original Dianetics organization. And so he took action in the form of policies to defend the tech and the org. This included things such as "Keeping Scientology Working" (KSW) which casts the tech in concrete without providing any means for correcting actual errors in the tech itself. Up until this time, the tech had gone through constant review and revision, being based on practical application and results. Now it was frozen and supposedly perfect.
For those of you reading this who worship the KSW policy, please realize that it came out in 1965 at a time when the tech was almost totally incorrect based on the subsequent revisions in the 1970s, and it was one of the primary reasons why the errors persisted until the 1970s instead of being corrected almost immediately (which had always been the case during the previous evolution of the subject).
And the flak that this was creating had to be solved with even sterner policies such as fair game and disconnection, which had never been needed in the earlier days. But these are all events which were happening at the top levels out of my view. I was sitting at an outer org and only feeling the effects slowly as they spread out.
There we were sitting on thousands of hours of taped lectures and thousands of workable processes and we could not use a single one of them for fear of being declared "squirrels" (altering the tech and deviating from standard procedure) and getting thrown out of the subject. And Fair Game, Disconnection, etc. made it extremely dangerous to be declared suppressive (excommunicated) at that time.
It was heartbreaking. Tons of tech (even R3R - the 1963 Dianetics process) that you were forbidden to use and PCs making fantastic one shot gains which generally collapsed within a few months.
The solution to this was another flagrant mistake, based on the errors introduced by the KSW policy. It contained the assumption (obviously false in the light of subsequent events) that we had the correct technology and that any failures were due to an inability to apply it.
So the cure for this madness was to pound the errors in with a vengeance, insisting that it was a failure of application rather than a failure in tech. And Ron taught the original Class 8 course in this manner, tossing the auditors off of the side of the ship (overboards) and ranting at them at their failures to apply what was actually an unworkable technology. And these Class 8s returned to the outer orgs and did the same thing to the auditing staff and the result was that the 20 hours of grades auditing (which at least gave some results) turned into the 5 hours of super quickies which uniformly resulted in ruined PCs.
The class 8 course talks about getting PCs through the lower levels as being as "easy as making pie". Yes, it was like making pie. It was making the PCs into mud pies.
Scientology was actually expanding based on the shallow auditing of 1966 to 1968. But with the arrival of the Class 8 graduates in the Fall of 1968, the subject began to collapse, resulting in a total crash of the entire Scientology network by 1969. This was the direct and observable result of applying the policy "Keeping Scientology Working" in an idiotic and literal minded manner. And in a strange Orwellian reversal, the 1970 revision of this policy blames the quickie grades on NOT following this policy rather than on having followed it.
At that time, Standard Tech consisted of repeating the same idiotic errors over and over again, standardly and consistently. Any trained auditor from the 1960s will know that this is true. Find one and ask him.
And there were mutinies and rebellions and case failures and collapses, and people became "squirrels" and enemies by the simple act of trying to apply a bit more of the "lost tech" in violation of the unworkable standards.
And heavy ethics and training by force and a con-artist like crush sell (to try and keep the money coming in) permeated the subject and turned the organization into a nightmare of horror and oppression.
You might well say "Where was Ron? Why didn't he fix this?". But he took off for a vacation in Rhodesia (see SHSBC-432 "About Rhodesia") and then he went off to Africa and researched OT3. He got very messed up trying to research it (listen to the RJ67 tape). And therefore, by 1968 he was in pretty bad shape and everything was going to hell in a handbasket, so he solved it by throwing fits at the Class 8 students (listen to the screaming rage on Class 8 tape 11 of 7 OCT 68 "Assessments and Listing Basics").
Then finally, in 1970-71, Ron stopped insisting that it was everybody else's fault and took a look at the real results being produced and restored some of the older workable tech to the lineup. And thus "expanded grades" were born and the auditing began to work again. Big sigh of relief, at least as far as the tech was concerned.
But now the organization itself had suffered a severe "engram" and the heavy ethics and sales PR and the inability to think or to allow others to think about the data was woven deeply into the organization and the policies, and this was especially ground into the entire character of the Sea Org which had been born in this time of troubles and had never experienced that sane, free, high ARC atmosphere which had brought me into the subject in the first place.
The organization seems to have suffered a "group engram" and has gone unconscious. And it still remains unable to think and continues to dramatize this incident right up to this day.
There is, of course, an earlier similar group engram, namely the collapse of the first Dianetic foundation back in 1951. But as is often the case, a singular engram does not result in dramatization until it is keyed in by the appearance of similar dangers. And so the organization carried on fairly well through the 1950s, even soothing the hurt of that first collapse by regaining the Dianetic copyrights. Until this second incident. And Ron defended himself against the possibility of losing this second organization with a series of engramic policies that ensured the subsequent dramatizations.
Any loyal Scientologist should now go back and reread the LRH quotes given at the top of this section. The group engram happened. The phenomena is exactly as predicted. The Frankeinstein's Monster was created. This is not old news that has long since been corrected. The bad tech was fixed, just as the actual wound that occurred in an incident might have been patched up. But the arbitraries that were introduced, the perverted policies and orders that were created to save the organization from destruction during this engram, have never been canceled. The incident is still being dramatized. The entire structure of policy has been perverted by the impact and enturbulation of this old time period of bad tech.
It is high time to cancel the emergency policies and end the dramatization.
"The Fascist is probably best described as a very stupid man who insists upon a status quo which is intolerable
for all others, yet who believes himself to be brighter than all others"
- Dianetics 55 chapter 4 "Accent on Ability"
"Now the most basic overt act there is is to make somebody guilty of an overt act. That is the most fundamental
overt act there is. It's to make somebody guilty of an overt act".
- LRH Tape 26 Nov 59 1MACC-28 "The handling of cases - Greatest Overt"
"Force begets force, and he who lives by the sword will die by one, I promise you."
- LRH Tape 8 Dec 52 PDC-23 "ARC, Force, Be/Do/Have"
The first real inkling of the horror to come was in October of 1967 when I looked in my in-basket and found HCOPL 6 OCT 67 "Condition of Liability" which contained the formulas for the conditions of Liability, Treason, Doubt, and Enemy (originally in that order, later revised placing treason below enemy).
This policy includes the following paragraph: "It is assigned where careless or malicious and knowing damage is caused to projects, orgs, or activities. It is adjudicated that it is malicious and knowing because orders have been published against it or because it is contrary to the intentions and actions of the remainder of the team or the purpose of the project or org".
The policy has no mitigating clause about examining any other positive actions that the individual has taken on behalf of the group. You only had to mess up once, no matter how much good you have done before and never mind the fact that you have been working long hours for almost no pay for years.
In later years, there was some degree of ethics protection for upstats (people who's statistics were up), but that is based on one's current statistic. Even now, there is NO acknowledgement of any prior help given to the organization when a liability situation is being evaluated. However, they finally started protecting the auditors at least to some degree (green star protection for those who have completed both Class 4 auditor training and the org exec course, etc.), but even that does not protect against Committees of Evidence (often kangaroo courts) etc.
Furthermore, there is no evaluation of the relative importance of the supposed damage done and there is the insidious line about being contrary to the purpose of the project which is so flagrantly subject to interpretation that even refusing to do something which is not your job could be grounds for a liability condition, especially if a Sea Org member was ordering it, and especially if it was a stupid order that they were insisting upon. I have seen people (who's post was in an assigned condition of normal) put into liability for failing to put their post into affluence after being ordered to do so.
Yes this was almost a year prior to the notorious arrival of the Class 8s, but the Sea Org was already being formed and the tech had already gone out severely at the top levels. We were simply out in the boondocks and the wavefront hadn't yet reached us.
But we still had some sanity and reasonable ethics officers. It would be another 6 months before it really sunk in and half trained new ethics officers would start applying this with a heavy hand.
Soon there were extreme penalties for lower conditions and liability was assigned at the drop of a hat, often for failing to follow an arbitrary and destructive order issued from a distance. The penalties were canceled briefly in 1970 (as the tech was cleaned up) and then reinstated in 1971. The group engram was now in chronic restimulation.
Many years later, "repair of past ethics conditions" was introduced. At least somebody made an effort to try and right the wrongs. Unfortunately, they still continued to assign new incorrect ethics conditions based on slave labor standards of exploitation.
But even these lower ethics conditions were inadequate as far as keeping the Sea Org members themselves under control and properly afraid of disobeying orders. And so the RPF (Rehabilitation Project Force) was created. I have seen these poor bedraggled souls running about Flag and the LA complex. But that isn't my story and I'll leave it to others who have described it amply on the internet.
"One has to have certain fixed opinions to protect the fact that he's stupid on the subject, and that he
can exercise no judgment of any kind whatsoever as long as he's mired down in a bunch of fixed opinions"
- LRH Tape of 18 Jun 64 "Studying: Introduction" SHSBC(2nd)-24 renumbered SHSBC-387.
"If he insists that a great number of data be assimilated without further analysis or question in any way,
shape or form, we know this boy doesn't know his business. He's scared. Somehow or another he feels that nobody
must be permitted to examine these data. So he's doing something else".
- LRH tape OS-3 of 25 Oct 56 "Education".
"When the student is taught data, he should be given a high power of choice over the data in which he is
instructed, but he should be instructed in such a way that he can achieve the reality of the data"
- LRH tape of 14 Nov 56 "Training Methods" 15ACC-23.
"You cannot teach a man how he should judge something and still have him judge something"
- LRH tape of 24 Jan 62 "Training - Duplication" SHSBC-104 renumbered SHSBC-108.
When I first began training as an auditor (1966), the emphasis was on understanding and application rather than on memorization and rote procedure. You were expected to observe things and try them and especially to think about them.
The lower level training courses only include a small percentage of the underlying theory. For example, class zero (how to audit the PC to a release on communications) generally only includes 5 or 10 hours of taped lectures on the subject out of hundreds that could be included. The idea was to give the student enough so that he could do some auditing and learn practical application without being swamped with endless theory. This is a very practical and workable approach to learning a new subject.
But this only works as long as you have a supervisor who is a hotshot that can find the references to answer students questions, because the course materials are actually very incomplete.
And it only works as long as the student is continually encourage to think about and review his materials and go out and experiment and observe the results.
But then came the idea of management by statistics only. Now this is not to say that its wrong to keep statistics or examine the trends of production. This is simply to say that the stats are a wrong target in comparison with producing a valuable final product.
It takes time to dig out references, and it takes time to observe and learn something. You can get somebody through a course faster by rote memorization and by invalidating all efforts to question and understand the materials.
Soon there was an idea that the course checksheet contained all the material you would ever need. And that you went through the checksheet studying each thing in sequence exactly once and never going back because you must have falsely studied an earlier item if you wanted to look back at it in the light of new data learned on the course. And that you must never try anything because this was "experimenting with tech".
And they began specializing in the misunderstood word tech because this could be applied quickly and with little knowledge even though this is only the coin of admission to real study (of course you need to understand the words, but that doesn't automatically give you instant understanding of the concepts and how to apply them).
And these things all "got the stats up" because the students completed quickly. And the old time supervisors were in the way of this and obviously were downstats compared to untrained people who got fast completions by insisting on rote studying. So a policy came out saying that the supervisor did not even have to be trained on the course that he was supervising (previously a high crime of serious magnitude).
Again, I may have been lucky to even have experienced a brief time period before this rote training because all indications are that it had already changed in the upper organizations and I was in a backwater where old ACC (advanced clinical course) graduates and early Briefing Course completions were still training people based on the methods that had been used to teach them the subject.
Now I don't want to invalidate the people who have really learned to audit since that time. There have been good cramming officers and even supervisors who do not apply this rote get the stats up methodology. And most professional auditors continually went back to the materials and studied and thought and applied until they got it.
But the course room atmosphere has usually been against this instead of in support of it. So that in later days, it was almost always a battle instead of a pleasure to be on course.
At one point, an attempt was made to solve some of the stupidity by making the student go through the entire checksheet 3 times. But that is also rote and introduces its own problems.
An attempt was made back around 1973 to correct this by putting a large number of practical drills onto the course checksheets. That had some nice results, but it took too long (crashing the stats) and furthermore couldn't be supervised adequately by a supervisor who didn't himself know how to audit, and so it was canceled.
The new golden tech is trying to make the same effort, and therefore has a positive side, but they are using it to invalidate the people who did finally learn the tech so that they can sell them their courses all over again. And I don't think that they have fixed all the problems with inadequate supervisors and destructive ideas of getting student points up instead of building understanding.
But even partially trained auditors have some knowledge of the tech and can make quite a lot of trouble for unthinking executives and SO missionaries who scream stupidly about "Get the Stats Up". And trained auditors had some ethics protection. So the new watchword (early 1970s) was to train admin people on admin instead of letting them learn the tech.
"The next major point on the decline is that point where management is management for the sake of managing
for its own good, not according to the demised goal maker's codes of goals, but preserving only some tawdry shadow
of these such as 'patriotism', 'your king', 'the American way', 'every peasant his own landlord', etc."
- LRH Article of 9 Jan 51 "An Essay On Management"
As to statistics themselves, the original usage emphasized trying to find out why the stats went down. Unfortunately, the "why" was usually destructive orders, policies, Class 8 tech, and Sea Org missions. So the organization shifted more and more towards bean counting and suppressing any real observation. Eventually (1970s), the data series tried to stem this tide somewhat by establishing a procedure for finding "whys", but it was swamped by the heavy kick-ass atmosphere of the original FEBC (Flag Executive Briefing Course).
Blindly following a weekly statistic is short sighted and sure to get you in trouble. But Ron actually had the glimmerings of a better idea.
"Just as PCs have indicators so do orgs" - HCOPL 16 MAY 65 "Indicators of Orgs"
But he never carried this beyond the basic stage of observing that an org might be in ruins and about to fail despite supposedly high stats. The extreme troubles and problems that were developing caused an ever greater emphasis on bean counting to provide the cash to launch and maintain an ocean going navy despite the 1969 collapse.
No auditor worth his salt would ever judge his PC's progress exclusively on the amount of E-Meter Tone Arm (TA) Action (even though this is important) without ever looking at all of the numerous other good and bad indicators that occur during an auditing session. To do so would guarantee frequent failures.
The same could be said of performing any job. Total concentration on bean counting to the exclusion of all else instead of observing the appropriate good and bad indicators will guarantee failure in the long run.
Among other things, attention to all of the indicators rather than just statistics keep you from making the "penny wise, pound foolish" mistakes that sacrifice long term gain for momentary profit.
And because these stats are the sole criteria for the assignment of the staff member's weekly ethics condition, which in turn determines the weekly level of abuse that they will suffer, there is no hope of sane behavior in respect to these under the current policies.
"Individuals are viscous to the degree that they are enslaved"
- LRH tape of 7 May 54 "Energy - Exteriorization" 5ACC-28
As the tech on overts and withholds was being researched, a process known as security checking or "sec checking" was developed. This used the E-Meter as a sort of lie detector to find overts that the person had committed.
This was inferior to the normal grade 2 processing which is far better at raising a person's responsibility, but it does have some workability towards raising the person's confront of what they have done.
But these were easily abused and not very effective at maintaining security and there was a lot of bad publicity. So they were canceled.
HCOPL of 26 AUG 68 "Security Checks Abolished"
The following are among the reasons listed:
"2. Security checking of often done without regard to the point where the person feels better and so became overrun".
"4. Lower level cases do not react on actual crimes and so the 'security' furnished is often a false security".
"6. The existence of list of crimes in folders often makes it necessary to destroy the folders which may contain other technical data which is constructive and valuable".
"7. If a person is a criminal or has overt acts which affect his case, and speaks of them to an auditor of his own volition, the auditor is bound by the Auditor's Code not to publish, use or reveal them".
I wouldn't repeat the entire thing here because I want to remain within "fair use", but you get the idea.
But there were troubles in the organization, and the rebellions continued, and everything was always blamed on peoples overts. So they kept finding ways to put these unworkable sec checks back in. Various names have been used, such as "Hubbard Confessionals", "Integrity Processing", and (currently) "The False Purpose Rundown" which is used to do "Eligibility Checks". And they certainly don't follow the rules on destroying criminal confessions any more, instead they carefully collect and save these.
It even might still be possible to make some case gains on these things, although I think that grade 2 processing is much better.
But a fatal twist has been introduced.
In the old days, it was considered that when an overt was successfully gotten off, the PC confronted it and it vanished. Now if you bother him about it after it has erased (as in an ethics officer taking him to task and having him make amends), the PC will put it back again. Furthermore, it will no longer erase because the person will keep looking at the original overt (which is now gone) instead of the later moment when he was made to put it back. You have now set him up to keep doing that overt for real. This is like running more R3R Dianetics after Clear. The person puts things back (he starts mocking it all up again) and gets worse.
Furthermore, there is the problem of withholds which are not really overts. For example, being a Jew in Nazi Germany. The person is suffering from having to hide and is liable to pull in trouble from his withhold constantly being missed. So there is something here to audit out, but there is no true overt.
Now sometimes a staff member operates contrary to policy. It might be because the policy is bad, but it might even be a good policy which simply did not fit some rare situation (absolutes are unattainable per the axioms). Now he withholds this violation. It does help him to get the withhold off even though it was not an overt. Now you send him to ethics for an overt that wasn't an overt and you are guaranteed to be setting him up to commit real overts.
In the pure simplicity and workability of the tech, you simply bring him to view whatever it was without any value judgments. The charge vanishes and now you trust in his basically ethical nature to cause him to act better than before. If it wasn't an overt (despite the mores of the group), he will feel better and may do it again. If it was, you might well expect him to revise his operating basis. You don't judge this for him, you simply relieve mental charge.
There is also a case phenomena called a "missed withhold of nothing" and a meter phenomena known as a "false read". These come about through accusatively looking for something that isn't there, and they cause the exact same behavior as would a true occurrence of the thing that is being erroneously searched for. In other words, after a false accusation, the person is liable to go out and do the exact thing you have falsely accused him of. Once he feels like a criminal, he will act like one.
When you rabidly sec check people and then pound away at them with ethics after using the tools of auditing (whether or not you have made the idiotic statement "I am not auditing you"), you are ensuring that people will start committing overts on the organization if they have not yet already begun to do so.
And now we come to the most horrible of overts, namely to take the data revealed confidentially by a PC to his auditor and use it against him.
This violates the sanctity of the confessional and makes auditing unsafe for everybody.
But even worse, the act of doing this takes every withhold ever given up to an auditor or ethics officer and written down (whether in or out of session) and turns it into a missed withhold because the person does not know if the org has revealed it or not. This guarantees that people will attack ferociously and rabidly.
And the overts of people declared as enemies are routinely used against them and sometimes even broadly published.
And these days, even the registrars flip through the folders (supposedly counting hours to see that the person got everything they paid for) looking for buttons to push on the PCs to get them to buy their next service. And the people being reg'ed often realize this (recognizing something that they had said in session) and it turns on missed withhold reactions and makes even more enemies.
There was a time when Scientology freed people from sexual inhibitions. Now it creates them.
In Scientology, we divide a person's life and urges towards survival up into 8 dynamics or areas of operation. The first dynamic urge is towards personal survival. The second dynamic encompasses sex, family, and children. The third dynamic concerns groups, and so on.
Here is how sex and the second dynamic used to be handled until the mid 1970s.
"Ethics is not concerned with 'acceptable social behavior'"
- HCOPL 23 Feb 70 "Ethics, Quality of Service".
"It has never been any part of my plans to regulate or attempt to regulate the private lives of individuals.
Whenever this has occurred it has not resulted in any improved condition." ... "Therefore all former
rules, regulations and policies relating to the second dynamic activities of students, preclears, staff and Scientologists
are canceled" ... "no staff member may be punished, transferred or dismissed because of second dynamic
activities. No student or preclear may be suspended or dismissed because of second dynamic activities"
- HCOPL of 11 AUG 67 "Second Dynamic Rules".
"A thetan decides that she's a good woman and makes a lousy man, and 50 percent of the bodies that thetan
picks up, on the average, the rough average, are going to be male bodies. And yet this thetan knows that SHE is
a good woman. Now, she has the task, somewhere very early in life or even before birth, or something of the sort,
of flipping this body, or trying to flip it, or fitting (if she can't) a male body into a female role."
- LRH Tape lecture SMC-9 of 3 JAN 1960 "Your Case".
"The criteria of what is a hot withhold depends utterly on the PC's idea of What is an Overt. It does not
depend on what the auditor thinks an overt is." ... "Auditor is a bit fuddy on being a school principle.
Auditor keeps looking for sexual misconduct with small boys. It isn't on pc's case" ... "Finally almost
by accident ... the auditor disgustedly asks 'have you ever failed to seduce anybody?' and BANG! ... and the pc
gives up 'overt' after 'overt', failed to seduce her husband's friend, her sister's boyfriend, her kindergarten
teacher, etc., etc."
- HCOB 21 MAR 62 "Prepchecking data" (preparatory checking or Prepchecking is a Scientology process)
In the mid 1970s, a flag order was issued that placed any Sea Org member who had sex outside of marriage into a condition of Liability. Apparently the SO clears and OTs were being too liberated sexually and there was some fear of bad publicity.
The Sea Org immediately became sexually inhibited and turned into the Morals Police. And because they were stopped, they immediately began imposing this on the ordinary Scientologists even though nothing like this exists anywhere in tech or earlier policy.
Furthermore, it was obviously bad PR to have clears and OTs who were homosexuals. Since doing the OT levels did not appear to "cure" people of homosexuality, the solution was to bar practicing homosexuals from being allowed on the OT levels. In other words, they had to somehow or other stop being homosexual, at least temporarily, to get on their OT levels.
For the sake of PR (and a misguided PR at that), they have managed to recreate the puritanical aberrations that have already disappeared from the society at large.
"When children become unimportant to a society, that society has forfeited it future".
- Science of Survival chapter 18
"No child was ever spoiled by affection, by sympathy, by kindness, by understanding, or even by indulgence"
- Child Dianetics chapter 3 "Towards a Saner World"
Some of the best raised children I have ever seen are the children of Scientologists. As long as the Scientologists were far away from Flag and the Sea Org.
Some of the worst raised children I have ever seen are the children of Sea Org members. The children at the Los Angeles Scientology complex were so badly handled that they turned into a gang of juvenile delinquents and created such bad PR that SO members with children were banned from the area.
The children of Sea Org members were neglected, mistreated, and malnourished. They were handled with policy and with ethics. They turned rabid. Many of them hate Scientology.
The children of Scientologists out in the field were generally handled with the tech on maintaining good communication and high ARC and the granting of beingness. On the whole they have turned out quite well. Many of them are enthusiastic Scientologists.
The difference here is the difference between tech and policy. Those that were handled with tech did well. Those that were handled with policy and ethics and flag orders became monsters.
The simplest way to determine whether or not something works is to observe the products that it produces.
"Because life is understanding, it attempts to understand." ... "A secret is antipathetic to
life" ... "a total secret would be a total unlivingness" ... "Thus it is that the seeker after
secrets is trapped into being a secret himself" ... "This is the grave into which so many philosophers
walk"
- Dianetics 55 chapter 4 "Accent on Ability"
"The only thing that could be said to aberrate communication would be restriction, or fear of restriction"
- Dianetics 55 chapter 8 "The Application of Communication"
I think that the confidentiality is a mistake. I think it is destroying Scientology. I think that it is the strongest of the factors which are twisting the subject away from its original goals and making it into a fanatical sham.
But it is this specific point of reform which is going to be the hardest for the average Scientologist to swallow. Many of them can see the other outnesses and will agree with me on those points. But they have been so intensively hit with false information about the dangers of the upper level materials that they are terrified of them.
So let me get up here on the podium and try to wake some people up.
You don't teach people how to swim by making them terrified of the water. Imagine that they are not even allowed to see the water. Its hidden in swimming pools that are kept in locked rooms and all you have are dire rumors about how people can drown and die if they even see a pool nothing to say of getting in one. Now, after paying a fortune, an instructor unlocks the door and tosses them in the water. And they are not even allowed to see anybody else swimming (they can't hear stories of other students doing the level and their difficulties and successes).
Have you ever seen somebody trying to teach a terrified child how to swim?
Of course there are going to be bad reactions if you make things so secret and convince everybody that this stuff is dangerous.
We have always had lots of advanced data from the 1950s which was available and was not marked confidential. Lots of stuff on past lives, implants, entities, GPMs, and what have you. The clear cog used to be common knowledge. Even power process 5 is on a lower level tape (either "the Bad Auditor" or "Mechanics of Suppression" SHSBC-122 and 123 renumbered 126 and 127, I forget which one - they both cover not-isness and they used to be back to back on the old level 2 checksheets). A tape including R6 data called "Study and End Words" was sometimes part of the old student hat.
People didn't get sick or upset from studying this stuff. Once in a rare while somebody did get sick if someone else was insisting on jamming some piece of tech down their throats, but that also happens with grade 2 (overts/withholds) and grade 4 (service facsimiles - making yourself right) type technology. At one time there was even a bulletin (or policy?) stating that it was gross out tech to tell a person that they had withholds outside of an auditing session.
So there are student and PC rules and stern lectures from the ethics officer to keep people from jamming bits of out-gradient tech down each others throats. That is needed. But it is all that is needed. You don't have to bury everything under a cloud of secrecy. The mind's protection is at maximum when people are quietly reading things.
I don't really think that people should make fun of each others religious beliefs. If things were reasonable, I would say that its no fair poking fun at OT materials or at the book of Genesis or at any of the beliefs of other religions. But in this case, the anti-Scientologists with their OT 3 tee shirts and jokes and things are serving a very important purpose in demonstrating that knowledge of OT 3 is not dangerous nor does it make people sick.
Its almost inconceivable that hearing truth could ever make anybody sick. If it did, it would be the exact opposite of what is in the axioms of Scientology. Of course somebody might be emotionally upset from learning a sad or disturbing truth, but that's a totally different matter. And we know how to raise somebody's emotional tone in such cases, so we don't need to be afraid of it.
As to the liabilities of keeping things confidential, just look at what's happening on the internet. Scientology's comm lines on the net are almost destroyed. Tremendous ill will has been generated. The Scientologists can't even argue or defend themselves because they can't talk about anything in the confidential materials and the critics keep quoting confidential materials and scaring the Scientologists away. Attempting to maintain confidentiality has put the Scientologists into a totally untenable position, having to fight without ever mentioning the thing that they are fighting about.
Scientologists, who are trained with TRs to confront just about anything, can't confront or handle a handful of jokers if they quote confidential data. Scientologists, who win through opening up communication lines, find themselves to be the greatest suppessors of free communication that the internet has ever seen.
In the old days, before the clearing course and the introduction of confidentiality, the Briefing Course students used to chant implanted GPM end words at each other as part of their bull baiting while doing TRs. They had to do this because they were running implant platens on each other instead of doing them solo and they couldn't flinch at what the PC was running. They did just fine. I knew a few who had done this (it was only a little before my time) and they were in exceptionally good shape and had really fantastic TRs.
The whole business of confidentiality might have originally come about because any of the old time BC graduates could have just taken the clearing course platens and run them on themselves at home without paying for any other courses. And the average franchise, usually run by an exceptionally skilled old-time auditor, would have found it easy to teach their PCs to run these platens after they finished getting audited on their grades.
Let me urge any Scientology loyalist who reads this to please sit down and reread Dianetics 55. And then please demonstrate in clay what would happen to any group that specializes in secrecy and inhibited communications with special attention to what that group might do to itself.
The confidentiality has not served any useful purpose except to stick people with a mystery, and that is an overt.
"ARC Breaks bring about and restimulate a desire to get even. An ARC Broken person attacks." ... "The
true cause of ARC Breaks of long duration which transfer to us is when we permit technical goofs"
- HCOPL 23 Feb 70 "Ethics, Quality of Service".
"Strong Ethics actions by org E/Os and MAAs against Franchises and Franchise holders are forbidden."
... "Franchises are essentially PR activities. When you use Ethics you mix practices".
- from HCOPL 18 APR 70 "Ethics and Franchise". - - Note that Franchises are now called missions.
"The Rights of the Field Auditor" ... "9. To have and to hold his certificates without cancellation
by anyone forever"
- from PAB 112 of 15 May 1957.
"A group is not the extension of an individual, nor the extension of an idea. I have been at this longer
than anybody else but that does not mean that I can do it better than anybody else, nor that I can get better ideas
than anybody else. And it certainly does not mean that a large number of human being shouldn't have perfect freedom
of action".
- LRH tape of 1 Dec 1950 "Groups" STP-10
At one time there was an extensive network of "Field Auditors". These were people who had taken Scientology training courses and deliver auditing independently in the field.
But these people were not under strict control, and often used older technology which they had been trained in instead of the latest materials. As the tech became less workable during the 1960s and as the amount of lower level auditing to be done decreased down towards the level of 20 hours and then 5 hours, the field auditors became sharp competition and were therefore seen as a source of trouble.
In 1965 a policy was issued called "Field Auditors Become Staff" (HCOPL of 9 May 65). Although this did not absolutely forbid field auditing, it attempted to convert the Field Auditors into what are now known as FSMs, giving them sales commissions on any of their PCs that they sent into the orgs for services. In other words, these field Scientologists would now concentrate on promotion instead of delivering the tech.
When this was combined with the dangers of getting into trouble with ethics for "Squirreling" (which by that time included using any of the older processes in which they might have been trained) and the difficulties of being perfectly standard with anything less that Class 8 training (because one could not even learn the standard tech materials at that time without doing the confidential Class 8 course), the end result was that the practice of Field Auditing almost totally disappeared.
The tech was meant to be used, and yet the organization made it dangerous to simply take a course and use the data.
Of course this was in the madness of the late 1960s and things are better now. Now instead of crushing potential field auditors with heavy ethics, they usually just give the person a talking to and push them into abandoning any ideas of auditing in the field. The latest story I have just heard (1997) concerned some people who had the gall to form up an "assist network" in Los Angeles where partially trained people might simply do assists (a light form of auditing to give somebody a hand) on each other at no charge. Of course this has been carefully pushed out of existence.
Since it was too rough to be a field auditor, the solution open to these people was to form up their own private organizations. These organizations were known as "Franchises" and they paid a certain percentage of their income (ten or fifteen percent in the old days) to Scientology.
Of course the org had problems with these sometimes because they were potentially a source of rebellion. For example, there was an old time Franchise holder from the 1950s named Bernie Green. He had been a strong supporter of Ron, but in 1968 he did the Class 8 course and was promptly thrown overboard along with all the other Class 8 students. Not being a young man and not appreciating this repayment for his long service, he promptly decided that Ron was the enemy and completed the course with a smiling exterior to cover his rage. He went back to New York and converted his Franchise into a "squirrel group" (so called even though he delivered the standard tech of the time) which offered OT levels to declared "SPs".
You might now say, "ah hah", he was "covertly hostile", obviously the mark of an SP. But I would point out that this is the tone scale in action. A previously high toned individual is attacked and betrayed by the group he is a part of and ends up sinking into covert hostility and desiring to get even. Yet again an enemy was created where there had been none.
Of course they hounded him with legal actions and I think that he was eventually pushed out of business.
Again this is old news, but it shows the beginning of a pattern that would escalate over the years as the orgs worked to bring their own opposition into existence.
And please notice that we have passed far beyond the original definition of "Squirrel". We are not talking here about somebody like Werner Erhardt getting some Scientology training and launching his own subject. We are talking about an old time Scientologist, extremely highly trained in the subject, launching a splinter group. It is really a different breed of animal, referred to as a "Freezoner" here on the internet.
The "Franchises" eventually became "Missions" and things went on in this way with rare splintering during the 1970s because ethics was held back to avoid forcing them into revolt.
But a new echelon of Sea Org members were coming up the line, raised on a diet of "toughness" and dramatization and ethics conditions and almost no real tech.
If force worked to help people, police states would be therapeutic.
And there was ever building charge and vested interests and power plays as Ron removed himself from the lines. And finally this was unleashed in the notorious mission holders conference and the subsequent heavy attacks on the entire mission network by the Sea Org. The details of this have already been recounted extensively on the internet.
Soon a good thirty percent of the missions had rebelled and declared independence, forming the core of the "Freezone" as it appears today.
This, of course, crashed Flag's stats because it cut the flow of people coming in from the missions. I was actually at flag when this madness hit, and I saw a 50 percent drop in the number of people on advanced courses as mission personnel fled back to their organizations and new people stopped arriving. This happened fast, with an instant drop as the mission holders conference was called, followed by a further drop as all other mission staff pulled out either to join the rebellion or to replace mission staff that had been declared suppressive, and ending with a long steady slump.
The solution was to apply more force and dramatize further. The KSW policy was again misused to destroy anyone attempting to apply the tech of Scientology. This time it was applied against the Scientology business community, who had the effrontery to actually use tiny bits of tech in their everyday lives. They were hounded, and forced to go to Flag for KSW courses, and were often driven out of business. This was accomplished by a Sea Org unit known as the "Finance Police".
This was a successful action because it got Flag's weekly income up briefly as it delivered useless KSW courses in place of the advanced training that it used to specialize in. The side effect was to further wreck long term prospects and expansion.
Now the mission network is a shadow of what it once was, and there are self created enemies on every side.
The "group engram" seems to be evolving into a "group GPM" (Goals Problem Mass) with more and more opponents being brought into existence.
I have stayed away from the subject of technical errors in this writeup. I think that there only remains one serious one that has been giving us terrible trouble since 1965, and that is the definition of clear.
On a theoretical basis, a godlike being on the early track would not be subject to pain and force (engrams) until after he had sunk low enough to be hit. According to 1952 theory, the pattern is thought, then emotion, then effort, and then the scale inverts. So the basic aberrations are ones of thought.
There is nothing in the theory of the lower grades of release that requires the prior existence of secondaries, engrams, implants, GPMs, entities, or anything else. The grades are the basic aberrations. They can all be shown to derive from initial willful decisions to not communicate and thereafter feed on themselves.
The grades are run to a point of release rather than erasure. The original problems, overts, upsets, and communication barriers that initially caused the being to fall from a godlike state are too far out of reach for true erasure until after the being has worked his way through the band of force that lies between us and the early track. Therefore, the PC runs OT levels etc. but you keep putting in the rudiments or further expanding his grades as needed.
Total erasure on grade zero (the ultimate OT level) would include the ability to stop a speeding bullet or vanish a stone wall by acknowledgement alone.
Ron must have had an inkling of this because he says in HCOB 25 JUN 70 CS Series 12 that "The Grades harmonic onto the OT levels".
This would mean that we should revise the definition of clear to reflect the ability to confront the force in mental pictures rather than a total end to aberration. A clear is free from timeless reactive thought, but he still gets into problems, overts, and upsets unless he is in the temporary release states that we can produce in these basic areas. This should be obvious from the fact that we continue to do rudiments after clear and from the fact that the security checks continue to dredge up overts on people who are clear.
The mistake in the 1960s definition is the basic technical mistake that lead to the abandonment of lower level auditing (because going clear was supposed to undercut these aberrations) which in turn led to the group engram of the late 1960s which I have already discussed at length and which in turn has put us into the mess that we are currently in.
But this new definition, in terms of confronting the force in mental image pictures, is not really new. This is the 1958 concept of clear and of how clear can be achieved by Dianetics. Just listen to tape LCC-3 of 18 OCT 58 "Confronting". This has been re-issued in the cassette series called "The Origins of Aberration". Note that lecture LCC-6 "The Clearing Technique of 1947" was omitted from the cassettes and lecture LCC-7 was renumbered LCC-6 to cover the gap.
Despite this horrid tale, there is something to be said for maintaining a standard and workable technology. Keeping Scientology Working fails in its inability to correct and evolve the technology but it is successful in holding ground that has been already captured as long as it is not used in such a way as to destroy one's allies.
But the tech is still on a research line. And beings develop more independence and free thought as they go up scale.
An army needs its scouts to map the terrain. The scouts need the army to hold the territory. To make the scouts line up and salute is to destroy their effectiveness. To start a war between these two groups is a guarantee of failure.
Every time he tried to advance the tech, Ron unstabilized the organizations. When a standard line was held (the 1970s), the orgs expanded as long as Sea Org policy fanatics could be kept from driving everybody off.
But there is an entire world of research to be done (Ron mentions that there are at least 20 more OT levels beyond the top of the bridge, and I suspect that that is seriously underestimated), and a place is needed for people who have expanded beyond the rigid molds.
There comes a time when parents have to let their children leave home, and it would be insane for them to declare those kids suppressive for blowing the family environment. Instead they remain connected, they drop by for dinner once in awhile, sometimes the parents shake their heads or chide them for breaking the old traditions and sometimes the children think that the parents are old fuddy duddies, but they remain family and work for each other's benefit even when they disagree. Anything else, as seen in tales of estranged offspring or excessively dominated elder children living at home, appears to be highly abberative.
The Freezone is essential to the long range expansion and evolution of the subject to the point were it can deliver total freedom to all of mankind. So is the standard organization. They should be in good communication and mutually supportive rather than at war.
There are many freezone sites on the internet. A good link to start from if you're interested is:
Note that some freezone organizations adhere very close to standard and others are more exotic. The standard ones keep a low profile because they are too easy to attack on the basis of copyright violations. Therefore you will mainly see the more exotic one's here, who are either exploring alternate methods or renaming terms to avoid the continual legal harassment by the CofS.
Yes there are a lot of real anti-Scientologists. Here I don't mean the freezone, who are simply unorthodox independents, but the real anti crowd that doesn't believe that there is such a thing as tech and considers that Ron was a con-artist.
Again, I would point out that you bring about your own opposition.
Many of these people would not be in the fight if the org had not worked so hard to smash all criticism out of existence.
Many would not be fighting if they themselves or people close to them had not been hurt by abuses practiced by the Sea Org.
Many would not be fighting if the CofS did not continually and abusively exploit its people and violate the laws of the land.
Only a handful would be attacking if the org had behaved well instead of badly. And guess what, if you can take a bit of criticism and you have many enthusiasts on your side, it really doesn't matter if there are a few critics.
But if you start trying to destroy these few critics with legal harassment and dead agenting type lies and more extreme overts, then ten new critics will spring up for every one that you destroy. Its like fighting dragon's teeth.
You don't find anti Zen hate groups or societies dedicated to destroying Christian Science. Even the weirdo cults are tolerated until the moment when some insanity such as Heaven's Gate is dramatized.
Right now they are making extreme fun of various OT materials, especially OT3. And yet most of them don't care except that it pushes the org's buttons. Except for the jokes, that is. The OT3 jokes are getting very good and those might persist long after any desire to attack has ceased. Do you see now what the org's dramatizations have wrought? We still have jokes of Polish stupidity despite the existence of genius level Polish mathematicians and chess players. We had better learn to laugh at ourselves because some of those jokes are never going to go away.
A Scientologist will need a strong stomach to look at the anti sites. There will be a lot of harsh criticism and "entheta" (enturbulated theta). There will be some lies and false information, but there will also, unfortunately, be a lot of true information about overts committed by the CofS. I say unfortunate not because I think that these things should be hidden but because I think that these things should never have happened in the first place.
The anti sites also contain a great deal of real OT material along with an occasional bogus document, so be warned.
Here are a few links which will lead you on to others. They are all over the internet. Every time the org forces one to shut down, a dozen volunteers put up more copies than existed before.
"We in Scientology could put together a group strong enough to run over everything it came to. But then
someday, when I and others are gone, it would have to be overthrown and the cry will be 'Auditors of the World
Unite, you have nothing to loose but your certs'".
- From LRH Tape lecture 15 of the "Anatomy of the Spirit of Man Congress" titled "What Scientology
is doing" given on June 6, 1955.
I choose the pseudonym of "The Pilot" for various reasons. It is meant to convey a sense of the old riverboat pilots guiding the way through difficult channels or in the sense of the old barnstormers showing people about flying for the first time. It was partially inspired by the pilot in Richard Bach's "Illusions" and partially by some confidential things on OT 3 and even by some incidents I ran once.
I am a positive fanatic on the LRH tech. As I mentioned earlier, there are over 2900 taped lectures by Ron (over 3000 hours). Of these, I have thoroughly studied more than two thirds (everything I could get my hands on, over 2000 lectures). The entire training route up through Class 12 only has about 500 lectures. That is only about one sixth of the subject.
Really the bulk of what they learn is on the Briefing Course. Class 8 and higher courses only have a small amount of additional tech plus a lot of hammering in of basic auditing skills. The old time estimates were one year for the Briefing Course and one month for the Class 8 course. With a few exceptions, the highest trained people in the subject know less than twenty percent of the tech.
I did the old OT 7 and then the new OT 7 as well. I have been keyed out OT but that was back in the early days and was very unstable. Neither the old nor the new OT levels were capable of restoring that temporary OT state (they are PreOT levels) and portions of my case remained unhandled despite doing everything available.
So I launched off into my own exploration using the early almost forgotten tech. I stayed away from the freezone. I experimented on nobody. But I did what Ron used to say in the 1950s, which was that just about everything from 1952 onwards could be self audited by a trained auditor.
I came up with a lot of material. It is available at:
or they can be found in Homer's archives (mentioned in the freezone section above).
I would not introduce this material into the standard tech lineup within the orgs. As I said above, there are scouts and there is the fortified territory of standard tech. But the roadmap of what I found is there if you are ready for it. There are quite a few people who are above the current top of the bridge and they are floundering because it is far from the end of the road.
But the final document (number 32 of 32) is addressed to fixing things that are wrong with the orgs and you might want to pick it up
I continue to discuss and post things to the internet newsgroups. You can search for these postings on dejanews
at http://www.dejanews.com/ (Dejanews is gone, use Google now. Ed.) either by searching for "SUPER SCIO"
(which is in the message headers) or by searching for all pilot postings in the ARS newsgroup (discussed later)
using:
~a (The Pilot) & ~g (alt.religion.scientology)
"Yet a condition of no-barriers can exist, and this is itself Freedom"
- Dianetics 55 chapter 6 "Trapped"
The general target is a restoration of truth, open communication, and care for one's fellow man.
1. Promotion of free and open communication. Cancellation of "Issue Authority" and "Jokers and Degraders". Use of "mixing practices" only to forbid actual practice while trying to do a Scientology level at the same time. An end to the persecution of squirrels and psychs except for situations of actual physical abuse. A recognition that we have shared goals with many other groups.
2. Cancellation of eligibility checks for students and PCs. Restoration of the sanctity of the confessional, even for those who subsequently are labeled as enemies. Use of the FPRD only as a major case action for the purpose of case gain and not to gather data.
3. Recognition that the subject is still on a research line. Redefinition of the State of Clear as being "no longer affected by the force in mental pictures and free from stimulus response reactive thought". Acknowledgment that this does not erase the grades of release or handle the basic problems, overts, and upsets which originally caused the being to decay. The OT levels are a gradient to allow the being to reach these on the early track.
4. Cancellation of confidentially. Re-emphasis of Scientology as a religion and abandonment of the viewpoint that it is a business with trade secrets. Termination of all legal suits except those necessary to defend the church from direct attack. As a matter of religious freedom, all materials should be easily available to anyone regardless of their status within orthodox Scientology.
5. Cancellation of all policies on suppressive persons and an end to declaring people SPs. Use of "non-enturbulation orders" for the duration of training or processing as a last resort when a PTS condition cannot otherwise be handled. An absolute and total amnesty for all past actions (because we'll never sort out what was or wasn't justified). Subsequently, people are only to be declared as enemies if they engage in flagrant and unreasonable attacks against the church. People who disagree or blow are not to be labeled as enemies. Elimination of the use of "lower conditions" except in circumstances of outright damage and danger.
6. Establishment of an International Chaplain, a chaplain's division within OSA, and an expanded office of the chaplain within the organizations, all with the power to right wrongs, override policy as needed, and keep the orgs operating in an ethical manner towards their staff and public.
7. An end to all physical abuse, including cancellation of the RPF and an end to all penalties for lower conditions. Decent food, living quarters, and more family time for Sea Org members. Far far better treatment of Sea Org children.
8. Intensive tech training, co-auditing, and solo auditing delivered locally to all staff as an exchange for the low pay and long working hours. Emphasize tech training for all staff.
9. A steady release of new OT levels and a steady downward export of levels to the next lower level of organization as the new levels become the premier service for the top level orgs.
10. A cleanup and simplification of pricing. Ethical behavior on the subject of money. Restoration of the policy "Only Accounts Talks Money". Make money by means of low prices and high volume.
11. Full reinstatement of the 1967 policy "New 2D Rules". Drop all rules against homosexuals etc. The Sea Org does have an image to maintain, so their staff shouldn't be wildly promiscuous or throwing orgies, but they don't have to be more puritanical than what is currently accepted by the society at large.
12. Change from management by stats to management by good indicators with stats being a highly important management indicator.
13. Re-emphasize that policy is a guiding thing rather than an absolute (see "Theory of Organization: What is Policy").
14. More truth, more communication, more ARC. Less concern with PR. More compassion and less harassment.
-------
I would intend that amnesty to apply to everybody on both sides of the fence. One big reason that revolutions go sour when they win is that they take revenge on the overthrown regime. This is why things never change so much as they remain the same. The revolutionaries soon take on the color of those whom they deposed. You break this and many other deadly cycles by means of forgiveness. Christ was right. Forgiveness is one of the keys to getting out of the trap.
"If one gets himself into trouble by communicating, he should further communicate".
- Dianetics 55 chapter 7 "Communication"
"The more thetan you have present, the less policy you need and the better things run. Only a thetan can
handle a post or a pc. All he needs is the know-how of minds as contained in Scientology. That was all he ever
lacked. So, given that, sheer policy is poor stuff as it seeks to make a datum stand where a being should be. That's
the whole story of the GPM's. So why not have live orgs?"
- HCOPL of 23 OCT 63 "Refund Policy"
Become a Reformer NOW.
There are others who are pushing for reform.
You might even be able to tread on the edge without quite getting declared. For an example of this, see this website:
which describes Heidrun Beer, also known as clear baby. She has been bothered by OSA and threatened with a ComEv but is still going strong.
Or post anonymously. There are anonymous remailers and websites which explain how to use them (do a search for things like Private Idaho and Mixmaster Remailers).
The ongoing discussions are on the news servers.
alt.religion.scientology is primarily anti plus some OSA agents posting "good theta". If you don't have it on your newsserver, try
alt.clearing.technology is primarily freezone. You can try
Some people crosspost to both newsgroups. Free news access is unstable, but you can also try aiming your news reader at lamont.ldgo.columbia.edu or search for open NNTP Hosts. If you don't have a good newsreader and you are using windows, you can download a shareware copy of Free Agent (far better than using a browser).
You may find other reformers (such as myself) on either one. Many of the posters even among the antis are courteous and supportive of honest efforts to reform the org.
You can print out the above points for reform and give them to your friends. You can even print this entire web page and pass it around if you want. If you have a friend on staff, please show him this page because the staff members (and especially Sea Org members) suffer more than anybody and they often don't have computers.
And if you are not a Scientologist yourself and are only reading this for the sake of some friend or relative who is involved, please show them this page because this page is in agreement with the tech that they believe in and only seeks to change the destructive policies that currently exist within the organization.
Let the orgs know that you want reform. To prove that you are in good standing without revealing who you are, take a piece of Scientology promo that you have just received and rip your mailing address off of it. Write REFORM NOW on the promo piece (without your name) with a magic marker, place it in an envelope, and mail it back to the org or to a higher level org.
If you do this frequently, they will get the message. The actual letters in stat at most orgs is extremely low. Few people answer the letter regs. The stat is considered very important and is carefully watched. It could go negative (more reform than real letters) quite easily. AND THAT WILL BE NOTICED BY HCO AND THE EXEC COUNCIL. And if it happens at many orgs, Int Management will take notice.
This is intended for use in verifying my signature if there is ever any doubt as to whether or not anybody is forging my anonymous posts. I recommend that you pull one or two of my old posts from dejanews (I began using this key in June 1997) and compare the public key with this one to ensure that it hasn't been tampered with before adding the key to your PGP key ring for doing signature verifications on my posts.
This was generated with a DOS version of PGP 2.62ui which maintains 2.3 compatibility. This is sharewhare that can easily be downloaded for free.
- -----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- Version: 2.6 mQCNAjOdP4IAAAEEAMm+dCcv5Tx0KMfaqvvQrhqAlXAuUaMRyLp5VS1CHAE0C0Aq LR9N884PAfTJ//aDBZKYMAXMxp/pp+Ei/Yq9n5Rh8GAkoFhVt1TjeyKuthTMduOD cbkAmFGLQiKkvnx/pYtlyUIjqt2cFjh/qBWH2tEbPXW+uZV1xssIt3ZgVQbNAAUR tCFUaGUgUGlsb3QgPHBpbG90QGhpZGRlbnBsYWNlLmNvbT4= =q/DH - -----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
Copyright 1997 by the individual who is currently writing anonymously as "The Pilot". This web page may be freely made available on any internet web server or copied for personal use as long as the text is not modified. However, tasteful reformatting, maintenance of web links in keeping with the original intentions, addition of counters and appropriate logos (such as the free speech campaign), and information about the host or host site may be added.
Sorry, you cannot E-Mail me at this time because I am remaining anonymous. However, I do watch both alt.religion.scientology
and alt.clearing.technology for posts which mention The Pilot in their message headers.