"Hubbard cancelled the process ..."

 

In roaming the Internet (in my limited way) I have come across sort of complaints in the nature of a statement "Such and such a process produced fantastic results, so Hubbard banned it because it would not make money", meaning the results came too fast. This article goes into that from a somewhat oblique angle.

First I would like to take up something I came across which I found rather bizarre. It came from a man who I possibly trained when I was an HPA (Hubbard Profesional Auditor) instructor in 1957-1958 (the name seemed familiar). He first wrote: "I did three Weekend Group Intensives at Palace Gardens Terrace, which I believe was in the late Summer of 1956. The first of them was S-C-S, which I did enthusiastically, and the result was that afterwards I went off the top of the tone-scale. Did you do this process, or do you know of anyone who might have done it, or anyone who might know anything about it?" Later he wrote: "The SCS was on the body, and we all did it together, with two or three auditors taking turns, each doing maybe one and a half hours before swapping over. Difficult to remember the details now, but in each session we did some Start, Change Location, Stop, Grand Stop, and some 8C. At least 15 of us, and it was a big room. I was very disappointed that SCS wasn't done anymore, and I seem to have a vague memory of getting a bulletin from LRH saying that some people (thetans?) who had got out of their bodies and the universe doing SCS had decided not to come back, and this was causing embarrassment so he had given orders not to run it any more. I knew that I could stay out [of the body] if I wanted to, but I chose to come back."..."Some years later I realized that if I had had more weekends of SCS, I could have stabilised and would have been OT within a few months, at a cost of only a few pounds, and so would others. This sort of approach is the way most spiritual paths work, not like the endless meanderings in the byways of the mind, and the years of unnecessary study and useless and irrelevant data.".

Well, as many readers will know SCS, both on the body and on an object has been part of Grade 1 ever since grades came out in about 1964. I had not before heard of such a "rave result" but it is certainly possible, and run with the auditor's code and rudiments in and preclear sessionable, I doubt if they would ever give a "bad" result.

Bad results.

Procedures can give "bad results" and the following is one I came across. It is very early Scientology, though I picked it up within the last ten years (it is 2011 when I write this).

"In late 1958 probably December, Dennis Stephens ran the process conceive a static on me.

"Yes, xxx [earlier writer in the list I got this from], I think you were right. Hubbard was looking for a one shot clear process, that would shoot a pre-clear up the tone scale, to a permanent position at a high level of awareness.

"Unfortunately it had the opposite effect on me.

"After a few commands I went down tone very quickly, and my havingness went out the bottom. I was unconscious or close to it, had no feeling of having a body and was about as close to death as I could get.

"I went from being totally paralyzed to no body, no head, no mouth. So how could I execute an auditing command?

"I started to panic, and lost hope of surviving. My last thought, what a hell of a way to go, here I am a pre-clear trying to go clear. Where is the justice in that?

"The only thing that saved me was a very faint voice from my auditor saying something like, just try and spot a very tiny tiny spot in space, doesn't have to have any mass.

"His voice sounded like he was a thousand miles away. I had lost almost all of my normal senses. But his intention was there, he had mastered his training drills.

"At first I insisted I couldn't do it. It was impossible. But very slowly and very gradually he encouraged me to persevere and I eventually told him, yes, I have a very vague spot in space.

"It gradually progressed to larger and heavier objects until I could actually see the auditing room.

"At the time I wondered why my auditor never panicked. He was totally there. He could have been saying; pass the butter please.

"I would never suggest the average auditor run this process on the average pre-clear. Unless the auditor notified the pre-clear's family that they might have to prepare for an unexpected funeral for the pre-clear. Or the auditor remembers he can revive someone by using a simple touch assist such as, feel my finger, thank you, or you give me that hand, thank you (Where you simply take the person's hand and you deliver acknowledgments, until they are able to do it themselves)."

(Dennis Stevens was closely associated with Scientology in England at the very beginning, and later gave an account of it, which you can find at http://www.antology.info/index-8.html. This is probably one of the best accounts of the early days by one that was fairly close to Ron some of the time.)

My contention here is that Ron tested process pretty thoroughly, and dropped those which were wildly variable. The above process, "Conceive a Static", is process no. R2-40 in the 1954 Scientology book Creation of Human Ability, and has the warning "THIS IS A HEAVY PROCESS. IT IS NOT RECCOMENDED FOR CASES HAVING ANY REAL DIFFICULTY". Such a warning about a process, in capital letters, I do not recall seeing anywhere else in the literature. I would not use R2-40 or advise its use on anyone.

I do not have an example of other Scientology processes which produced widely different results including bad results. I am pretty sure they occurred, but that Ron withdrew them as soon as tests showed them unreliable, and most evidence was carefully removed, or suppressed from the records (for the general good of Scientology's reputation). It should be remembered that Ron tried very many processes and they were first tested out at the HGC (Hubbard Guidance Centre - processing department) of the organisation he was at at the time, and he also received reports from the other organisation he was not present at (Washington or London).

Good results

My thesis is that Ron took a good deal of responsibility for seeing that processes recommended had wide usability and did not produce random disastrous results. The processes are all relatively simple (with the proviso that some did require a pretty good auditor, which was why training went up to Class XII). When I say relatively simple, I mean relative in comparison to human cases. Human cases are vastly different and enormously complicated - and Hubbard set himself the problem of reaching them all. In the 50's, certainly when I was auditing in the Scientology Org in London, he did make a broad division of cases, and certain cases (determined by results on a personality tests) where only to be run on objective processes until they passed certain levels on that test.

I was/am not a superbly highly trained auditor with an enormous number of well done hours behind me. My time in Scientology, and after I was thrown out, has been partly absorbed in the socalled "Admin" work in the Church, and "Publications" work in and out. The auditing I have done has had its remarkable successes, of which I will relate three of to help put this matter in perspective.

The first one was in 1958 or 1959. I worked in what was (and may still be) the Hubbard Guidance Centre - the auditing part of the Scientology Org in London. I was a humble auditor, and when I look back on it, my case was in terrible shape, possibly disguised to a slight degree by some semblance of "Trs" - putting on a front to hide nervousness, lack of confidence, and shyness. This fellow traveled down from the North of England for week, in which we normally delivered 25 hours of auditing, 3 straight off in the morning and three straight of in the afternoon (3 hours Mondays and Fridays being devoted to tests and interview). I was told to run CCH 1-4, a set of objective processes (which had been developed in the previous three or four years, and I had been around to hear bits and pieces of the background and trials some of which may not have been published). When we started the fellow was totally unable to look anyone straight in the face, but on the contrary, he was looked , almost frantically, all around the person he was talking or listening to. You could say he was highly nervous. The four CCH processes were run in quick succession, leaving each one the moment one got a slight win (which was standard). On one of them, CCH 3, he suddenly looked straight at me - an amazing change. The process involved us sitting opposite each other, hands held up facing the others hands, and the preclear following and duplicating simple movements of the auditors hands. When he stared straight at me, I took this to be a win, and went on to the next process, which involved me making a movement with a book, and having him copy the motion. We had done it a number of times before, so he was not new to it, but he could not do it. He just sat there staring at me.

It was about noon, so we took a lunch break. We were at Fitzroy Street, and if I remember correctly, there was an Odeon (or Gaumont) cinema on the other side of Tottenham Court Road, which had a restaurant, and we went there. But he was still looking at me as though he had never seen a human being before. I reckon any Scientology process can produce such a startling change in an infinitesimal number of cases (just as the SCS mentioned earlier). I understand that a year or so later, he wanted another intensive (no doubt having saved up for it) and wanted me to audit him. I had been moved to another post, so he got some one else. I do not know what happened, but I guess he was disappointed, for one probably never gets two such tremendous case changes after each other. Looking back over 50 years later, where my case has improved out of all recognition, I could be led to wonder how a person in such lousy case shape as I was then could achieve such a miracle. All honour to LRH to produce a process which even a "wet rag" like I was then could make a success of with what might very well be called robotic auditing. It should be remembered that I had an organisation around me (primitive compared to what Ron developed) and there was a director of processing to keep an eye on things. I was a complete failure trying to be a field auditor :-(

The next case occurred more recently. The prehistory was that the preclear had a very unpleasant father, and had vowed to commit suicide if he ever did things like his father did. He had had auditing in the Scientology Org. But it came to pass that his father died, and he found himself compulsively behaving like his father did. In the early days of Scientology we talked about a life continuum which was probably what had happened. The fellow went back to the local "Church" but it was after the early 80's degradation of official Scientology, and he could not stand their behaviour. Fortunately he found me and we did the grades, which I suppose handled his problem with his father. What I do remember was that a problem with his mother was handled, which we were not aiming at (I did not know about it). He told me afterwards that for thirty years he had been unable to communicate with his mother, despite wanting to, which he did not understand. What turned up in routine Grade auditing was that he made a promise to his father that he would never talk to his mother. The situation was grotesque, in that after living with the impossible father for years the mother told the father she wanted to leave him. She was then kicked out at a moments notice, with three children. She found a single room, but after one night there the three children went to an impossible orphanage. My preclear at the age of eleven had no possessions but his shoes, and had to run when he woke to get clothes that fitted him (before the other boys got there), and one time he suffered heat stroke and found himself in bed, after the nuns had refused to let him come indoors in the shade from a boiling hot sunlit playground without shade. His father came to him and said he would take my preclear out of the orphanage if the my preclear promised never to speak to his mother. Not surprisingly he had repressed that decision - but routine auditing brought it to light and he emmediatly got in touch with his mother, and not long afterwards she came from England to Denmark to visit him. When talking to him on the phone about this article, he mentioned one of many other wins he got from the Scientology Grade Auditing. He told me that he had a big win from the auditing, where in the first place he occupied another viewpoint (not his own) and from that came to occupy all viewpoints which was an enormous blow out.†

In these two cases the surprising, startling result came after doing routine auditing (as did the one with first reported with the group SCS auditing). In the last one I am giving you auditing was aimed at a specific problem (though badly aimed, according to the person who sent the preclear to me :-) )

I had audited some one on Dianetic auditing, four flows, and got a remarkable result which probably was Dianetic clear. He had a girl friend who suffered from what I would call hallucinations. The immediate cause of the referral to me was that she woke in terror in the middle of the night, in terror because his head had become a tiger's head (a vicious tiger!). He had got up (in the middle of the night) and tried (unsuccessfully) to run it on Dianetics. So he referred the case to me. My background told me this was what we called a CCH case and I was doomed if I tried to run engrams. The boy friend did not agree, and apart from the girl, who was kind of neurotic, ringing me up at odd times during the course of the auditing, I had him also ringing me up and telling me I should not be running CCHs, I should be running Dianetics.

I ran CCHs 1-4. CCH 1 (known as "Give me that hand") ran briefly without any large change. On CCH 2, (also known as Opening Procedure by 8c), the first cycle (of four commands) went alright but on the second cycle, when she was walking with me by her side from one wall to the other she very suddenly collapsed on the nearby sofa, with her hands over her face, crying "Oh, No!" What had happened was that my face had become that of a tiger, and she was in terror. I continued the process set (CCH 1,2,3 and 4) for I think some 17 hours. It was not easy, mostly because she was ringing me up with problems in between sessions (and her boy friend also, as mentioned, with his urge for me to do Dianetics). However at the end I ran her for some seven hours in one day on a process known as Opening Procedure by Duplication (also known as Book and Bottle), which is a very tough process, and she did not get the hallucinations and terror during it, and so far as I know, in life thereafter. Which did make it easier for her to hold down a job. I did not keep in touch with them, mainly because of an ARC break between me and the boy friend.

Well, that is what I have to say on the subject "LRH stopped that process because it was so good that he could not make money from it" - and having gone to all the trouble of writing the article, I feel inclined to think "Why go to all that bother to refute such a silly idea". But there are many success stories in Scientology, and it may be good seeing some, going way back to the 50s.

 

 

Added 15th June 2014:  Recently someone contacted me regard to this article, unhappy that I had given the impression that Ron had cancelled processes because they worked too fast to make money.  I have no evidence that he did and do not believe that he did so. While Ron (in the early days, anyway) intentionally left a track of his research (the old red volumes contain Bulletins that were cancelled, being so marked) I can not remember instances of processes being cancelled because they worked too well.  I do remember once in the 50's as an HGC auditor, going into session to run the latest process on a preclear, and after 6 hours of auditing, looking in my comm(unications) basket and finding a Bulletin saying that that process must not be run! There were processes which worked fantastically on some people, and disastrously on others, and I found an account a friend of mine wrote aligned with that, You cant find it at http://articles.ivymag.org/pdf/IVy78.pdf starting bottom of page 44 "Win from 1961".

† Since this article was written, this preclear has himself written his account, which is a more broad example of the results from Scientology (from earlier times before he came to me).  See http://scientolipedia.org/info/Antony_A_Phillips , which is an introduction of me as a practitioner or (true) Scientologist - see the inset paragraph headed "Success Story".