Historical - Joan de Veulle interview – Academy training and teaching by agreement (PE)
When living in Denmark, and before I got thrown out of the Scientology organisation I took a summer holiday from my job in an insurance company, went to England, and visited Joan de Veulle, who had retired (to enjoy gardening) to Porlock, Somerset, south west England. I made this interview of her on cassette tape, have just (jan 2012) discovered it and got it converted to this mp3 reproduction.
Near the beginning she mentions Fitzroy Street. 37 (and 35) Fitzroy Street was the building where the Scientology organisation on London (called HASI) was. It is in central London, parallel to Tottenham Court Road.
http://www.ivymag.org/jdv/jdv.html
if that does not work, try:
http://www.ivymag.org/jdv/Joan%20De%20Veulle%201975.mp3
(This is a temporary placing of the recording)
I can give a little background on this, but first I would say that this tape and my experience provides historical background on how the HPA course was run in the 50s.
I took the HPA course in the evenings of the second part of 55 and day time the first few weeks of 1956. Joan took it later in 56. I taught parts of the HPA course in 58 (and a month of so before and after 58).
Broadly the courses were the same. However I think there were LRH taped lectures in '55 (which I don't remember, and probably did not understand), Joan had few LRH lectures but when I taught the HPA we had every afternoon an LRH tape from the 18th American ACC – some marvelous tapes. They were played through a loudspeaker to the whole class, repeating when we got to the end of the series.
In '55 I was on the evening course – three nights a week. In 1958 the day and weekend courses ran from 9.00 to 5.30 with an hour for lunch.
The first hint of communication training drills was in 1956, were in December, I was on a experimental training course on what was called dummy auditing. No confronting drill then, Monday was “dear Alice” (originations from the Alice book of Lewis Carol), second day was acknowledgments, third day was repetitive questions (“do birds fly?” or “do fish swim?”) fourth day was handling originations (I think from a list of originations given out) and fifth day was dummy auditing (later numbered Tr5 and dropped when Tr0, confronting came out to keep it five drills with a drill a day for a five day week.). The course became the communication course (Tr0-4) and was for a time called the Indoctrination Course, and what we now know as Tr6 was introduced to increase the persons ability to control the preclear, and was called at first Upper Indoc(trination).
The period around '57 was very much concentrated on communication, and control, and it was in 57 (when I was in Dublin) that the processes CCH 1 to 4 came out, with the idea of Tone 40 auditing. The idea of Tone 40 auditing was found very difficult to grasp, some thinking that it had to be in the same tone of voice each time, and I even ran across the idea that if you made a clumsy job of the first command, all other commands had to repeat that clumsy way. I can say that after coming out of Scientology I have twice used the CCHs (1-4) with great success, once on a case that suffered from hallucination, during the course of everyday life, which was cured to the degree that I ran 7 hour opening procedure by duplication without any hallucination occurring, and once on a more “normal” case.
There were no Bulletins on the course I received in '55 or the course I later taught, neither was there a checksheet.
I had an exam on my HPA course, which consisted of a number of questions with yes or no answers (one was “Can you lie?” and we were told the correct answer was “yes”). But the stringent part of the exam was to write out the then 50 Scientology axioms word (and comma) perfect.
I can remember auditing on my HPA course in the evening, rather an unpleasant session, as the preclear exteriorised, and we were required to run route 1 (see Creation of Human Ability) and the preclear became uncertain. I felt totally uncertain and it ended in a loss (for both of us).
The course I was on in '55 was eight weeks long, and when I started the evening course it was six months, three nights a week. When I got near the end of the six months they found out that six months evening was not equal to eight weeks day, so they made it twelve months evening. I gave up my job and switched over to day for four weeks.
I started teaching the HPA course at weekends (I had a day job in the London Org shipping books, and handling memberships memberships and tape library). The weekend course was run so that three weekends was equivalent to a fives day week. The day course was from 9.00 to 5.30 PM. With lunch from 12.00 to 1.00. I started as upper indoc instructor (answers to today Tr 6 to 9) and, because we had an extra day equivalent to a week, we ran Tr.8 (Tone 40 on an ashtray) for three days.
There were three instructors, one to Comm Course, one to Upper Indoc, and one to what I think was called CCH, which in fact taught (and audited) all the processes on the agenda. At one point the Comm Course was considered the most important, so the Director of Training (who we never saw at weekends) was the person who took the Comm Course.
The eight week course consisted of the following weeks:
Receive auditing (25 hour intensive) from a student.
Comm Course
Upper Indoc
CCHs
Comm Course
Upper indoc
CCHS
Give a 25 hour intensive to a new student
In the first week of Upper Indoc they did three days of shouting at the ashtray (Tr8), and on the second week three days of doing a number of different variations of the drill of the Tr8 drill to increase intention. On all drills, if one was student in the morning one was coach in the afternoon. At 4.00 PM there was a tape play, and some extra time on various things – at one point I had to teach the pre-logics in that period. At another point I got each student to stand up and confront all the other students (just something I invented, or worked out, there was very little control on how we ran the course, though of course there was a broad curriculum to follow).
First written: Feb 2012.
