Ensifer

First off, a short bit of recent history.

For close to 28 years, or perhaps more, I have had a small cash balance at Flag. Depending on the year and who was calling me the actual amount ranged between $20 and $2000 credit. I’d vote for the $20 because it’s hard to believe even I would have overlooked two thousand bucks.

Okay. Now that you’re up to date – until about the year 2001 I got phone calls pretty much every few months from Flag. The credit balance was the proverbial ‘foot in the door’ to open a dialog directed at recovering me, getting me to pony up more money and come back to Flag to get repaired, renewed and reviewed. Then I bought a small horse property in another county, disconnected the land line and all but disappeared off the Scientology radar. It was pretty strange, not opening a mailbox and having 30 or 40 pieces of Scientology promo fall out. And since I was now totally cell phone the only way for Flag reg teams to get that number was for someone currently on lines to give it to them.

Guess what? Someone did.

It was actually my nephew Sam. He was at Flag training on something-or-the-other for the Org he works for and ended up in the call center. That’s what I term it, the call center. The guy he was talking to happened to be a person I have untold quantities of affinity for. My former roommate, a guy I audited back almost 40 years ago and who also worked for me on staff at my Mission. Bob Goodwin is his name and if you know him you know he’s wonderful. But Bob is also in the Sea org and has targets to meet. Isn’t that what most relationships between Sea Org members and their non SO friends eventually boil down to? Targets? Now I know Bob likes me. At the same time, he wasn’t calling to discuss old times. He was on Miscavige’s dime and he was all about informing me about the new revision in the Scientology library. That and this awesome DVD introducing the Golden Age of Technology.

Half of Bob. All of me. Late 1970s. Booze was flowing.

My apologies for the truncated image of Bob. When I scan in a full image of him I’ll replace it. The funniest part of this picture is me though… I crack up every time I see the size of those lapels on my suit. Sweet huh?

Anyway, Bob is nothing if not persistent. I agreed to let him send me the DVD. He did. I put it in the player, watched maybe 3 minutes of it and ejected it. You all probably know why. I’m not a fan of slasher/horror flicks.

Bob didn’t give up though. He called me every couple of weeks for well over a year. I told him how much I like him and suggested he was wasting valuable time with me. But then he had an idea! Why not let him send me some of the new books in exchange for the credit I had on account? Sounded okay to me. I agreed and quickly forgot about it.

Then, about 3 weeks later, I was at the post office and the guy behind the counter said some packages arrived for me. Huh? I didn’t order anything. He instructed me to wait by a door and about 5 minutes later came out with a hand truck loaded with 7 heavy boxes. It was the complete flippin’ library! Not only that, but there were full sets of CD lectures, about a dozen of them. I was flabbergasted. What the fuck?! Oh well, I loaded them in my truck and dropped them off at my storage unit.

Bob eventually gave up on me. Cut his losses I reckon. Hopefully Bob is doing well. But I was stuck with a couple hundred pounds of books and CD’s and began to wonder how they afforded to do that. So I did some scouting around on the Internet and discovered that the GAT and the revision (re-structuring?) of the basic library was nothing more than a huge reg cycle being done on current Scientologists. The best I could figure out is that one of you guys actually bought the books for me. You got regged for $10K or maybe $50K and that cash was applied, as a stat, to book sales. People like me were selected out, sent the books and viola! The Golden Age of Tech is born and stats are up. See? Look at all the books we sold!

In other parts of society this is known as money laundering. You, the target of an IAS reg team, pays $25K. Bob and his team send maybe $5K hard money worth of books out. The books and lectures are ‘valued’ at $25K. And an extra $20K is banked by the CofS… or whatever the organization is called these days.

I don’t know about you, but that whole scenario feels like some sort of continuing criminal enterprise. Maybe I’m wrong . Maybe not. I’d prefer to ask the person who bought my 7 boxes of books what they think.

You know what though? Before I left the church we also sold Scientology books. The main difference was that we sold them to people who hadn’t read them yet. Or if they had, they bought back-ups or gift copies. In fact, I always felt the basic books were key to getting people into Scientology. You know, they delivered new knowledge, cognitions were had and need of change was arrived at. But there is also a checkered history of manipulation of numbers by the church in order to have bragging rights on sales numbers. Wikipedia references this here:

Various sources allege that the book’s continued sales have been manipulated by the Church of Scientology and its related organizations ordering followers to buy up new editions to boost sales figures. According to a Los Angeles Times exposé published in 1990, “sales of Hubbard’s books apparently got an extra boost from Scientology followers and employees of the publishing firm [Bridge Publications]. Showing up at major book outlets like B. Dalton and Waldenbooks, they purchased armloads of Hubbard’s works, according to former employees.” Members are asked to contribute by placing Dianetics in public libraries.

Some of this is true. But it’s also true that in the later half of the 70’s Dianetics did hit the NYT best seller list legitimately. I know this for a fact because my center in Fresno and my teams of booksellers were #1 in the world for selling copies of Dianetics to non-Scientologists. The new cover was published in paperback form… you know, the BT-laden volcano one… and the game to get DMSMH back to the #1 spot was announced. I can’t recall any Mission not getting behind the game. Any that didn’t were dumb asses because selling books to public in large numbers usually ended up with people coming in to buy services. And I wanted our Fresno Mission to be #1… to win the game.

We did win. And somewhere in my storage unit I have the plaque to prove it. Diana Hubbard handed it to me at a Mission Holder conference in Mazatlan, Mexico at the end of the game. In the Fresno area we sold in excess of 25,000 individual copies of the DMSMH paperback book. And we did old school. Door-to-door. I organized teams of booksellers, trained them up myself on how to actually knock on a door. Then on how to parley the ‘script’ into a sale. I taught them simple things like to actually get the $5 from the customer and to always, say thank you. In addition I provided them with data cards where they could record the address and name of the buyer if the buyer agreed.

It was insanely successful. Think about it… 25,000 copies sold over a 6 month period to complete non-Scientologists in one city alone. If every Mission had done that there really might have been a massive effect instead of just a positive one. I’ll also admit I had a few tricks that helped. One of them was a brace of very, very cool looking Dianetics vans.

See?

Are these great? Or what? Not the Porsche dummy! Although, it was pretty cool as well.

The sales team hit the streets in these vans. I had the gal who painted them also spell out DIANETICS in backward ambulance style on the front of each so people could read it in their mirror. That VW went through about 3 motors during the campaign, but everyone liked driving it. Probably because a lot of them were former Hippies.

The guy in charge was one of my top staffers. His name was Pat McCabe and he ran a great team. He organized each day, set up the grids they worked and kept meticulous logs of sales, expenses and all the other little crap that needed to be done. Pat was also the mentor and moral support for the book sellers. This was door-to-door and unless you’ve done it then you cannot possibly know the confront required to get out there and do it every day. Another thing that helped was that I not only paid the book sellers whatever the weekly salary was but they earned commission on each book. My memory is a bit sketchy but as I recall we bought the $5 books for $2.50 total. Pat and I worked out that we needed about $1 from each book for expenses and so each sale meant $1.50 into the staff’s pocket. May not seem like much but realize that there were probably never more than about 8 sellers total and they sold 25,000 books in 6 months. So they made their salary plus about $30K between them.

The unacknowledged Super Star of the Dianetics book campaign though is a quiet little gal named LeeAnn Smith. She really was quiet. Shy even. Cute and very mellow, but not aggressive at all. The type of young lady who put her hand over her mouth politely when she laughed or smiled. LeeAnn was a total fucking animal out in the field. She was like the Navy SEAL of selling books. She overwhelmingly beat the numbers of any other seller on the teams. In short, she was a Goddess. I hope to hell I gave her a cash bonus. I’m certain I did. I do know she got a plaque every bit as grand as the one I received for being the Mission Holder who “won”.

LeeAnn getting her plaque at our winning celebration in Fresno. Notice how shy and meek she looks? Trust me, it's a trap!!!!

When I started this blog I stated I wanted to tell stories about what it was like being a Scientology staff member before the RTC, Financial Police and the rise of Miscavige.  The message I hope to pass on with this story about book selling is that we had fun. Yeah, stats mattered. But when we aimed for numbers the numbers had integrity. We didn’t sell books to launder money or to create a false impression to the media. Our team In Fresno sold a ton or two of books to people who might actually read them and walk in the door. It was the most basic concept of marketing… get out a huge quantity of material. And the fact that people paid for the book attached a value to it.

Speaking of value. I suppose I ought to thank someone for all those books and CD’s. I’ve done pretty good on eBay with them.

Thank you.

There was a point in my early teens where I absolutely fucking hated those words. And not just those specific ones either. Here’s a few other choice samples of phrases I hated –

Follow them and contribute to their motion.

What is it’s weight?

Look at that wall.

If I had been anything but a  skinny little 110 pound hoodlum I probably would have slapped Ron Cook upside the head. He was tasked with auditing me on Objectives. Let me tell you… it was endless. Grueling. Maddening. Grindingly insufferable and punishingly horrid. I’d sooner have stuck my leg in a tree shredder just to see what came out the other side. I’d rather have checked into a Honduran dentistry college for multiple root canals… sans anesthesia.

I sometimes wonder what my auditor was thinking? He was maybe 30, a nice guy, was learning to audit and lo and behold! My mother handed me over to him and said, “Have at it. Send me a card when you get there.” He took it like a man. Always kept good TR’s in and I eventually decided that the tiny little upward lift at the corners of his mouth wasn’t a smirk. Probably some sort of genetic anomaly or something. He always had that itty-bitty smile, even when his wife Betty was giving him the stink-eye for whatever real or imagined transgression he was guilty of committing.

Ron Cook was great guy. I owe him a lot. He was Old School and not the type to complain when he had to grind out literally hundreds of hours on PC’s like me in order to be a qualified auditor.

That's me and Ron Cook. Look! He actually allowed me to run objectives on him. Such courage.

So what got me in an Objectives state of mind? Several things actually. One was a post I read the other day on one of the ex-Scn blog s about how all these higher-ups got ordered to run objectives and do some Hard TR’s or something. At the risk of appearing to agree with anything Miscavige does (including sucking my oxygen into his lungs) I will say that the post and some of the comments seemed like whining to me. What’s the problem? You guys are tough aren’t you? Most of you are some sort of OT-Something-Or-The-Other. Can’t handle a little control can you?

Which brings up one of the other reasons Objectives have been floating around in my head space. Control. It may shock some of you… considering my age… but I am the single dad of a 7 year old boy. Control is an issue. A big one. I haven’t audited anyone for many, many years but this kid is going to get some Objectives. That’s for sure.

And the final thing? The Karate Kid.

Not the Ralph Macchio version. The newer one with Jaden Smith and Jackie Chan. I took my little boy Wyatt to see it the other night and he was entranced. In the grocery store afterward he was doing one clumsy karate kick after another… in his flip-flops. He’s mentioned it every day since then. The kid has no clue. He thinks doing stuff that’s hard is easy. I should have whipped out my cell phone and taken a video of him. Then, when he’s grown up I can show it to him and say, “See? That’s what a dork looks like.”

You can not control me! I am chaos! Pure, unadulterated randomness!

Let me repeat … he thinks doing stuff that’s hard is easy. That’s the typical childish attitude. And, like most children, he’ll stop when it gets hard. Unless his desire overcomes the resistance inherent in doing hard stuff. I’m not here to lecture anyone on Scientology tech but this is my blog so I’ll just bloviate a little on the subject of control, objectives and why I am not particularly negative about people at all levels of awareness getting a little 8C run on them.

For starters, when I was a young teen I was out of control. Literally. In this modern era I would have been diagnosed as ADD or something starting with hyper- . I couldn’t shut my yap in school. I was always trying to kiss the girls. I was a smart-mouth who got beat up frequently because of my inability to shut up. I ran away from home in El Paso, taking a long Greyhound ride to Dallas and upset my mother’s well-ordered life as a professional Scientologist. I got arrested for smoking cigarettes, shoplifting a 45 record and being drunk in public. On that last… remember… I grew up in Texas in the 50’s and 60’s. So it’s not like I was one of the rare teens who thought drinking was cool.

When I studied I got A’s. Except I rarely studied. I read books like most kids eat popcorn but I couldn’t focus long enough to finish a homework assignment. My father, the most patient man in the history of planet Earth, bore it all with no complaint. I suppose he understood that the only way he could control me would be to chain me up. So he provided a roof, meals and a small amount of money for clothes.

But Dolores, my mother, she had something for me. She knew that if I could be drawn into the concept of learning how to control my environment that I might subject myself to accepting that I needed to be controlled first, as the primary step towards being in control. And that’s Objectives.

How many minutes or hours of Objective auditing does a person need? If you have a cognition and then an f/n does that mean you’re done? You’re now in total control? Is there an End Phenomena to control? Isn’t that like asking if there’s an EP to Confront. Or any of the TR’s. Okay, there’s an EP. I agree. But at the same time there is life it’s own self out there and you batter away at it while it hammers back at you. Control is not some sort of finished product where, once you float the needle while holding an asparagus can you have all of it that’s available. There are degrees.

So back to The Karate Kid. Instead of the old oriental guy having the kid do “wax on, wax off” the modern version has the old oriental guy making the kid take his coat off, drop it on the ground and then hang it on a peg. Same deal. Objectives. The “lesson”… as you probably already know… is that the way to better control is through better control. The student is made to do repetitive motions until whatever underlying resistance or manifestations rise up and are blown. Then he’s made to continue again and again and again and again until all the little mini cognitions and attempts to fool the Examiner are eclipsed by a real and meaningful change in attitude.

Usually that change is accompanied by Good Indicators that are palpable, visceral and infectious. If a meter is handy I suppose there would be an f/n as well. Not that it matters. No need for a meter when something is obvious. Even dense people recognize real GIs.

From my perspective, as an auditor and former Mission Holder, the world for an auditor who has had the opportunity to co-audit tons of Objectives is a far more rich world than that of the PC who is often on a time and money budget and so doesn’t really have the opportunity to get past that first wide f/n and cognition that indicates he or she is complete and it’s time to move on.

Here’s something to think about…

For anyone who did the actual Clearing Course instead of had some ‘clear cog’  – and immediately became Org Property – you might recall that Hubbard was very clear in the materials that auditing the bank to a point of destim (or erasure) was like “digging a ditch”. He meant it. He meant for us on the course to grind that stuff out. And we did. Day in and day out, one hand sweating and one hand writing down reads. Hubbard wanted each person to have a very specific huge cognition. Not a feel good moment. He demanded that a clear cognite that they were “mocking it all up”.

Okay. Fine.

If the cognition that you’re merely mocking it all up means you’re Clear, then why are many Clears and OT’s such pissy, bitchy, PTS little pussies? Aren’t they free of a reactive mind? Well, yeah, sort of. In the same sense that someone who has a single intensive of objectives, cognites and then f/n’s is now totally in control of themselves.

A partial reason for this weird phenomena, that of OT’s dramatizing as much case as the people they’re supposed to be better than, probably lies in the paradigm shift I mentioned in this blog in the ‘About’ heading.  Nobody digs any ditches anymore. Or at least the right ditches. Roughly 10 years after I finished the Clearing Course the new Scientology was suddenly all about clearing the planet. I’ve already mentioned what a bunch of horseshit I think that is.

Clearing an entire planet the old way does present some issues. Like, say, convincing 6 or 7 billion people to subject themselves to several hundred hours of auditing, weeks and months of intense training, then going to a distant place and grinding away for a few hundred more hours until they eventually realize the only case they actually have is the one they believe they have. That’s an insanely stupid idea. But hmmm… what if people just kinda-sorta accidentally went clear along the way? You know, like while doing a Dianetic co-audit or maybe while being bull-baited on the Comm Course. That would certainly speed things up. Now instead of an insanely stupid idea we have one that is merely stupid.

Seems to me what this really comes down to is deciding what you got into Scientology for in the first place. And perhaps what it is you expect to extract from the tech. If you honestly believe that the planet is going to become clear then good on ya! /cue Twilight Zone theme/ If you, like me, want this stuff because it will make you stronger and gives you the tools and strength to be more powerful, more calm and an asset to those you care about… then what’s the rush? I never felt like I was in a particular hurry to win, I just knew that I would win and get my money’s worth if I understood that I was digging a ditch and building an experiential track and base of self-awareness that would serve me in tough times and hard situations.

So my mother gave me what I needed. A shovel and a guy to show me how to use it. That’s a powerful chunk of love. And when I think about my little boy it’s almost embarrassing how much of that same love I have for him. I absolutely do not want him shortchanged and used as a tool for some psychotic and ridiculously hazy goal of a megalomaniac and his troop of zombies.  At the same time, if anyone ought to have the same opportunities I was given by my mother, her fellow Scientologists and men of endless patience like Ron Cook and my dad, then my little boy is my choice for the prize. I plan to ruin him forever for the CofS by seeing to it he knows how to dig a proper ditch.

Another thing I want. I wouldn’t mind it if someday Wyatt heard the phrase “give me that hand” and thought to himself – I absolutely fucking hate those words.

Los Gatos, California 2010 – Summertime

Two days before my 60^th birthday I was sitting in the chapel of the Church of Scientology of Los Gatos. The reason me being there was remarkable is that I walked away from the Church of Scientology almost three decades ago. I hadn’t been in a Scientology building for 28 years until that Sunday earlier this year. The occasion that day was a memorial service for my mother Dolores. She had died earlier in the month. June 6^th, to be exact. Same day as my father’s birthday and the kick-off of the Normandy invasion… D-Day… in 1944.

Dolores Stokes. At Saint Hill around 1966. Just beautiful.

I wasn’t uncomfortable being in a Scientology Church. I’m rarely uncomfortable around people, Scientologist or not. But I was stunned a bit. Not the kind of stunned where you reel back, gasp loudly and lose focus on your surroundings. It was the kind of stunned where you sit there and think – Well, fuck me.

My brother Wally was giving his version of a eulogy for my mother. I call it “his version” not to be snide. It was his version because essentially the eulogy was an abbreviated synopsis about him and our mother. The stunning part was early in the monologue when he told the story about how our mother had helped him as a young boy to overcome asthma by getting him some auditing. Which, of course, eliminated the asthma forever.

The problem with Wally’s memory of that event was that it never happened to him. It happened to me.

That’s why I had a “fuck me” moment. This person was standing there, emotionally, telling a story that was false. And tearing up over it. So, to correct the record – here’s what really happened.

Dallas , Texas 1961 – Summertime

In the summer of 1961, when I was 11 years old, Wally and I were staying in Dallas with my mother. She had been involved in Scientology for a couple of years at that point and was the significant other of a man named Red Shea. He had started a Scientology franchise in Dallas and that was where Wally and I spent a lot of our time during the visit.

Red and my mother took us kids to see “101 Dalmatians”. During the movie I had a severe asthma attack, a regular occurrence for me as long as I could remember. Those who have never experienced asthma simply need to understand one thing to imagine what it’s like – you simply cannot breath. You work your chest and lower abdomen, drawing deeply from inside trying to force oxygen into your lungs. Sitting down is scary and the idea of laying down is beyond frightening. Standing or walking is preferable, often bent over, hands on thighs to help facilitate the intake of air. I got up during the movie and went out to the lobby, gasping and wheezing as I worked to suck in air. The attack made me nauseous and I ended up in the bathroom throwing up.

My mother and Red were solicitous and a bit shaken by the severity of the attack. The other thing I recall from that evening was feeling better when we got to her apartment and she fed me some chicken noodle soup. The next day mother said that if I allowed Red to do some Scientology auditing on me there was a good chance the asthma could be eliminated. What was I going to say? I was 11 years old. Wally and I lived with my father in El Paso and he was married to a supremely evil woman. By supremely evil I mean she put us through a grind that some of you Sea Org members might think of as an RPF for kids, replete with terror, starvation and liberal applications of a leather belt on bare asses. Being asked if I wanted someone to help me was like asking a man dying of thirst if he wanted his water ice cold or room temperature.

I told my mother that I absolutely wanted the auditing.

So Red did a few sessions with me. Sorry auditors, I have no idea what he ran. Probably some Dianetics because one thing I do recall from the sessions involved me as a baby, crawling on a floor sucking in dust and other fine particles off the wood planks. After a couple of sessions I felt different. Not cured different. But intrigued different. Frankly, not many 11 year old kids are introspective about why things are the way they are. And even fewer of them are put in a situation like mine. Red was an imposing man and my mother was the epitome of an urban, cosmopolitan woman of the era. The Dallas Scientology Center was vibrant and populated by types of people that I had never been around. Artists, musicians, svelte women in black, clingy turtleneck sweaters, men who wore desert boots with slacks and worked at mysterious jobs. They laughed, smiled, joked and above all – they did not ignore me. Think back to when you were 11, how would the attention of adults, who sincerely seemed to view you as something other than just a kid, have altered your self-image?

I began the process of actually thinking about “me” and why I was the way I was as opposed to thinking about “me” and what I wanted or didn’t want.

The fact is… I didn’t have any more asthma attacks after the auditing. Not that summer, not the next, not even the next few decades. It was gone. Handled. And you can bet your ass that had a huge effect on me. It’s not like Scientology auditing was all I thought about, more like I wanted to know more about the intoxicating atmosphere, edgy people and excitement that pulsed through the Center. I did read one or two basic books. Not Dianetics, I was 11 and any of you who have actually read Dianetics know it’s slow going and a challenge for most adults.

So how did my brother, a Scientologist for 44 straight years, end up thinking that what happened to me had actually happened to him? I don’t mean for this initial entry to be an indictment of Wally. Not that I really care. After all, he did appropriate my experiences and use them in a public manner to eulogize someone I actually do care about. Instead I view what happened at my mother’s memorial as sort of a super-truncated example of how the Church of Scientology has transformed from the excitment, enthusiasm and honesty of the earlier era to the sort of slick, greedy and image-conscious corporation it has become today.

Mercifully, the memorial service was short. Wally had never once used the word “love”. In fact, I was the one person there who turned around in my seat and told the 20 or 30 people attending that I loved my mother and would miss her. I may have a prejudiced view here, but it seems to me that the personae the contemporary Scientologist is expected to exhibit does not include demonstrations of ‘wog reality’. So missing a recently deceased person might be frowned upon because only their body is dead, they, of course, are immortal and will return soon. Probably as the child of a nearby pregnant Scientologist who isn’t currently receiving PTS handling or being routed to Ethics.

What’s wrong with saying that you love someone who recently passed away? Particularly if that someone is your mother? The absence of the word in a setting where you would most expect it is perhaps one of the more subtle, but telling, aspects of Scientology today that separates it from the usual human experience.

So, there is a little synchronicity to how my first visit back to a Scientology organization tied in to the events that brought me into the fold to begin with. Yes, it’s true that having your brother hijack one of the most significant experiences of your life and then tell people it happened to him is just a little weird. But it’s a unique kind of weird… the kind that makes me want to tell the story as it really happened.

That’s what I’ll do. Over time, of course. Slowly no doubt. And I’ll throw in my interpretation of how I saw things from a time and place that most of you missed. I guess it’s fair that you missed my personal Scientology because I (thankfully) missed the one that happened after 1982. So we’re even. Right?

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