7 May 97
 

THE LATEST COFS PLANS TO GET THE STATS UP:

 

Have you heard about it?  Its called:
THE GOLDEN AGE OF TECH

 

Its based on a brilliant idea.  If you can't get new people to pay for courses, then get the old people to pay for doing all their courses over again.

It will now cost each of the existing class 4 auditors another 15,000 dollars to again become a class 4 auditor.  Of course that's only for the new "certainty" courses (TRs, study, emeter handling, and each level from 0 to 4).  There is also a "forgiveness" step which could easily lead into selling them a few intensives of sec checking as well.

Now in all honesty, let me say that it does seem like the courses have been improved a bit.  I would say that some smart auditors sat down and tried to make things a bit better.  Theres nothing wrong with that.  It used to happen all the time when Ron was still issuing materials, and the field auditors would pick up the new bulletins and sometimes even pay for a few days of cramming to catch up on the latest and greatest.

But in this case, somebody in management has cognited that it would be a good way to make lots of bucks.

It also gives them an excuse to run a loyalty check on all the existing auditors.  The auditors are always a bit of a danger. They read too much of Ron's early stuff (like the quote that I'm putting at the end of this post) and they get uppity and rebellious. So in this way, they can filter out all the ones who have stopped listening to management and cancel their certificates and distroy their status before they really start making trouble.

Let me quote from Senior C/S International Bulletin No. 168 of 10 May 1996.  Entitled "Auditor Reviatalization".

"The point is, we have auditors who previously trained without benifit of what the Golden Age of Tech offers, and are consequently less than perfect.  And following from that failing, they may have committed some out-tech along the way." ...

"This includes both ex-staff and field auditors, as well as all who may have trained in the past ..."

"If ethics is out, tech can't go in, and the only way we might fail to make a perfect auditor is by failing to handle the ethics blocks." ...

The bulletin includes an 8 step program that is to be done, which includes the following:

"5) Auditor Clean-up and Forgiveness step:  This step is done even if not routing onto course right now.  A. See the Ethics Officer.  B. Read ..(various O/W HCOBS etc.).  C. Write up your O/Ws, confessing any and all transgressions including ..." (and so on and so forth).

The office of Senior C/S International has also issued a "Qual Summons to ALL previously trained auditors" which includes the following:

"This is not just a nice idea.  It is a matter of standard tech.  You MUST report to your org at once and avaial yourself of these breakthroughs".

Both of the above documents appear in issue 5 of IHELP's magazine "CAUSE" (undated, but copyright 1997).  They are gradually swinging into full gear as far as hounding people about this.  I assume that both of the above were written by "Ray Mithoff" although his name doesn't actually appear on them (at least in the IHELP version).

Note that the "forgiveness step" ensures that the auditor will blame himself instead of blaming the org for mis-training him.

One of the big breakthroughs was the discovery that somebody had added an unnecessary step to the can squeeze which the PC does at the begining of the session.  Specifically, they were making the PCs shake their hands out until they were loose and floppy before squeezing the cans (like is done in the emeter drill). This was actually introduced by some Sea Org dummies back around 1980 or so (it would be very funny if Ray Mithoff himself were actually the source of this one).  Occasionally this was annoying. But it wasn't exactly a key point.  And experienced auditors who hadn't been browbeaten knew better anyway.

Its actually a matter of judegment.  If the PC is new and doesn't know how to hold or squeeze the cans, you show him (as in the emeter drill), if he does know, then you leave him alone.  The only way they could have trouble with something this simple and obvious is if they continually kicked the student around until he couldn't think for himself but only did things by rote.  And that is what happened.

They also have added some nice practical drills, mocking up situations and having the student figure out what he's going to do about them.

Back when I was first training, the instructors would push for this sort of understanding (although they didn't have a specific set of rote drills).

Then came the Class 8 course and the loss of free thought.  At that time, if you asked any question of the "What if ..." variety, you always got the answer "There is an infinity of wrongness and only one rightness" and they just wanted you to do the steps on the checksheet and stop "Q&Aing" or worrying about stuff that wouldn't happen.

This, of course, made rotten auditors, so then somebody got bright and issed a series of BTBs (Board Technical Bulletins - this was how they issued HCOBs that were not written by Ron in the early 1970s) which gave a series of practical drills that were very much like the new certainty drills.

Eventually of course, these were cancelled because they were not by Ron.  But the idea of mocking up and solving the various difficulties that you could run into while auditing was now back in vogue and training went well on this basis for a good while. But of course Sea Org "toughness" and training by force gradually began to creep back in, distroying free thought and making robots. I think that the current training is a mixed bag, depending on who is supervising the course.

When somebody was trying to sell me on these auditor certainty levels, I mentioned this business about having done similar drills in the 1970s.  The answer was "But those were BTBs and these are HCOBs".  And I replied "Whats the difference?  You do realize that Ron has been dead for over a decade and that these are not LRH HCOBs, don't you?".

He wouldn't answer.  I really wonder what they're telling these guys.  I haven't attended any confidential briefings recently, so I don't know the latest story.  The tale about all the stuff Ron left behind that hadn't gotten issued yet is begining to wear a bit thin.  That only leaves telepathic channeling (a'la Koos) or an 11 year old reincarnated LRH hidden in the underground vaults, neither of which seems very credible to me. It should be obvious that Mithoff and company are originating these things, but that might not be acceptible to the membership because the trust level is not very high (the same people who brought you "barking" and "six month sec checks" now have a wonderful new "discovery" to aid you progress up the bridge).

They actually want to get rid of any of the older auditors that they have lost control of.  Its been too long since they had a nice clean purge.

The new solo nots certainty course also gives them a chance to go after the solo nots completions, collect some more bucks, and force them to overrun some more.  That's deadly.  I have said this before.  NOTS is not the basic source of human abberation. If you do run it to completion and then keep blaming stuff on it, you are going to assign the wrong source to every abberation remaining on the case, and that's enough to sink anybody.

What's more, this same filtering business will let them kick out any Solo Nots completions that are not completely toeing the party line so that they wouldn't set a bad example for the rest of the membership.

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And now a word from Ron:

"People look on this as being 'my science'.  Yeah, I own all of your postulates.  I bought them one day at a raffle.  Like the devil I did!  About the only thing, as I told you the other day, that I have done is organize and put together, and maybe I can look a little bit better than anybody else has been looking for a long time, and so I can see it.  But if you can see it, well , so help me Pete, it's yours.  Got that?"

From LRH tape lecture 1MACC-26 of 25 Nov 59, titled "Individuation".

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SOME MORE POINTS ABOUT THE ONGOING BATTLE:

Watch out for dirty tricks at the DM deposition.  Like maybe a couple of OSA plants pretending to be antis and assaulting DM when he enters the building.  That would give him an excuse to run away and stall some more.

Also in the news is earthlink's new anti-spam campaign.  As you  have probably noticed, they don't really give a damn about  get-rich-quick advertisements.  This is a shore story to build  up their credibility and protect their reputation before they  launch a massive cancellation campaign against anti-Scientology  postings.

Has anybody heard anything about earthlink visiting other ISPs  or news servers to install anti-Spam controls or to get help in  tracking down "Spammers" (which really means annonymous ARS  posters)?

Concerning MSH (Mary Sue Hubbard) or any of her children or any old timers who are still high up in the command structure: If you do have access to any of these people (or can simply put a note in their mailbox), please push them to get on the internet and explain about ARS and ACT and searching for things on dejanews.  Although there is much here that they would find  upsetting and hostile, there are also things that they should know which appear in these newsgroups.  The upper eschelons  have long suffered from heavily filtered communication lines,  false data, and viewpoints that are heavily interiorized into one side of the conflict.

It is highly unlikely that MSH & family would support any actions that were dangerous to the CofS.  This is how they were browbeaten in the first place, namely that any resistance to DM, Starkey, etc would endanger the orgs.  But it has reached a point where it is obvious that the ruling hierarchy have themselves placed the CofS in danger and are running it into the ground.  On that basis, she might indeed take action. But the most you could expect from her would be a reformist position, to eliminate the various abusive and unethical practices (the kind of things that I have been pushing for).

Actually, I would be pleasantly surprised if she could even support the amount of reform that I have been proposing.  I can only hope that there has been enough eveidence to convince her that there were flagrant mistakes in policy so that she can honestly consider reforming the operation for the sake of preserving the tech and the CofS itself.

As most ARS readers already know, I personally consider that the tech was brilliant but that much of the later policy (except for a few smart things such as the Data Series) is self distructive.

Working to create a sane CofS,

The Pilot