Newsgroup Postings : LRH and I

LRH and I
From: mayo@lightlink.com (David Mayo)
Subject: LRH and I
Date: 1996/04/18
Message-ID: <199604181729.NAA10273@light.lightlink.com>
sender: electra@light.lightlink.com
organization: Art Matrix - Lightlink Electra Gateway v2.4
newsgroups: alt.clearing.technology


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My experiences with LRH, L. Ron Hubbard, Founder of Scientology

For a long time I have felt the need to communicate some of my
experiences with L. Ron Hubbard.  Bear with me, dear critics, but I
am writing this primarily for a.r.s. readers who have been
Scientologists.

While I was in Scientology, from 1971-1983, I had what I
considered to be the privilege of working directly with LRH.  I did
the SHSBC in 1971-72 and joined the Sea Organization.  I went to
the Flagship Apollo (Flag) in 1973 where I met L. Ron Hubbard.  I
had never really expected to meet L.R.H. personally -- but not only
did I meet him, but ended up as his technical aide (Training and
Services Aide/CS 4) for several years.

I had gotten interested in Scientology because people told me that it
would enlighten me regarding out of body experiences, telepathy,
and it would answer various questions I had concerning the meaning
of life.  I also wanted to do my bit concerning helping mankind.  I
was much more interested in training, rather than receiving auditing,
which is why I had done the briefing course.  I was fascinated by the
"technology" in many ways.  First, that there was a subject that
sought to improve human abilities, which was codified and laid out
into theory and processes.  Secondly, that there were all kinds of
explanations and instructions on how to do these processes.  Thirdly,
that when I sat down across from another person and did the
processes, the phenomena that were supposed to occur actually did
happen most of the time.  If a person was upset, I flew the ruds, or
maybe did an LIC and the person became happy and the meter
F/Ned.  Pretty extraordinary stuff.  Not everything happened exactly
like it was supposed to:  people didn't have perfect out of body
experiences on Op Pro by Dup like was suggested in the tech -- but
most people got some type of extroversion.  The fact that any of it
worked impressed me.  The fact that so much of it seemed to do
what it was supposed to do so much of the time, seemed miraculous.

The methodology clearly wasn't perfect, as anyone who had done
the SHSBC could see.  The tech was an ever changing, evolving
process.  I spent hundreds of hours listening to LRH discuss the
theory and techniques and change his mind about things and try new
things.  It was exciting.  I formed an impression of LRH from
listening to all those tapes.  He sounded like a man who was very
interested in people and in exploring human potential.  He almost
sounded a bit fatherly, and he was a wonderfully entertaining
speaker.

So, when I arrived on the ship in 1973 in Lisbon, I was very curious
to see how LRH matched up.  The first night I was there I snuck a
peak into the "research room" where he was working.  To me, his
presence seemed to fill the room.

I was not on board for much time before we set sail.  We sailed to
the Canary Islands, on a trip that was very rough -- strong winds and
high seas.  Everyone had a sea watch.  I realized that, like me, most
of us really didn't know what we were doing.  People had been
"hatted" to some degree on a ship duty like radar, lookout, and so
forth, but we really were a bunch of amateurs sailing a big vessel in
high seas.  Amazing and scary.  In the morning we mustered on
deck.  The Canary Islands were coming into view and LRH came out
on deck.  He was smiling, exuberant.  His eyes were sparkling.  Life
seemed to be a great adventure to him.  It was very infectious.

I saw aspects of Hubbard I hadn't suspected while listening to all
those course lectures.  He was extraordinarily adventurous; he
expected people to do incredible things, and people responded and
did things that they wouldn't have dreamed doing had he not
demanded them. 

I was struck by the fact that when I ran into him on the decks he
always gave me a big smile -- the kind of smile that made me happy
for the rest of the day.  It seemed like he would give people his
complete attention.  I was surprised at these qualities -- I thought he
would have been too busy to pay attention to people and to small
details to the degree that he did.  On the other hand, he had some
bad qualities that were equally unexpected.  Sometimes he would
lose his temper, and when he did, you would feel it down to the very
cells in your bones.

When he was angry, he could be quite mean.  He would write an
ethics order on someone, condemning them to the galley, or never to
be an executive again.  Then two weeks later, he would change his
mind, and he would appoint that same person to one of the highest
positions in Scientology.  There were no overboards when I was on
the ship, but there were plenty of sleepless nights and conditions
were really quite terrible at times.  Not that we really noticed much,
we were completely occupied day and night.

During the first months of 1974, I worked in external
communications and although I saw LRH daily, I never really got to
know what it was like to work with him until I was a Tech Programs
Chief and then Training and Services Aide.  When I was appointed
to Tech Programs Chief I did my first eval.  It was an "all hands" --
all the programs chiefs were doing evals.  At this particular time they
were all going straight to LRH for approval via a messenger.  I
remember doing my eval and sending it to him.  A few minutes later
I got it back down via a running messenger with a note about
something that needed to be changed.  I changed it and sent it back
up and I got a surprise:  a messenger screamed at me "What the H--
!"  "You didn't...."  I really was quite indignant and insisted that I
had too made the requested change and sent it back up to him via the
messenger.  Two minutes later it was approved.  It shocked me that
LRH was so explosive, but it was certainly exciting working for him.

He issued lots of "orders" and liked very, very fast action and
deadlines.  All nighters was more of a routine, than an occasional, in
1974.  He was much better tempered in 1975 when we were in the
Caribbean.  We got lots of sleep, though conditions were so
crowded that about 60 of us had to sleep on the sun deck as there
were no more bunks.

I was temporary CS 4 in January 1975 and again in the fall.  When I
was T/CS 4 one of my first "message runs" concerned the
Conditional Certificate system.  LRH was furious with Ron Shafron,
for instituting conditional certs.  I had a tape in the office of a
briefing on the subject between LRH and Ron Shafron.  The tape
clearly showed that it was Hubbard who had ordered the conditional
cert system, not Shafron, so I was quick to point this out to LRH.  I
soon learned that this really wasn't the politically acceptable way to
deal with him: the usual way was to "PR" him and take the blame
yourself.  I was disappointed, but not disillusioned.  LRH sent me a
few mean messages for my obvious blunder, but forgave me by the
end of the evening.  I also forgave LRH.  Hubbard was an
extraordinary man, though not perfect.  Most people don't
accomplish a tenth of what he did.  He authored huge amounts of the
tech, which mostly produced remarkable results.  Hubbard definitely
had redeeming qualities, in my estimation.

Speaking of authorship.  That was another situation that I had to
deal with as CS 4.  The truth was that lots of the tech was not
authored by Hubbard.  In fact, one of the things I did as LRH's
technical aide was write bulletins, HCOBs.  If it was important, it
had to bear LRH's name, because that was the way the religion was
set up.  I didn't like the system much for several reasons.  The first
was I thought people should know who actually wrote the bulletins. 
Secondly, the system was set up that if something went wrong, or if
Hubbard wanted to change something, he could save face and blame
it on some one else.  "The mice have been gnawing at the pillars
again... ."  I reached a compromise with Hubbard: if I wrote a
bulletin, it would be "Assisted by".  That didn't always work,
though, because if it was an important bulletin, it wouldn't do to
have it assisted by someone else.

One of the first orders I got from Hubbard was that I was to cancel
everything the last two CS 4s had ever written.  It was an impossible
task because I would have just canceled out the grade chart.  What
was clear to me from this order, was that there were a line of fall
guys before me.  It would be just a matter of time before, I too,
would be the "who" and have my work canceled.

As CS 4, I had various projects done and had several people
working for me at different times.  LRH had written Technical
Correction Roundup in 1976 or 77 which called for a great deal of
writing and compilation.  The Expanded Dianetic project was a
particular nightmare -- for many reasons.  The first was that a lot of
the work that had been done on it originally was by Allan Gilbertson. 
LRH decided that Allan Gilbertson was a squirrel, so he wanted the
EX DN course done again, using only LRH material.  (LRH loved
the idea that if there was something wrong with the tech, it was
because someone else messed it up.)  The problem was that
Expanded Dianetics really wasn't fully researched to start with, and
there were no, or few, successful case histories.  I remember getting
a nudge from him concerning what was taking the re-write so long. 
I told him that the project of re-writing the case histories was
incomplete.  Much to my embarrassment, Hubbard took what I said
out of context and wrote an HCOB saying that Training and
Services Aide had found the why on Expanded Dianetics-- the case
histories hadn't been fully written up.  The real problem was
Expanded Dianetics wasn't completely researched -- something I
believe LRH really didn't want to think about at the time.

Sifting through HCOBs and canceling "out tech" ones or ones
written by "other people" was something that went on constantly. 
The "out tech" HCOBs were then corrected by a project and the
HCOBs written by that project would be sifted through a few years
later and canceled as out tech.  In 1974 there was a project done by
Molly and another girl, FMO ___.  They were supposed to change
bulletins into BTBs that hadn't been written by LRH.  But the
important ones were all retained as HCOBs whether they were
written by Hubbard or not.  In compliance to the LRH order to me
to cancel everything written by Livingston and Shafron, I had stacks
of bulletins put together with their CSWs.  The problem was, what
to revise them to?  I couldn't just cancel important bulletins which
described technical processes for no reason.  Most of them had been
ordered written by LRH, and even though he had ordered them
canceled, he would have been furious if they were canceled with no
replacement.  Finally, I asked Shafron to go through his stack and let
me know if he thought anything needed to be revised, which he did
graciously.  He found a few that he thought needed to be updated so
I sent them over to David Mayo to check and if he agreed, up to
LRH Pers Comm for approval.  Sometimes they went to Hubbard,
but mostly LRH didn't look at stuff like that.

It was in December of 1975 that I had one of my more memorable
experiences with LRH.  This is during the period when we were
coming to land.  We'd been sailing around the Med in 1974 and the
Caribbean in 1975 and the ship was getting crowded.  We had the
problem of getting kicked out of ports, too, but that is another story. 
LRH went to Daytona, Florida with most of the Flag crew and
"FCCIs", (public), and I went to NYC with about 30 of the
management crew.  LRH had just done a couple of "international
evaluations" and it was our job to keep things going and get the
"eval" programs implemented by the outer orgs while the Flag Land
Base was being set up.  As CS4 I had a couple LRH orders in
particular I was supposed to implement, one of which was to switch
internships from the qualifications division to the technical division
of the service organizations.

As it was an LRH order, I did it with gusto.  I remember Kerry
Gleason, who was the Commanding Officer of the Flag Bureau at
the time, cautioning me about it.  He kept saying that I should hold
back on it.  To me, it would have been sacrilege to do anything but
go full speed ahead.  It was an LRH order and that meant it had to
be done, and right away.  Looking back at it, I realize that it had
probably been Kerry's idea in the first place that Hubbard had
adopted and put into the eval program.

Well, the international statistics went down around Thanksgiving. 
They always did around that time of the year but it was "off-policy"
to blame anything else but ourselves.  "The Why is God" -- is the
policy letter.  So when we joined the rest of the Flag crew in
Clearwater we were in disgrace, we were sent down from NYC by
slow bus.  On the other hand, the Flag Land Base had been doing
really well so everyone else was being praised.  Then, the obligatory
why -finding began.  A who had to be found for the down
international statistics.

I was woken up at 2 AM one December 1975 morning by a
messenger yelling at me that I had crashed international statistics and
to assign myself a lower "ethics" condition for doing so. 
Furthermore, I was to immediately gather up all the issues I had ever
written to send to LRH so that they could be reviewed, and
presumably be canceled.  Up I got, in a state of panic.  I ran over to
the Clearwater Building from my dorm in the Fort Harrison, losing a
shoe in my haste along the way.  I went to mimeo and searched the
files, gathering up things I had written.  I started sending them "up"
to "R".  LRH was giving me a really hard time via his messengers --
who were making it quite clear I was in deep trouble.  Suddenly,
everything changed.  I got a soothing message, delivered by Annie
Broeker, telling me that the why had been found.  I was to read a
policy letter in Volume 5 of the OEC.  In the late 60's Hubbard had
tried to move the internships from Qual to Tech, and it hadn't
worked then either.  A messenger told me, on the side, that LRH had
thought that I had been following an order from Shafron and then
realized his error when he saw a copy of the eval written by himself.

LRH was obviously no longer as angry with me, but I still wasn't off
the hook on crashing international statistics, so I sat down and
assigned myself a condition of "Treason".  I figured I was in
"Treason" because I hadn't fully worn my hat as CS 4.  CS 4 was
responsible for rising technical statistics -- I should have "made
things go right",  somehow.  I remembered something Maureen
Sarfatti had told me years ago.  Mo had said that when she was
appointed as "Programs Chief", (first time programs chiefs came into
existence), that she and the others had been called into the research
room for a conference with LRH.  LRH had sat them all down and
told them that they were each assigned a "continent" to manage. 
The world was broken down into sections:  Europe, Africa, US, UK
and so forth.  LRH looked them each in the eye and told them that
they were responsible to make sure that their assigned continent was
expanding and doing well statistically.  He said, "Each one of you
have managed planets in the past."  A mere continent would be a
piece of cake.

I was ashamed that I hadn't managed to keep tech division statistics
rising.  I was off to a poor start on my CS 4 post.  I sent up the
Treason Formula to LRH.  By now it was New Year's Eve and I
would spend the evening doing amends.  Surprisingly, I got a
response back from LRH almost immediately.  He wrote in his own
handwriting, "Condition mitigated to Danger.  Brush up on
pinpointing whys with DSEC."  It was a God send.  Not only had
LRH given me the night off to go to the party -- which I did
thoroughly enjoy -- but he told me something.  He told me it was
OK for me to disagree with him and even change his orders, as long
as I had a correct reason for doing so.  I took the lesson to heart and
for a long time I could almost do no wrong as CS 4.  LRH was
extremely happy with almost everything I did-- and if I disagreed
with him on something, I wrote to him about, with a suggested
handling, with which he almost always agreed.

There were lots of things that happened between then and my final
departure in 1983.  When I did leave Scientology, it was really quite
overdue, but I was and still am happy to have had a chance to have
known LRH.  He was an extraordinary individual.  He was incredibly
brilliant in some ways, evil (at times) -- and he was always
interesting and exciting and most, of the time, fun to work with. 
Unfortunately I believe that today's Scientology is memorializing his
worst qualities and forgetting about his best qualities.  One of his
most outstanding characteristics is that he could change, and did, all
the time.

When I say evil, I mean things like dirty tricks, harassment, and so
forth.  Staff members really weren't aware of that side of things --
because it was all done by separate departments like G.O.  But there
are other things -- like his temper tantrums, and the observable fact
he treated people like his slaves.  He really should not have been
allowed to get away with it.

What I personally most liked about LRH was that he was
extraordinarily interested in things -- and would get excited at things
that were particularly smart.  To this day when I encounter
something particularly bright, especially technically, I think about
how much Hubbard would have appreciated it.  It was fabulous to be
able to share things with him, because he would be genuinely
fascinated.  In this respect, he was completely delightful to work
with.

I didn't feel any pang of guilt or disloyalty towards LRH when I left
Scientology thirteen years ago.  There was no doubt that LRH
would have been furious with me because he hated splinter groups. 
No doubt, I, and others, would have been made "who's" and blamed
for anything that went wrong.  That was LRH's style.  But I knew
that if he had been me, he would have left long before I did.  He, for
one, would have never put up with the treatment that we all did!

Julie Gillespie Mayo

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