The Hubbard tapes: When Scientology was all about reeling you in

Val Ross has another memory from her remarkable experience in Scientology, much of which is quite dark. But this time, she says, she wanted to give us a chuckle.

I was beached from the Sea Org for “Out-2D” in 1976. (Translation: I was cast out of Scientology’s indentured servant class — declared a Suppressive Person — because I was accused of activity that was against the rules for intimate relationships, which are on the “second dynamic.”) I didn’t even know I had an SP Declare against me. Mark Plummer let me know about it in 2012. He said its was the oddest declare he had ever read in his life. Apparently the day after I was beached, my Briefing Course students were read this declare before they got to start study that morning.

As with any good Scientologist, most of them probably just shook their heads and went back to studying, but I know at least one of my students didn’t buy it. And, honestly, anyone who knew me would have had second thoughts.

I was 21, 5-foot-10 1/2 tall and weighed 115 lbs. I was not a really sexy girl. I was, built more like Olive Oyl than Anna Nicole Smith. I was not your worldly 21 year old, I was still wet behind the ears. The student I am in communication with these days remembers me as naive and almost ethereal in my innocence. I was not someone who, as my SP Declare stated “had sex with my students in order to boost student points.”

First of all, how would that work? How could they be getting points up if we were off doing the deed? And student points were through the roof. Our course room was overflowing. There was no room for any new students. There was no need to falsify or increase student points. They were in a continuing power trend.

And, to put it bluntly, the only sex (if that’s what you want to call it) I had in my life at that point was when my abuser was pulling me aside to have his way with me. My students were at least five years or more older than me, both male and female and at least 15 to 20 years more worldly than me. I was the little sister to them, even though I was their supervisor. I was not a person they would think of in that way. I confirmed this with two of the people I supervised back then that I in contact with these days.

Now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, let me tell you what it was like dealing with the people who I was not having sex with to boost student points. Even though the days were long and hard, I had life a lot easier than most of the other people in the Org. I did one job all day every day. The likelihood of interrupting me on course was low because supervisors, like students, were not to be interrupted while in the course room.

The students on the Briefing Course were there for the long haul. Even though it was divided into Sections A-F, that was only window dressing so the student could feel like they were making progress and so there could be a certificate. There were over a thousand pages of reading to get through, and 472 taped lectures. When a student routed on to the Briefing Course, they had to be there until they finished it. They couldn’t take a break and go home. They were there — as Hubbard liked to say — “for the duration.”

This was not ideal. Imagine being shoulder to shoulder, lined up at tables in a course room with 200 people (the maximum allowable in the course room on Temple Street), if you arrived later than about a half hour before the course started, you were at one of the tables we had out in the hallway because we couldn’t fit any more in the course room.

In that course room, there were 25 reel-to-reel tape players, a tenth the number of tape players that the students needed for each of them to have one. That meant that if the student reached the part of the Briefing Course on their check sheet where they were required to start listening to the tapes, they had to wait until someone else finished listening to All. The. Tapes. Oh, great, they could go home, take a beach day, go shopping. Um, no. this was Scientology. They got none of the above.

A student was required to be on course a minimum of 40 hours per week once they routed onto the Briefing Course. The students at ASHO Day easily reached this and the ones on Foundation attended four hours at night and 10 hours per day on weekends to reach this. I supervised only ASHO Day students. There was a lot of overlap though because it was easier to get access to a tape deck at night and on weekends when there were sometimes fewer than 50 people in the course room.

If a student couldn’t access the tape decks, while waiting they were made to redo the sections of the course they had just completed. Hubbard said “times over material equals certainty” ya know, so why not just re-read all that stuff you just read? My head hurts just typing this. It often happened that a student would just not show up for course one day when they hit this point, and we would never hear from them again. Not a lot of effort was put into looking for them. We had too many bodies in the shop to look for a missing student.

But as for the ones who just fell off the radar, I can’t say I blame them. You’re stuck in a course room 40 hours a week, paying rent on a place that is not your home, no way to earn money because of where you are and what you’re doing, and you just figure out that the year you budgeted away from may have grown into a year and a half, and there’s no way you can afford that, what choice did you have? Now, the Wall of Tapes was tongue-in-cheek named after the Wall of Fire, but ironically that was just what it was. The tape decks were all lined up against one wall of the Briefing Course room.

And when I’m talking about a Wall of Tapes, I mean a whole damn wall, oooh boy. Four Hundred Seventy Two Hubbard Taped Lectures. Most of you reading this are by now aware of his ums and you sees and all that in Hubbard’s speech pattern. They are on his recorded lectures in full glory. Sometimes the lectures would drone on for over half an hour with him vamping on this or that and such forth before he’d even get to the point, so you would not be wrong if you guessed that none of the taped lectures were less than an hour long, most lasting 1 1/2 to 2 hours. If we were to generously say each lecture was 1 1/2 hours long it would mean that a student who was on a 40-hour course week would take almost 18 weeks just to listen to all the tapes in the wall of tapes.

That would be if a person understood each and every word uttered on each and every tape the first time they heard it. And that would also mean that the tape didn’t ever break. Oh, but break they did. They broke so much that I brought my trusty X-acto knife that I had somehow thought to bring from home when I moved to LA as well as an old roll of Crystal Scotch Tape I had also put in my luggage onto course every day because there was always a need to splice the tapes. Yes, I could probably have gotten those things from someone at the Org, but that would have required a CSW.

A CSW (Completed Staff Work – Situation, Data, Solution, This is OK, Approval Lines for everyone who would need to approve it) would have required I price those things out, let my senior know where I would be able to purchase them, let my senior know exactly why I needed them, and it would have had to go up approval lines and, if I was lucky enough to get finance approval for the money to go get these items, then I would actually have to get them in my spare time. So yes, I brought things I already had rather than jump through hoops. That’s usually what people did, and, I’m sure, exactly how Hubbard intended it to happen.

But even when listening to a tape, once finished, the new tapes didn’t just magically appear in the students’ hands. They had to finish a tape, rewind it from the pickup reel to the original labeled reel, put it back in the original box, take it to the library where they hopefully didn’t have to wait in line too long, get the next tape on their check sheet then go back to their tape player and start the tape.

So, well, maybe I didn’t have sex with my students to get student points up. Well that’s not a maybe, that’s a nope. But, did I do things to make their lives easier. Yes, if I was dumb enough to be there today, I’d still do it the same way.

Sometimes if they had a misunderstood word, I would skip all the rote questions and just talk to them, try to see if we could figure out what Hubbard really meant there, because it was fairly obvious that what a lot of what my students were reading was really kind of obscure, to put it kindly. No, I definitely shouldn’t have done that, but sometimes it was the only way they could get past a certain paragraph. I also asked a student if they had had enough sleep the night before without automatically assuming they had a misunderstood word every time someone allowed a yawn to sneak out. I got really good at ignoring a plethora of suppressed yawns as well.

I would put the student’s headphones on sometimes and listen to a piece of the tape they couldn’t figure out and help them decipher just what words he was saying because there were some really mealy-mouthed moments in some of those lectures. Some lectures, the minute I saw the lecture name on the tape, I knew exactly what the student was trying to figure out.

But the biggest and baddest thing I did, and I freely admit to this, was that I allowed my students to listen to L. Ron Hubbard at a faster speed than the speed at which he talked on those tapes. Yes, I let my students turn Hubbard into Mickey Mouse.

Here’s a diagram of the way a tape goes across from one reel to the other. And this is a simple drawing. If you take a piece of paper and put it between the tape and the capstan, it will speed up the playback of the tape. The majority of the students figured this out really quickly. However, if I caught a student doing this, I was supposed to assume that they had a misunderstood word and make them rewind the tape and listen to the whole tape again.

I never got that or bought into this concept. To this day, I listen to most of my podcasts at 1.5 speed, so I must really have a lot of misunderstood words. This led to a few comical moments on the Briefing Course floor. The students knew I would let them get away with it. We actually even discussed it (in whispers) during a break. Supervisors were provided with and always carried a clipboard and a pen when walking the courtroom floor. If I walked by and my clipboard “accidentally’ hit the top of one student’s chair after that, it set off a chain reaction.

It was comical, but we all had to keep a straight face. The person whose chair I hit knew someone who was not me was coming into the tape area. That person would elbow or kick the chair of the person next to them, etc. etc. etc. All of a sudden each and every tape player in an entire row of 25 tape players would develop “a problem” the students would be stopping them, fiddling with them, I would jump into action, helping them, palming pieces of paper, if necessary, and getting them restarted really quickly. It was a chain reaction that took only a matter of minutes, then the students were all listening to their players again.

When the threat had left the area, I would drop a scrap of paper on the closest student’s desk and they would stop their player, insert the paper and restart their player. That student would hand a piece of paper to the student next to them, who would wait about a minute before doing the same thing and on down the line. Not elegant, but it worked. And we kept our TRs in.

So there you have it. Every one of my students treated me with respect. I do not recall a single student on the Briefing Course ever treating me unkindly or treating me poorly. In the world I lived in at the time, that was a welcome anomaly. If any of my former students are reading this, thank you for that. And a special thank you for the student who let me spend the night at her house despite the fact that it could have caused a lot of trouble for her. It was a light in my dark days and now you know I didn’t have sex with the person you were sitting next to either. Sheesh. And don’t worry, I may miss the people, but I don’t miss the situation, not going back, no way, no how.

— Valerie Ross

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