"a lot of what my students were reading was really kind of obscure, to put it kindly." Or maybe it was all bovine excrement? I have come to the conclusion (after listening to only small snippets of Lron's droning drivel) that he sounds like Donny tRump doing any speech with all of the asides, aspersions and non-sequiturs that his speeches entails.
Having to listen to hundreds of second or third generation copies must have been torture. Throw in crinkly tapes that keep breaking, how does one actually understand what ever it is that Lron is trying to teach?
Thank you Valerie, your description of $cieno tape hell is funny and very sad.
For the most part these were very old Wollensack tape machines, very unlike the nice Studer B67 behind Hubbard in the photo. The sad truth about tape machines is that the heads wear out. As the tape passes over the playback head, it wears a sort of shallow pit on the surface.
This reduces the ability of the system to reproduce high frequencies, which are needed to understand speech. The sibilants, the "s" sounds and similar, go away and consonants all become the same sound. Ps and bs become indistinguishable.
And, of course, the tape itself wears out. Students soon learn that they can make the sound clearer by pressing the tape against the head harder, which wears it our even faster.
Added to the fact that it is all nonsense to begin with, the "wall of tapes" would seem to be insurmountable to all but the most dedicated true believers. No wonder Dave cancelled it. But how does Scientology go on when all the old Briefing Course students die out? You can't deliver OT levels without Class VIII auditors, and you have to do Class VI to become a Class VIII.
Maybe Dave is channeling Louis IVX and saying " Après moi le déluge" (After me, the flood). Which turned out to be more or less true, Louis VX was just a playboy king and Louis VIX was the one that got beheaded in the revolution. Dave hasn't named a successor because he doesn't expect corporate Scientology to survive him. Good enough for him now, devil take the hindmost.
Besides, it’s harder to “find rouge semicolons” in tapes. The smart thing would have been to replace the tapes after a certain number of playings but that would have lost a few pennies.
Val, they don't worry about the semicolons on the tapes but they do quite a bit of editing. If you listen to the CD versions of the SHSBC lectures you no longer hear the little introductions at the beginnings that name new students. Quite a disappointment for some that loved to hear their names on Ron's lips in the lectures.
They take out breaths, umms and aahs, mouth clicks and so on. Also the order is in (I've heard) to remove all references to Creative Processing. The technique Hubbard stole from Volney Mathison. A lot like the Guided Imagery technique still in use outside of Scientology. I don't know how that could work with the Philadelphia Doctorate Course which is mostly about Creative Processing.
Obviously the semicolons was a tongue in cheek comment. They didn’t care about semicolons in the rewritten basics, it was an excuse to modify Hubbard’s work. They also have to get rid of any reference to his children or wife.
It's interesting, Val, Dave seems to want to return to the basics with his Golden Ages of Crap etc. but wants to sanitize it all. Can't have it both ways, Dave, Crap is crap, never does smell like roses.
Like Hubbard, he wants it to work. But it just inherently doesn't. Hubbard was changing it up constantly to his dying day and never got it right.
The part I know most about is the meter. The meter is just part of a device known as a polygraph or lie detector. It does show that the person reacted to something, and it does show when the person has achieved a hypnotic dissociated state (polygraph operators seemingly don't know about that part).
But using repetitive hypnotic commands to desensitize someone to his emotional reactions does not help the person.
Maybe he can now happily chatter on about his dear departed mom, as though the grief was just an illusion, but he has not properly processed the grief of loss. He has pushed it down and replaced it with fake bliss.
Sort of like going out to get plastered after losing your mom. You might feel better for a while, but the issues are still there. You still need to go through the stages of grief.
All of Scientology sort of "works" in just this way, seeming to offer a road to freedom but really enslaving you in a road to serfdom. With Dead Hubbard as the king.
Absolutely! The reel to reel tapes have thus the history of WHO was even on the course, and when, that is so excellent for posterity dating things.
But Hubbard, he himself carved people out of the movement's history telling, so Hubbard to me, is always "source" of who gets the blame.
But, if the quackery just did something supernatural, but it never did, so from now 20 years out of the cult, I think more every day the whole thing is quackery, and deep study of the history, other than to reminisce, is futile. The quackery's never going to go anywhere, it can't.
Jon Atack wrote an article called something like "The likely origins of Dianetics and Scientology" that traces back every one of Hubbard's ideas to earlier writings.
Sometimes it seems like Hubbard just read the Reader's Digest and repeated random articles from the Science section.
There is something to all of it, it's not purely random maunderings, but it is never what Hubbard thought it was or could be. The dream of a world free of criminals, insanity or war was always really a nightmare of pure Hubbard domination. Like the Pax Romana (Roman Peace) or the mutually assured destruction doctrines of our age, it was a dream of peace based on ultraviolence.
I forgot to mention this in my story, but it is important to note that the Commanding Officer ASHO Day, Irene Howey and the HCO Area Secretary, Jack Dirmann, were not married but living together when I arrived at ASHO. They married in 1976, Yvonne was their officiant. BUT when I arrived at ASHO, two of the highest ranking officers there were cohabiting outside the bonds of marriage. Irene was the person who beached me for something she did, Out 2D, that I was not doing. Yet I felt guilty when it happened.
Val, brings back memories of doing the solo course 6 before doing the Clearing Course. I did that in late 1968. I was at ASHO(American St. hill Organization) in among briefing course students. Listening to Hubbard lectures was a way of life. Most of us were clueless. Good story Val. Thank you.
wow, really great explanation for speeding up the tape playing of dull Hubbard's droning extra verbose lectures on those old reel to reel tape machines.
This speeding up the tapes was just so widespread, but I never mastered how to do it, only heard about it.
The content of the Briefing Course has so much material that isn't used today, so studying it, really it's not like Hubbard's output warrants anyone doing it, honestly.
Some of the squirrel splinter Scientologists have discussed, "verbal tech" which is a taboo, openly tried to explain the late 1950s "SOP Goals" and then the "GPM Goals" etc, and it's at least better easily understood when someone has become a "squirrel release" (joke, but the point is that someone has to achieve splinter/squirrel/verbal tech level grasp of Hubbard's "tech" quackery to talk about it sensibly, I believe.
Also, even more extreme, I've found people in other mystical practices who can grasp and talk sensibly simply cut to the core, of Hubbard's crap, better than trained "KSW" Scientologists.
==================
The whole speeding up the tape machines to get through the "Wall of Tapes" though, that would be a transgression, a group "mutual out ruds" overt and withhold, in Hubbard's blaming the followers for all bad results of the Hubbard quackery.
Calling Scientology quackery, quickly puts the Hubbard quackery in it's rightful place.
Then all the transgressions supposedly against failing to meet Hubbard's endless quackery regulations, also puts those Hubbard draconian blaming penalties in correct light.
There is really no fault in failing at the Hubbard rules in failing to perform the Hubbard quackery nor learn the whole painfully obscure details of all of Hubbard's quackery development.
But the Briefing Course, that in the movement's history, is the hardest longest course, and the Wall of Tapes is where it just goes on and on and on, never ending.
I'm currently studying one of the four main divisions of the Pali Canon of the Buddha's discourses and the 1/4 I'm studying is 44 hours audible book length, and thankfully it is far far easier to absorb than anything Hubbard garbly lectured.
Another awesome story, Val! Maybe on a subconscious level, you knew you were in the wrong place. So glad you took care of your students. I pray most of them didn't stick it out.
"a lot of what my students were reading was really kind of obscure, to put it kindly." Or maybe it was all bovine excrement? I have come to the conclusion (after listening to only small snippets of Lron's droning drivel) that he sounds like Donny tRump doing any speech with all of the asides, aspersions and non-sequiturs that his speeches entails.
Having to listen to hundreds of second or third generation copies must have been torture. Throw in crinkly tapes that keep breaking, how does one actually understand what ever it is that Lron is trying to teach?
Thank you Valerie, your description of $cieno tape hell is funny and very sad.
tRump is LRH returned
For the most part these were very old Wollensack tape machines, very unlike the nice Studer B67 behind Hubbard in the photo. The sad truth about tape machines is that the heads wear out. As the tape passes over the playback head, it wears a sort of shallow pit on the surface.
This reduces the ability of the system to reproduce high frequencies, which are needed to understand speech. The sibilants, the "s" sounds and similar, go away and consonants all become the same sound. Ps and bs become indistinguishable.
And, of course, the tape itself wears out. Students soon learn that they can make the sound clearer by pressing the tape against the head harder, which wears it our even faster.
Added to the fact that it is all nonsense to begin with, the "wall of tapes" would seem to be insurmountable to all but the most dedicated true believers. No wonder Dave cancelled it. But how does Scientology go on when all the old Briefing Course students die out? You can't deliver OT levels without Class VIII auditors, and you have to do Class VI to become a Class VIII.
Maybe Dave is channeling Louis IVX and saying " Après moi le déluge" (After me, the flood). Which turned out to be more or less true, Louis VX was just a playboy king and Louis VIX was the one that got beheaded in the revolution. Dave hasn't named a successor because he doesn't expect corporate Scientology to survive him. Good enough for him now, devil take the hindmost.
Besides, it’s harder to “find rouge semicolons” in tapes. The smart thing would have been to replace the tapes after a certain number of playings but that would have lost a few pennies.
Val, they don't worry about the semicolons on the tapes but they do quite a bit of editing. If you listen to the CD versions of the SHSBC lectures you no longer hear the little introductions at the beginnings that name new students. Quite a disappointment for some that loved to hear their names on Ron's lips in the lectures.
They take out breaths, umms and aahs, mouth clicks and so on. Also the order is in (I've heard) to remove all references to Creative Processing. The technique Hubbard stole from Volney Mathison. A lot like the Guided Imagery technique still in use outside of Scientology. I don't know how that could work with the Philadelphia Doctorate Course which is mostly about Creative Processing.
Obviously the semicolons was a tongue in cheek comment. They didn’t care about semicolons in the rewritten basics, it was an excuse to modify Hubbard’s work. They also have to get rid of any reference to his children or wife.
It's interesting, Val, Dave seems to want to return to the basics with his Golden Ages of Crap etc. but wants to sanitize it all. Can't have it both ways, Dave, Crap is crap, never does smell like roses.
Like Hubbard, he wants it to work. But it just inherently doesn't. Hubbard was changing it up constantly to his dying day and never got it right.
The part I know most about is the meter. The meter is just part of a device known as a polygraph or lie detector. It does show that the person reacted to something, and it does show when the person has achieved a hypnotic dissociated state (polygraph operators seemingly don't know about that part).
But using repetitive hypnotic commands to desensitize someone to his emotional reactions does not help the person.
Maybe he can now happily chatter on about his dear departed mom, as though the grief was just an illusion, but he has not properly processed the grief of loss. He has pushed it down and replaced it with fake bliss.
Sort of like going out to get plastered after losing your mom. You might feel better for a while, but the issues are still there. You still need to go through the stages of grief.
All of Scientology sort of "works" in just this way, seeming to offer a road to freedom but really enslaving you in a road to serfdom. With Dead Hubbard as the king.
Absolutely! The reel to reel tapes have thus the history of WHO was even on the course, and when, that is so excellent for posterity dating things.
But Hubbard, he himself carved people out of the movement's history telling, so Hubbard to me, is always "source" of who gets the blame.
But, if the quackery just did something supernatural, but it never did, so from now 20 years out of the cult, I think more every day the whole thing is quackery, and deep study of the history, other than to reminisce, is futile. The quackery's never going to go anywhere, it can't.
Jon Atack wrote an article called something like "The likely origins of Dianetics and Scientology" that traces back every one of Hubbard's ideas to earlier writings.
Sometimes it seems like Hubbard just read the Reader's Digest and repeated random articles from the Science section.
There is something to all of it, it's not purely random maunderings, but it is never what Hubbard thought it was or could be. The dream of a world free of criminals, insanity or war was always really a nightmare of pure Hubbard domination. Like the Pax Romana (Roman Peace) or the mutually assured destruction doctrines of our age, it was a dream of peace based on ultraviolence.
I forgot to mention this in my story, but it is important to note that the Commanding Officer ASHO Day, Irene Howey and the HCO Area Secretary, Jack Dirmann, were not married but living together when I arrived at ASHO. They married in 1976, Yvonne was their officiant. BUT when I arrived at ASHO, two of the highest ranking officers there were cohabiting outside the bonds of marriage. Irene was the person who beached me for something she did, Out 2D, that I was not doing. Yet I felt guilty when it happened.
Val, brings back memories of doing the solo course 6 before doing the Clearing Course. I did that in late 1968. I was at ASHO(American St. hill Organization) in among briefing course students. Listening to Hubbard lectures was a way of life. Most of us were clueless. Good story Val. Thank you.
wow, really great explanation for speeding up the tape playing of dull Hubbard's droning extra verbose lectures on those old reel to reel tape machines.
This speeding up the tapes was just so widespread, but I never mastered how to do it, only heard about it.
The content of the Briefing Course has so much material that isn't used today, so studying it, really it's not like Hubbard's output warrants anyone doing it, honestly.
Some of the squirrel splinter Scientologists have discussed, "verbal tech" which is a taboo, openly tried to explain the late 1950s "SOP Goals" and then the "GPM Goals" etc, and it's at least better easily understood when someone has become a "squirrel release" (joke, but the point is that someone has to achieve splinter/squirrel/verbal tech level grasp of Hubbard's "tech" quackery to talk about it sensibly, I believe.
Also, even more extreme, I've found people in other mystical practices who can grasp and talk sensibly simply cut to the core, of Hubbard's crap, better than trained "KSW" Scientologists.
==================
The whole speeding up the tape machines to get through the "Wall of Tapes" though, that would be a transgression, a group "mutual out ruds" overt and withhold, in Hubbard's blaming the followers for all bad results of the Hubbard quackery.
Calling Scientology quackery, quickly puts the Hubbard quackery in it's rightful place.
Then all the transgressions supposedly against failing to meet Hubbard's endless quackery regulations, also puts those Hubbard draconian blaming penalties in correct light.
There is really no fault in failing at the Hubbard rules in failing to perform the Hubbard quackery nor learn the whole painfully obscure details of all of Hubbard's quackery development.
But the Briefing Course, that in the movement's history, is the hardest longest course, and the Wall of Tapes is where it just goes on and on and on, never ending.
I'm currently studying one of the four main divisions of the Pali Canon of the Buddha's discourses and the 1/4 I'm studying is 44 hours audible book length, and thankfully it is far far easier to absorb than anything Hubbard garbly lectured.
Another awesome story, Val! Maybe on a subconscious level, you knew you were in the wrong place. So glad you took care of your students. I pray most of them didn't stick it out.