jim incorrectly w”rote: “What you write is likely true of auditing since 2000. In the late 1960’s and into the 1970’s the professional auditor had leeway and could have easily been described as a ‘guide’ to the preclear as they worked with two-way communication and the grade processes.

No jim. “Muzzled” auditing was introduced in the 60’s by Hubbard. What you describe is properly called squirreling by Hubbard.

Quotation marks for ‘wins’ can be necessary when writing for the uninitiated, so to speak, who might also need the writer to define LRH or CoS or COB or DM or Ethics or Withholds or Coverts or Int or Flag, etc.

‘Wins’ in quotes could also mean the writer does not believe a win actually occurred, or was of any permanence, of much value, or could be recognized by anyone except the individual claiming the win. ‘Win’ in quotes could be a smirking attempt to demean a claim of a win.

Or ‘wins’ could be written that way just because the writer is, like me, not really a writer, just a high school dropout (with BA degree at age 43). I have to keep a supply of semi-colons, hyphens, quotation marks and apostrophes waiting in the wings to cover for when I am at a loss for proper punctuation and sentence structure. As DM once noted, the march of the semi-colons…

I would be interested in hearing about wins, especially if they came with additional explanatory information. I’d like to know, just for curiosity, exactly what program (TR? audits?) was used to obtain the win, how many hours of work were involved, what year it happened and how long has the win endured (i.e. was it a fleeting good feeling, or a significant and so far permanent change of behavior), and of course, being a thrifty Scot, how much did it all cost – both in dollars, in time, in opportunity cost, perhaps family weakening or strengthening, perhaps time spent with children or away from them and the cost to the children of being raised without a parent or two every day, or the cost to children for being sent off to the Sea Org or Scientology school at a very young age, and so on.

There are many factors one could think of to try to determine the true total cost over time of any individual win. It would be very helpful if I could understand the value of a win by a breakdown of its true cost to the person and to those closest to him.

Anyone want to define their win in such detail?

Well said. The infamous but scathingly accurate Australian Anderson Report got to the meat of the Hubbardian treatment of ordinary people – it was command a.k.a. authoritative hypnosis, which could easily result in the subject going into an unhealthy state of disassociation. Quoting the Report: “Many of Hubbard’s processes, especially those developed in the 1950’s, were deliberately designed to produce “exteriorization”, a state or condition known to psychiatrists as “disassociation”, which is produced by hypnotic means. Dissociation is an hallucinatory experience in which the subject believes that he is outside his body. ” Cleverly, Hubbard renamed disassociation to ‘Exteriorization’, calling it a win for the person experiencing it, all to undermine the psych nomenclature.

The Report continues to warn against the hypnotic, repetitive nature of auditing with a statement that holds as true today as it did decades ago when the Report was written: “These are dangerous procedures in unskilled hands.”

Of course, current CoS might claim that is old news, that the Report is over 50 years old, that procedures have changed since then, or that the Report was unreasonably influenced the author’s religious beliefs, and to some extent the religion complaint has some validity. However, the basic elements of the Report have stood the test of time.

At some point CoS started trying to refuse to serve anyone with a psych history, trying to eliminate one population most at risk from their auditing techniques. However, so many people have experienced disassociation,and even worse, have slid into psychotic breaks using CoS tech, that even the CoS has developed policies to try to control the negative effects of its own tech.

Two famous times when the CoS procedures went terrible wrong were the Lisa McPherson death, and the murder of Ellie Perkins by her paranoid schizophrenic son. In both cases the principles only received CoS-approved treatment instead of treatment recommended by appropriate licensed medical doctors. I am sure there have been other perhaps less serious breaks with reality for CoS members using CoS tech, because by its original design it tries to remove the person from his normal sensibility and view of himself, and of the world around him.

Sure, there is value of having a dedicated listener; I myself manned a phone crisis hotline for several years. We were a respected non-profit organization whose phone volunteers were called Listeners, and that was our primary trained skill. The goal was to let people sort out possible solutions to their dilemma by letting them talk without being judged, hopefully helping them to sort out their own existing support groups. . But CoS tries to move its members into a state of being that was originally imagined by a control hungry, narcissistic science fiction writer who, at the time he imagined the OT levels, was known to be using drugs, which he normally avoided.

Over the years, especially from the late 60s on, LRH tweaked his ‘religion’ with various new policies, procedures and proclamations, each to be followed as if gospel sent down from on high. Things only got worse for confused CoS members after LRH died and Miscavige got control of the tech. DM made his own tech tweaks, mostly to generate new revenue from the same old membership, but also designed to insulate himself from contact with anyone not of and for the CoS, and to punish and drown internal CoS criticism to protect his absolute CoS power and position.

That is spot on, Bruce Ploetz. Having studied brain and central nervous system functions recently, it makes perfect sense too. Do something enough and it becomes “hardwired”, literally.

secretfornow, I completely understand and have experienced the same things. It does lessen as you get out there and LIVE your life and see it’s BS. I still have the conditions formulas so ingrained that I end up saying to myself, that’s BS, just do whatever in the hell you want to do – and DO it!

Bruce Ploetz – IKR?!?! I’ve experienced the same thing. 🙂 (I had parking karma before Scn and still have it today. 😉 )

Exactly, secretfornow

True Mark. Part of what this post points out is that these same “wins” can/could be gotten elsewhere and with that, I agree. It doesn’t change the fact that I had some great realizations about myself and my life from the Grades. Where it gets muddy is when you consider that the Grades are part of the whole scheme. You can’t just take them out as a standalone – they’re part of the bigger package, which I disagreed with then and still disagree with now. While I don’t “regret” anything I did/got particularly, my time could have been better spent elsewhere. C’est la vie.

Xenu’s son, I want to add that my experience is different, because I got my auditing as a staff member and did not pay thousands of dollars for it. That makes a big difference. I never had concerns and pressure about how much time it was taking or how much money I was spending.