From International Viewpoints (IVy) Issue 20 - January 1995

See Home Page at http://www.ivymag.org/



Letter to the Editor

A Puzzled Reader

THERE ARE TIMES when I fail to understand what Ivy has to do
with scientology, what with all sorts of new, strange and unexplained
processes, rundowns and seemingly scientological offsprings popping
up all over the place.

There is Dianasis, Belief Changing, bilateral metering, TROM, to
mention
just a few. One hears success stories, one is told that such-and-such
is so much better than scientology - yet what is this all about?
To me these are foreign names. Hollow syllables. No mass, no reality.

One hears about new interpretations and applications
of the Admin Scale, the Tone Scale, the Ethics Conditions. These
changed
versions are simply put there without reasons why. One gets the
impression
that Ron was a bit daft, perhaps. Didn't do it right. As well one
hears about mixing in with auditing other techniques such as shamanism
('soul retrieval'), acupuncture, massage. Why? What's that
got to do with the good old LRH-style auditing most of us grew up
with? What's wrong with auditing that these off-beat steps had to
be taken?

The tech didn't seem to work, so one added other
bits or became inventive. Obviously there was a need to look for
alternatives,
else one wouldn't have taken the trouble to 'squirrel off'
(to use a well-hated term). But why did the tech not work? Personally,
I have no trouble whatsoever with the tech. The simpler I go about
it the better it works. So what occurred in the experience of others
to necessitate their exploring new avenues?

Mind you, I'm not speaking out against improvements
in the sense of streamlining and simplifying. Even Ron says: 'When
a group seeks to forward only what is currently acceptable it of
course
stalls all progress. Further it is dishonest to suppress or fail to
reveal scientific discoveries.' (Dianetics Today, p. 353.)
But he doesn't say that one - in order to make scientific
discoveries -
would have to deviate from the basic tools he summarized on
the Cl.VIII course, i.e. Ruds, Prepchecks, Lock Scanning, Two Way
Comm, L&N, Repetitive Recall, Narrative, and Chain Running. One would
certainly combine these basic tools in ever new ways to handle
whatever
the pc wants handled. But why go off them? And why invent 'new
OT levels?' Aren't the old ones good enough?

To me, scientology is a science, not a set of beliefs.
The application of this science extends to subjectively revealed
personal
memories (mental image pictures), certainly, but the actual tools
are as concrete as a hammer or a screw driver. The tools are not
subjective! So changing well thought-out, thoroughly tested
conventional
tools for something novel would demand some explanation.

So let's be a bit more scientific, I should suggest.
Anyone who deems it necessary to use 'other tech', such as
alternative approaches, mixed approaches, or new OT levels, in
a word, anything that goes beyond the basic tools mentioned above,
ought to be held to explain why it was necessary to do so.

As well I propose that something new and unprecedented
shouldn't be mentioned on the side without comment, but that such
articles should have the general form of a CSW, that is, 1) state
the situation that had to be solved, 2) give all necessary data to
make comprehensible how this problem could not be solved by
conventional
means, and 3) present the solution (new tech) complete with how
many people it was tested out on and what the results were. The
article
would have to state convincingly how straight scn didn't work in
certain
areas, that this was tested out, and that other avenues had to be
taken. (As for myself, I have yet to see the problem that cannot
be solved by the combination of tech, admin, and ethics.)

This does not amount to the editor having
to 'censor' articles! He would simply ask his authors: 'What
made your view necessary? What problem were you trying to solve? In
the attempt to solve it, to what extent did you test out the
conventional
means of scn tech? Where did you find them to be inapplicable and
failing?' This wouldn't leave the reader puzzled and wondering
whatever happened to good old auditing. I believe it would make the
magazine more comprehensible, constructive and positive.

To say: 'Scientology just didn't work for me, so I quickly invented
scrapology, and it runs like a bomb', is not scientific. It's
PR.

So give Ron a chance. Why deviate?

Ulrich