Ron’s Research Line
| Ron’s Research Line | |
|---|---|
| Author | The Pilot, Internet |
| Type of Article | Category:History of Scientology - Technical |
| Website | http://scientolipedia.org/info/Ken Ogger |
Ron’s Research Line
By The Pilot, Internet [1]
- [This article is taken from International Viewpoints (IVy) nr. 36 April 1998]
Ron’s research line went as follows:
1. Early mucking around[edit | edit source]
He sees a fakir lying on a bed of nails while visiting the orient, it makes a deep and lasting impression (mentioned on a tape). Then he is playing with affirmations, hypnotism, magic, psychoanalysis, etc. Perhaps he is seeking power, perhaps seeking truth, or perhaps a little bit of both. He finds odd and interesting tricks and unusual phenomena but can’t sort it out (per Evolution of a Science).
2. Dianetics[edit | edit source]
He hits on an improved way to run incidents, documents some wild phenomena, assembles some halfway incorrect theories and launches the Dianetic boom which collapses because prenatals are not basic and will not make a clear.
But some PCs were finding past lives.
3. The basic OT research[edit | edit source]
Suddenly it all starts falling together. With a whole track incident running technique and all of metaphysics and science fiction to draw on and a crowd of willing followers, he gets on a roll and the stuff just starts pouring out.
It begins with the HCL lectures of March 52 and then Tech 80 and Tech 88 and then the SOP and LPC and PDC courses and each one is cumulative and moving forward.
And it carries further, continuing to build through 1953, with the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd American ACCs (Advanced Clinical Course), each as long as the PDC.
And it’s all moving forward. He doesn’t cover the old ground again. It’s cognition after cognition and what’s the next barrier in sight. Maybe his, maybe his students’, maybe the latest metaphysical book from the library, it doesn’t matter, it’s all just going forward in a broader and broader outline and gain of ability. And the processing is totally unconstrained. Make up the commands as you go along. No rules but a loose version of the auditor’s code (check the PC’s pupils to see if he is too drunk to audit right now). Run the wildest stuff even in group processing. Run the processes on yourself solo if you are a trained auditor. Try everything. Play with everything. He even talks about having done group processing on a Boy Scout troop, giving them mock-ups and OT drills to do.
But something goes bad at the end of the 3rd ACC. Just the tiniest slip-up. It’s a successful ACC. The highest point ever reached in the subject. The top of the bridge, about twice as high as the PDC, although it was probably only about halfway to real OT.
The bug was “courage processing”. It restimulates and causes you to mock up your own opposition (more on this later). And he misses it.
4. The lower gradient OT research (1954)[edit | edit source]
So now he feels that something is wrong. He never quite gets his hands on it because things would have been different if he had, but something is not quite right. And of course he never admits to mistakes, so we don’t really hear about this.
And that first pass through OT was sloppy as all hell and he knows the stuff was only half right (clams [derogatory Internet term for church scientologists. Ed.] and so forth) although it was good enough to keep letting them all jump up to each next step anyway.
So he backs up and slows down. He is going to go over it again and try to straighten it out and find what was missed.
And the processing is a bit more cautious and everything is more restrained, but it is still on the OT line and it is pretty wild and unrestrained by our standards although not in comparison to the earlier stuff.
The difference here is between Creation of Human Ability (1954) and 8-8008 (1952), and the really advanced stuff of 1953 never got into book form.
This is the time of the 4th to 10th ACCs and a lot of new things are discovered, but they are refinements and filling in the gaps of the earlier work rather than going any further.
And Ron does seem to pull in a bit of opposition and keys in on this mocking up of opposition. And the real OT research comes to a grinding halt.
5. The late fifties[edit | edit source]
So it is time to back up again, and get more cautious, and worry about handling case charge.
The auditing gets a lot more formal (although still sloppy by later standards).
It’s lots of objectives (16th to 18th ACCs) and then lets get back to engram running and see if we were deluded about the whole track (1958). And it’s clear procedure (19th ACC) and Rock hunting (20th ACC) and eventually back to some mock-up processing (1st Melbourne ACC).
But the Rock research goes solid. It seems to be connected to compulsive mock-ups and opposition and the students come out of the ACC “looking like rocks” (according to one old timer).
And the mock-up processing gets into trouble on the button of Create/Destroy.
6. The GPM era[edit | edit source]
So now it’s sitting on his plate. One is creating one’s own opposition, and it’s coming from GPMs.
And they have one hell of a time with this because it’s late track.
And the grades are developed as a spin off of the difficulty of keeping the rudiments in while doing this research.
And the auditing gets very very formal and cautious because the PCs are over-restimulated and ARC break at the drop of a pin.
And finally the problem is solved with the clearing course. The create/destroy button is erased. And the person supposedly stops creating his own opposition, at least for a few days.
But all the GPMs, not just the implants but even the actual ones are only dramatizations of a more basic postulate to create one’s own opposition. They are not the source but just the manifestation, as I will discuss later.
But Ron misses this and thinks that he has erased the reason that the PC mocks up his own opposition.
And then he looks around and there is opposition on every side.
7. The insane period[edit | edit source]
If the opposition is being mocked up but it isn’t the PC doing it, then it must be those entities. They were handled casually in 1952 and did not seem to be a major case factor, but they must be to blame so let’s go after this with a vengeance.
But even with the entities out of the way, there is still endless opposition, so it must be the evil SPs who are all around us. Therefore let us declare everybody.
Oh no, it is getting worse. There must be a true world conspiracy after our ass. Let us take to the sea in ships and run and hide from them before they get us.
Except that it is still the PC who creates his own opposition. Ron just never got the basic on it.
And of course the auditing gets even more constrained. Here is the introduction of Standard Tech.
And everyone is afraid of their own shadow and how dangerous all this data is. And so we have confidentiality.
8. The aftermath[edit | edit source]
But the imagined dangers never quite materialised. And the real ones are side-stepped, at least partially.
And the expanded grades are introduced.
And some of the worst of the insanity cools down.
But now it’s all gone solid and the subject limps along thereafter.
Reasoning[edit | edit source]
So how did I come to this wild view of the research line?
I didn’t even think of this in these terms until a few weeks ago.
It was while writing chapter 43 “Advanced Concepts” of the Self Clearing Book[[1]].
I felt that this was the right place to put courage processing. I knew about it from the 3rd ACC. Ron considered it very important. There is more than one tape on it.
Ron said that when you mocked up courage, everything you had backed down from which had accumulated in the bank would start showing up. So it would be a tough run, but you would get through all this remaining force.
And because it was so tough, his gradient on it was to mock-up clouds of courage over distant cities before trying to do it closer to the body.
I had done a bit of it to a win (it is mentioned in Super Scio chapter 7), but not a lot and it didn’t quite feel right.
So I put together a brief little rundown on courage processing (it is now section 43.2) and gave it a try.
But I don’t have any flinch anymore at the force or pain in pictures and yet I was getting this feeling of opposition whenever I mocked up courage. And it certainly wasn’t entities. And it couldn’t even be GPMs either because I’ve handled enough of that to recognize how it would feel. I think that I’ve even touched enough of the game sphere stuff to catch on if that is where it was coming from.
So I thought of very early and basic things, and there was all that reality wars stuff that I’ve only managed to scrape a bit of charge off of because the incidents involve large numbers of dimensions and super selves that have many simultaneous viewpoints. And the keynote there was entrapment by aesthetics and courage was the kind of thing that would be used.
So I thought of combining courage and opposition with aesthetics.
I’ll reprint the process here that I finally came up with and put in the book.
43.1 Courage and beauty[edit | edit source]
Courage was messed up very early in our history by convincing people how beautiful and glorious it was to be courageous and fight against overwhelming odds and lose.
So one tends to postulate one’s opponents as stronger when one is being courageous.
The following process should clean this up.
a) Get the beauty of being courageous and losing
b) Get the beauty of another being courageous and losing
c) Get the beauty of being courageous and winning
d) Get the beauty of another being courageous and winning
Run this at least to the point where you have no need to make an opponent stronger to show off how courageous you are.
At basic, this underlies the tendency to mock-up one’s own opposition.
Experience with process[edit | edit source]
I was trying the above out as I put it together. First it seemed like losing was much more aesthetic than winning and the greater the opponent, the better.
I had added the flow 2 commands (“another”) on the basis of theory rather than because I had really looked at what they would do.
And then I was spotting the beauty of another being courageous and losing and how hard they must have worked to do that and it seemed like an impossibly insane idea and I started laughing and exteriorized from the whole mess.
I tried the courage process again and there was no tendency to mock-up any opposition. I thought of GPMs and I could see them as locks on this early aesthetic desire to have stronger enemies because it made the courage more glorious. For me it was a major undercut.
I tried it on a friend. It might have been a little bit out gradient (he hasn’t done the book yet), but it flattened in about 45 minutes and went to the same major EP with big cogs and getting over this tendency to mock-up one’s own opposition.
The ordinary courage process went into the next section of the book (43.2) with warnings to go back and do more of 43.1 if there was any tendency to mock-up opposition while mocking up courage.
Then I thought back on the 3rd ACC. The basic error was thinking that the opposition that showed up when you mocked up courage was the old force coming off of the bank. And so one should do lots of it to drain the force out of the bank. And it was a mistake. The opposition that shows up is new, because this is why one mocks up opposition.
And I thought of those old ACC students grinding away at that courage process. And I thought of Ron grinding away at it, and mocking up more and more stimulus response opposition. And then all the later stuff I described above just seemed obvious.
He was barrelling ahead and there really were no reasons for having a lot of stops and restrictions. And then the train jumped the rails due to an error in theory.
It was not that the processing was too loose and unrestrained. It didn’t solve it to get more and more pedantic and careful. That is like telling the guy to keep taking it easy until he ends up in a rest home.
It was not a mistake in application. It was a mistake in basic understanding. He simply missed the boat on a critical process.
If he’d trained up other researchers and listened more to other people’s ideas, somebody else might have caught it and saved the bacon. Maybe he even tried briefly and there were just too few people with him then. And when nobody else could pin down what was wrong, he gave up on everybody and shut the door on getting any help.
This is hubris[2] in action. The malady of the gods where their arrogance brings about their own downfall. Isn’t it funny how that old Greek word seems to derive from the name Hubbard.
Similar buttons[edit | edit source]
I have been trying to spot similar buttons which might run like this.
The ones I’ve found so far are:
a) Spot the glory of self sacrifice
b) Spot the glory of not sacrificing yourself
c) Spot another’s feeling of glory at sacrificing themselves
d) Spot another’s feeling of glory at not sacrificing themselves
And
a) Spot the wonderful fascination of waiting for something to happen
b) Spot the wonderful fascination of having something happen immediately
c) Spot another’s wonderful fascination at waiting for something to happen
d) Spot another’s wonderful fascination at having something happen immediately
These should probably be added to chapter 43.
Note that the wording on these is a bit better than the one on courage, so maybe courage should be revised as follows:
a) Spot the beauty of being courageous and losing
b) Spot the beauty of being courageous and winning
c) Spot another’s feeling of beauty at being courageous and losing
d) Spot another’s feeling of beauty at being courageous and winning
But note that the version given in 43.1 did run properly. This is just so advanced and new to me that I keep seeing a bit more in the general area and thinking of improvements.
Conclusion[edit | edit source]
For me this seemed like a correct indication of what really went wrong with the research line. There were endless advances in the later days but it seemed like they were always on things that were in other people’s way (like the grades being in the way of people running GPM listing) rather than what Ron’s attention was really fixed on.
Even now the orgs are frozen in this pattern of bringing more and more opponents into existence. The military bearing and the uniforms and the toughness just demands that there be a strong opponent. And notice how aesthetic all those things are.
Footnotes[edit | edit source]
- ^ The Pilot is anonymous, and first appeared a year ago on Internet. He issued his Self Clearing Book on the Internet on the 18th of December 1997, which is referred to in this article, which was issued on to Internet. This article appeared on the Internet along with 12 others on the 30th December 1997 [2015: a Scientolipedia article on Self Clearing appears at: http://scientolipedia.org/info/Self_Clearing_by_The_Pilot ]
- ^ insolent pride, arrogance. [<Greek hybris] World Book Dictionary