Author Archives: Mark C. Rathbun

I encourage everyone to read what I call the Joe Howard Paradigm at http://www.scientology-cult.com/new-model-for-scientology.html

Also please consider what LRH once said in a similar vein:

“And I believe that the freedom of the material which we know and understand is guaranteed only by a lightness of organization, a maximum of people, good training and good, reliable , sound relay of information.  And if we can do these things, we will win.  But if we can’t do these things, sooner or later the information which we hold will become the property of an untrustworthy few.  This I am sure, because it has always happened this way.”
From the tape, “What Scientology is Doing” 6 June 55, Anatomy of the Spirit of Man Congress.

I think my own technical training narrative supports  this line of thinking.

I worked pretty hard for 12 years in support of obtaining tax exemption for the Church. My primary motivation was that it was called for in LRH’s estate planning which was designed to make Scientology available to everyone ultimately. His estate planning  called for a system of checks and balances so that one madman could not lord over and destroy all of Scientology. When exemption was attained it took me about a month to confirm my suspicions that the checks and balances had indeed been usurped by a madman. The control was so thorough that to even subtly object would mean being shipped off to a gulag and made into a mouse. I got on my motorcycle and rode across the country for nine days.  When I phoned my father from San Antonio Greg Wilhere intercepted the call – he sat for days by my father’s bed side who was terminally ill with cancer for this purpose. He begged me to speak to Miscavige. I did, and Miscavige pleaded with me to meet him in New Orleans. I met him. Miscavige swore to God he would cease acting like a madman, and promised he would stop abusing people. He told me if I returned he’d send me to the ship to train and move up through OT III (I was Clear at the time) since I had worked so hard and safeguarded the church forever and thus deserved it.

I accepted since training in and applying Scientology was the only reason I joined the Sea Org in the first place. Miscavige sent his most trusted Class XII Greg Wilhere to join me to twin with me and report on me. He sent Snr CS  Int Class XII Ray Mithoff to audit/sec check me. Both have recently executed declarations under the penalties of perjury that they are DM’s top technical dogs and I am a lunatic who has no certificates.

Now, you have probably seen that I have copped to committing physical violence on staff members – on several occasions in 2001 and two occasions in January 2004.  Mithoff’s and Wilhere’s decarlarations reminded me of some more physical battery I performed on several occasions.

a. I lightly  kicked Wilhere in the shins on a number of occasions, just hard enough to wake him up when he fell asleep while “coaching/suping” me on TRs, and meter drills, and while auditing me.

b. I lightly kicked Mithoff in the shins on a number of occasions just hard enough to wake him when he feel asleep on me in session.

Note, since I left the Sea Org a number of others have reported similar batteries upon those two for the same reasons.

Because no one on the ship had any idea I had blown, but for Greg and Ray, and because they only knew me as IG Ethics, nobody fooled with me on study. It was just me and LRH as far as I was concerned. I absorbed it intensively because it was the opportunity I fought for twelve years to obtain. I never once in almost two years of study doped off.  I demanded to and did TR O two hour blinkless – even though I had to look at a dozing twin. When it came to the meter drills, the Class XIIs couldn’t do them with me because their needles were painted to the dial. I had to sup myself on those too, using greenhorn staff whose needles reacted like normal beings.  And – long before the Golden Age of Tech, and despite orders from the two Class XIIs I didn’t need to – I did the dating drill all the way to a done routinely with no flubs. That is the way I applied LRH because I was dead serious about thoroughly duplicating his tech and using it as he did.

When I started student auditing, another Class XII – Margaret Supak – C/S’d my auditing. Not long into Grade O auditing she sent me to cramming for “comm cycle additives” for asking a distraught p.c. “what’s up.”  Of course, the p.c. told me and it was the first of many, many cases I would crack by simply using communication, my meter and trying to audit like LRH did. You might have noticed that it is ILLEGAL in the current Church of Miscavology to audit anything like LRH did in the many auditing demo tapes he recorded.

Well, when I refused the cram, Wilhere came in to handle me. He couldn’t. He had zero altitude or credibility with me for the outnesses noted above and because I caught him and reported him for destroying the Freewinds Captain’s marriage by constantly and covertly flirting with his wife.

Mithoff then laid down the law with me. He told me the numerous LRH references I provided to him stating to the effect that the only way an auditor can seriously run aground is by failing to understand what is going on with the pc before him, and that one must use two way communication (required by the auditors code) to be sure he does, were trumped by Class VIII data.  I told him that rather than accept verbal tech from him, I was now forced to go study Class VIII. I listened to all the Class VIII lectures and read all the written references I had not already read on Academy training.

Of course I found out Mithoff was lying or simply hadn’t a clue what Class VIII is about – and thus no clue what Standard Tech actually is. LRH lays in with an atomic branding iron that Class VIIIs study all the tech  and it is drilled and applied and finally one can simply sit down and “play the piano.”  Just like he advised policy be applied in the intro to the OEC. You don’t argue one line of one HCOB against another. Just as you don’t argue one line of policy against another. Incidentally, that is ALL that DM’s technical hierarchy and international management have done for years. They produce nothing. They use tech and policy to stop all day long. And right when some enterprising soul does something adventurous like do an eval, or initiate a sane tech program, Miscavige will enter some blanket order that “evals are canceled” (actual DM order), or Snr CS Int Office can issue no orders (actual DM order).

When I left the ship I had trained through Class V Grad officially. But, because of my experience with the Class XII priesthood, I effectively did the Briefing Course and Class VIII. That is because Mithoff could not explain to me why a number of integral LRH lectures were not on the Academy level checksheets he and DM had issued in LRH’s name.  Rather than limit myself to the 8-12 lectures on each Grade – and then again at NED and Grad V and HSSC – I did a computer search and pulled and listened to every lecture LRH ever gave that touched on COMMUNICATION AT LEVEL 0, PROBLEMS AT LEVEL I, O/W AT LEVEL II, ARC BREAKS AT LEVEL III, AND SERV FACS AT LEVEL 4 , etc.

My first assignment upon going to Flag to work under the RTC Rep in late summer 95 was to handle the ethics (including sec checking), TRs and metering of the Class XIIs at Flag. They were a piece of work – with only a couple of exceptions – because like Mithoff and Wilhere they couldn’t even keep their eyes open for a session, couldn’t sit still in a chair, couldn’t read a meter, all the while asserting they were the priesthood and could not learn another single thing about Tech – they were IT.

In the middle of all this, their (and DM’s) product Lisa McPherson and her tragic death took me off that project  before completion.

Over the next several years more of their flubbed products were assigned to me to handle by DM because he had no where else to turn. That included a virtual who’s who list of Scn celebrities and executives. Nearly all of them I FES’d, C/S’d, examined, and serviced as Ethics Officer and Chaplain  in addition to auditing because every time a Class XII either at Flag or Int got involved it was all about making themselves right for their own overt products. Miscavige not only condoned that,  he ordered it in place once he saw that was the only way he could stop some serious squeeky wheels from collapsing and possibly hurting his image or creating an external PR flap. Suffice it to say none of them went the route of Lisa McPherson – quite the contrary. I handled many cases tangled up in a ball from overt L’s delivery. Because of time constraints and his necessity to handle direct requests from VIPs themselves, DM ordered me to Read it-drill it-do it on NOTS and the L’s.  I later was able to complete Class IX training formally, but not before I handled a number of NOTs ball ups.

When Miscavige had his final psychotic break (which he never came out of) in November 1999 (see my St Pete Times filmed interview for particulars) he started targeting me and all of international management in bizarre ways (much covered in the SP Times Series).  My attempts to continue myself up the Bridge were torpedoed by Miscavige – twice pulling me off NOTs with NO justification when he had learned I had arranged an auditor for myself. I audited hundreds of hours of NOTs without having received a NOTs session. I audited Tom Cruise from start to finish on NOTs without having received NOTs myself. And even when that was done, I managed to get onto the program – and while getting Tom through OT VI – and being his review and six month check auditor, Miscavige again ordered me OFF NOTS.

Meanwhile, Miscavige took over all TRs and metering passes at FLB through his rep office as the first phase of his Golden Age of Tech.  They prolonged and complicated the TRs to the point where auditors were churned out who could ARC break a Saint in a New York minute. The metering coaching was so complicated that his metering comps were left with one certainty, “there is no way to know for sure whether something is an instant read or not.”  And then the drills.  He had a group of tech bustees putting them together. In the last couple weeks before release he had me and Snr CS FSO Richard Reiss testing the drills and correcting them for return to Tech Comps for corrections.  Richard and I sent reams of pages of drills blackened with our edits and notes back to Comps. By the time the release event arrived, we had tested perhaps 60% of the drills, and had seen very few of our corrections back for verification. But, in Miscavige’s world, the EVENT must go on. Scientology is but one series of events for him (Hitlerian backdrops and all). There is serious out tech embedded throughout DM’s Golden Age of tech. For example, have you ever seen an auditor assess “buttons” on you back to the stone ages, and by the time you start taking them up, you are talking about problems you never even conceived of having at the start of session?  I contend a simple “what’s up?” (Two Way Comm) with an eagle eye on the meter would have resolved 95% of those situations. In fact, I’ve seen it happen because that is Standard Tech, not hammering the pc like he was a defendant before the Spanish Inquisition.

Now, my coverage of Miscavige’s practice of Reverse Dianetics is well covered in this blog, as well in a segment of the St Pete Times filmed interview.

My point in all this is simply this: The Church of Scientology under Miscavige has created a priesthood of Reverse Dianeticists. The only way I escaped it was the circumstances of not being junior to it during my own training. It was me and LRH with no vias or interruptions. I had no sup, I had no Qual, the only people assigned to “handle” my training got in the road of it.  I would not allow the apex of DM’s tech hierarchy (Mithoff and Wilhere) to confuse me with their warped interpretations. And today I would not let either of those blokes audit my dog.

Interestingly, the only “Scientology priest” I have run into on the outside also justifies his omniscience on his Class XII status. Eerily, he too possesses a signal inability to sit comfortably in a chair or read an emeter, and has twice been reported to me by pc’s of his for falling asleep in session. He inquired through one of his trainees about my post warning people against fooling around with Ls. I responded that the biggest problem I ran into with botched L’s cases was their having been run on tons of unreading items. This newly minted “Class XII” responded that he had no idea how I could have determined someone was run on unreading items. Need I say more?

Incidentally, the priest Class XII was so offended that I reported that two of his pc’s reported he’d fallen asleep mid session that he viciously attacked me for being a mere read it-drill it-do it Class XII. He told me I haven’t a clue how to handle Ls, since he is the only man in the world outside the Church with a full set of the L’s material. I told him I’d have a discussion with him on the subject once he showed me his carefully guarded holy grail. He came unglued at the suggestion that his priesthood of mystery be shattered.

I think my experience supports that the Joe Howard Paradigm may well be the best way, if not the only way, to break the Reverse Dianetics priesthood of Miscavology. People are all going to have to take a measure of responsibility for their competency with the tech. They are going to have to learn enough about the fundamentals to judge whether the person who solicits them to audit them has the quality of TRs and requisite understanding of the tech to warrant their own time and effort. One is not given that opportunity within the Church incidentally. One ought to have the freedom to exercise that judgment.

If, as Joe suggests, some enterprising souls set up Qual units devoted to training and correcting auditors, it seems they all ought to be independent so that the most effective make it because of their stellar products, and the shoddy substitutes die out because of their lack of results. Such delivery would not be too difficult – because the “secrets” of Class VIII and Class XII are simply the reverse of what I have known Class XII’s to be capable of: to wit, if your TR’s are as natural as the wind and your metering is a accurate as a laser, you have made it. There is nothing you cannot handle.

To allow anyone to attempt to consolidate and monopolize the tech could lead to another Dark Ages like we are attempting to break through today.

I maintain that one gets out of the tech what one puts into it. If one is studying for the purpose of attaining some status or to make lots of money, he or she is going to be a lousy auditor. If one is studying it for the purpose of attaining a higher level of understanding of mankind and its plight, he or she will attain something approaching that. If one is studying it because of a driving purpose to help others as best as one can, he or she will make a great auditor.

Unfortunately, the organized (oxymoron in Miscavology’s case) hierarchy of Scientology has proven unworkable. We can argue for three lifetimes whether it is because of some defect or omission in policy or whether it was an SP who foiled the best laid plans. It is irrelevant in terms of delivering the tech now. A Black (Reverse) Dianeticist has set himself up as Source and those weak enough to continue to tolerate it within management have bought into the program 100%. And believe me, there are nothing but weaklings left in DM’s vicinity.  DM is continuing to alter training patterns and material so as to lose the effectiveness of the technology and in practice reverse its product.

It seems to me that it is incumbent upon those who care about the future of the technology that they do what they can to make it available outside of the control and continued alteration of Miscavige.