I’ve never met anyone who met Hy Levy who didn’t like him. I feel the same way. Hy took the time to write a fairly lengthy account of his decades in the church. He provides a very interesting look at the internal workings of the Flag Service Organization in particular. While longer than most posts, I think it is well worth the read. Welcome Hy! It is great to have you with us.
My name is Hy Levy.
I was staff at FSO for almost 24 years and routed out in June 2009. I have been “under the radar” since then but now I have decided to take a stand, as my silence has helped to support the current DM regime too long.
Here is my story. I hope it doesn’t bore you. It wasn’t boring living it.
I got into Scientology in 1974 when a San Francisco Org Foundation staff member, who was moonlighting where I worked, gave me a contact assist when I injured myself on a piece of old equipment that malfunctioned.
She saw I was in pain and asked if she could do something that might help.
I said “YES!!!ANYTHING!!”. She gave me a contact assist that produced results in seconds that I couldn’t explain with all my knowledge of the physical sciences.
I was a computer programmer at the time and was very MEST oriented (not in terms of accumulated MEST as I had almost none) in my view of life. Everything was explained by the physical sciences. I was raised an orthodox Jew but had stopped practicing years before and had NO belief in anything spiritual. I felt the only answers were in the physical universe where you could see, touch, feel or measure them quantitatively. Nothing else had any meaning or value.
The results of the contact assist changed all that. It was something I couldn’t explain with everything I knew. My finger had been caught in the gear chain of a machine and was cut and bleeding. I was in extreme pain. Within 30 seconds the bleeding stopped and the pain was gone. What the hell was that?? It shattered my stable data about life and explaining all things in a material sense.
This staff member asked if I had ever heard of Scientology. I hadn’t so she didn’t have to handle any antagonism or anything. I asked, almost as if I was repeating a patter in a drill, “Where can I find out more about this?”. She directed me to the local org (SFO). I took a personality test, had it evaluated and that was it.
The Div 6 reg tried to sell me the comm course, which was $ 25 at the time. Being fully materialistically oriented, I “knew” that you couldn’t get anything of any value for $ 25. So I said “What else you got?”. The reg told me about HQS. I asked how much and was told $ 100. I was making about $ 125 a week at the time (before taxes) so to me this was significant money. I said “I’ll take it!”.
I started course. The staff member who gave me the touch assist to begin with was the Foundation Div 6 Word Clearer. My first night on course, after a short amount of time studying, she pulled me over for word clearing. This care along with the word clearing tech was amazing.
I continued studying and a day or so later the sup asked me if would be willing to be a pc for another student. I was amazed at my good fortune. I considered it an incredible gift that somehow I was being given by whatever good luck the Gods had granted me. I of course said “YES!!”. (Much later on I realized the student needed a pc that was not in the middle of any other auditing to do his practical on.)
At that time HQS required that you deliver a full battery of objectives to another student. We were running a process that required the pc to alternately touch an object in the room and then a body part, over and over. My student auditor had me touch my arm and then a table, my arm again then the table again. Something “strange” started to happen and I must have had an odd look on my face as the auditor asked “What’s happening?”. I really was puzzled myself as to what was happening. I could only describe it in a way that didn’t even make sense to me at first. I told him, “Well, you see, I touch the table and I know how far away the table is because I know how long my arm is. But the table is somehow much further away. But I know it isn’t because I can reach it with my arm.” I babbled on about this for a moment or two and then I went into shock. “I” was on the ceiling looking down at the table. I had never heard of the concept of exteriorization and as I explained earlier I was completely oriented to MEST explanations for things. It took me a moment to realize that something I could not explain in physical terms was happening. I was exterior. With perception. I then thought back to a time period in my childhood where this had happened but no one knew what I was experiencing and I was scared because everything looked so far away. At that time I ran around the house almost crying, looking at familiar things but that were now not where they should have been relative to where “I” was. My Mother simply calmed me down by whatever means Mothers have for doing these things. It worked and the problem went away. It was that day in that auditing session when I realized what had occurred. I had gone exterior with perception.
Well this was a whole new ball game!
I continued on course and within 2 weeks of my finding out about Scientology, a Sea Org recruiter came to my local org. I spoke with her at length. She explained to me what the Sea Org was and the commitment involved. This didn’t bother me. She explained about being acknowledged and validated for work when it was well done. This was my “go button”. I felt I could be happy sweeping floors as long as I was validated when I did a good job (and I still feel this way to this day).
I signed up and quit my job and drove from San Francisco to LA to join the Sea Org. I will fast forward a bit here. I got married in the Sea Org. My wife and I were not happy with the way things turned out to be (I had been in just under 2 years) and we devised a plan to blow and did so. This may have been due to o/w’s but I also had had some bad experiences with ethics conditions being misapplied and how things were in general. For whatever reason we left.
About 4 years later my wife and I separated and divorced. Up to that time we were paying on our freeloader debts what we could. We didn’t have much money but each week we sent a payment of $ 10 each towards our debts. One day we saw we had made over 100 payments each, still had a long way to go to pay our debts (like another $3000 for myself alone) and then looked at what it would take to pay for the Bridge once we were done with the freeloader bill. We went into overwhelm at the thought and gave up and stopped making payments. Some time after that we separated and divorced for reasons having nothing to do with Scientology).
I was totally disconnected from the Church and making a decent living by then. I was contacted by an FSM who said there was a program being run that reduced an ex-SO members debt based on years of service. This really indicated to me and once again my “go button” of being validated and acknowledged for work well done was pushed. My debt was still about $3000. This program reduced it to about $2000. I immediately went to the New York Org (I was living in Brooklyn at the time), paid my debt in full, took the amnesty that existed at the time (this was around 1980), and then paid for my Bridge up to Clear as well.
We will fast forward again here. I made it to Dianetic Clear, went to ASHO and AOLA to do my OT Preps, Eligibility, OT I-V (doing 3 L’s along the way) and then to Flag for OT VI and VII. Along the way I had miracle wins regarding blowing a full blown case of arthritis (at age 28 this was pretty severe and affected every joint in my body) as well as a very painful infection that had recurred about every 6 months for about 8 years (and for which doctors said there was no lasting cure). So I was definitely getting gains from my auditing.
While I was at Flag I was once again recruited to join the Sea Org at FSO (it was known that I had blown the S.O. before but somehow we got around this). I had other out-quals for FSO staff so had to petition the GO for OK to join staff (this was 1985). This was accepted. I completed OT VI and went home with my materials to start auditing on OT VII while doing my “Project Prepare” to come back to FSO as staff.
When I got home, having been at Flag for about 6 months, I had no money, no job and had to move fast to just be able to survive. I exactly applied the conditions (a subject I had no problem with at that time but which later became a nightmare with the various misapplications that occurred). Within 3 weeks I got a job working for a guy who, last time I had seen him, hated my guts. For some reason he was able to put this aside and hired me. This was a short term contract as a computer programmer which at least paid the bills. This contract was for a possible project that never really got off the ground and lasted only a month.
By that time, my former client that I had before I went to Flag, and who had said that they couldn’t re-hire me when I came back due to budget cuts, etc., contacted me. They were in trouble on a large project and told me to “name my price”. Wow, I thought, this OT VII stuff really works (along with proper application of conditions and the little admin and finance policies I knew and used).
Meanwhile I began waffling about activating my S.O. Contract. I was then making about $ 15,000 a month (in 1985 that was like a King’s ransom), finally decided to re-join the S.O. at FSO and did so in November 1985.
I was FSO staff until I routed out on June 25, 2009.
I have detailed some of my experiences leading up to this to make it clear that I was a winning Scientologist who had gotten many benefits from the application of Scientology to my life.
My first post was as a D of P in the NOTS HGC. As I had been in computers for many years, I had a love for all things technical. I was only a level 0 auditor and really had no strong aspirations to become an auditor. I had NO CLUE what a D of P actually did, but I learned as fast as I could. I made really stupid mistakes in the beginning, but I had a wonderful C/S that was my junior who crammed me beautifully on each thing I did wrong. I learned a lot from those crams…things that to this day still stand me in good stead.
Being technical (computer-wise) yet having no Scientology tech training to speak of and having to run a number of NOTS auditors, interview PC’s, etc. etc. I decided that the only way to really know what was going on and what I should be doing was to read the NOTS pack. That’s right. A Level 0 auditor studying NOTS. As I was on OT VII, access to these materials was not an issue (especially as I was the D of P). I burned the midnight oil, studying late at night and during meal breaks. I found the material fascinating. It also made me better able to understand difficulties my auditors might be having and also to interview my PC’s better (I had an interviewer who worked under me, but I did the more searching, “case cracking” type interviews myself).
All sounds great right? So where did things go wrong? There were many incidents along the way and I will recount them as I recall them, not necessarily in the order in which they happened.
I took pride in my post. My stats were not always the best, but I did everything possible to make my PC’s win and to handle things when they weren’t. One of my auditors commented to me once that I was the best “interview D of P” he had ever seen. Not everyone agreed with my approach to the post. I felt, as D of P, my main function, as LRH laid out, was to be a “traffic cop”. To me that meant doing anything to keep the results going the way they should. Understanding my auditors and keeping them winning. Taking care of my PC’s and handling them well. Some of my seniors, looking at my stats of Well Done auditing hours, felt I should be tougher on my auditors. I was supposed to yell at them, run them hard, etc. I really couldn’t bring myself to do that on a regular basis, although I did fall prey to that more than I care to remember. I am not proud of that part of my history.
To illustrate the divergent views I held relative to my seniors about how to do my post, I will relate one incident. This was in the late 80’s or maybe even 1990. I had found an old pack of hand typed transcripts of talks given by LRH. One I vividly recall was titled “LRH Talk to SNR C/S 1970”. Here, among other things, LRH described a hat of the D of P in interviewing PC’s to get to the bottom of any difficulties they were having in their auditing. It required use of the meter, following up on reads and pulling strings so the C/S could unravel where things had gone wrong. I loved this lecture. One day, I had a PC who was in major case trouble. I went over with the C/S what they wanted to know, was given a set of questions from the C/S and the latitude to use the references I knew to get the product. It was a long interview. About 2 hours if memory serves me. By the end of the interview the PC was very relieved and I felt I had gotten the product the C/S wanted. The interview’s purpose was not to crack the case, but to find out what no one could figure out as to what was going on with the case. I got that product, as later confirmed by the C/S and how well their auditing went after that.
When I came out of the interview, a senior org exec was waiting for me, fuming that I had been in an interview that long. She called it “squirrel” and was incensed that I had left the HGC “unmanned” for so long a time. She demanded to know what reference I was applying. In fact, she was really saying there was no reference and that I was a “squirrel”. When I tried to give her the exact reference that was from LRH that covered what I did, she wouldn’t hear of it and ripped my face off.
This, along with other incidents, was what caused me to feel I didn’t belong there any longer.
Then there was the time, in about 1991 I think, when the org was under heavy ethics. It was announced that each day at lunch muster an individual would be sent to the RPF. This was insane and reminiscent of some kind of NAZI purge. Each day we would go to muster, knowing someone, anyone, it could even be you, would find out they were being sent to the RPF. This was for anything that ran the gamut of the ethics book codes from errors, on up. After seeing the kinds of insignificant reasons that a person was sent, each person then went into terror knowing any mistake they made could be a reason for being sent to the RPF. And you wouldn’t know about it or have a clue until it was announced to the whole crew at muster that day. The person was then carted off by security then and there to the RPF. You can imagine what the atmosphere was like.
Even with all this evidence that things were not as they should be in a Scientology org, I, as did most other staff members, just buckled down and resolved to do their jobs so perfectly that they could not be the subject of such handling.
In 1993, while I was still a D of P, we had just moved into a newly renovated space in the Sand Castle. I was told I was getting a new auditor, who was formerly staff at Int, and that I had “better have a line up for him” (of pc’s to audit). In those days the most unconscionable overt a D of P could commit was to have an idle auditor who didn’t have a PC. PC volume was a bit light at the time so I couldn’t take any existing pc’s from any other auditor’s line up. I was committed to the fact that I would solve this problem so that everyone would be happy with me. As I was told this in the morning, with the implications that the auditor could arrive any minute, I began assigning new pc’s as they arrived to his line up. I had gotten I think 3 real pc’s arrived, through their interviews, folders programmed and ready to go. Still the auditor had not shown up. At this time there was also a new rule that any pc who did not go in session that day, FOR ANY REASON, had to be reported to DM who was there at the base with a whole INT mission.
As the day wore on and the auditor did not show up (I had no control over this as he was a “gift” from DM to FSO), the PC’s I had assigned started complaining about not having gone in session. With the rule that all pc’s had to go in session or else, I began to get worried.
Finally Marc Ingber, who I believe was CO CMO INT at that time was in my HGC and was asking for the number of PC’s who had not gone in session. I was a bit self-destructive at this point, and rather than not include some pc’s in the count that maybe I could have validly excluded, I counted every pc who had not gone in session, and I mean EVERY PC. I think the number was something like 22. Even 1 PC would have been cause for a dressing down, but 22?? So, of course he looked at the scheduling board and saw that I had a line up for this new auditor with 3 pc’s on his line up, none of whom had gone in session. He ripped my face off for assigning pc’s to this auditor when he “hasn’t even routed onto lines as FSO staff” (a new concept I had never heard of in my almost 8 years at FSO) and wasn’t even my staff yet. In my feeble defense I said something like “It wasn’t my intention to keep those pc’s from going in session”. His response was “I’m not here to discuss your case!!!” (I guess this was alluding to some kind of FPRD tech to do with intentions, not what I was at all trying to communicate). This little interaction only served to push the wedge in deeper to separate my views from those of my seniors and INT management. Damned if you do and damned if you don’t was a phrase that came to mind.
Then there was the time when Big League Sales’s (a book recommended by LRH for reg training and was on all Pro Reg Course checksheets) use of how to handle “bird dogs” got me in trouble.
A “bird dog” is anyone who gives a sales person a lead on a prospect who later buys something. It was a tool, according to BLS, that was vital to a sales person’s production. It even spelled out that they were to be given monetary rewards whenever someone they “bird dogged” to a sales person (reg) paid for something.
This was a system that was “in” at FSO and sanctioned all up and down the line. The reges each week would keep track of these “bird dogs”, a specific percentage was used for the commission amount they were paid, a PO was submitted with the specifics of the cycles involved and the money was paid to the reg who then presented it to the “bird dog”. All above board and represented for exactly what it was. As a D of P, my pc’s needed to re-sign. It was something that was survival for my HGC as I then had more pc’s to audit and the auditor’s were not then idle as a result. I got very good at this. I didn’t do it for the commissions, nor did I even keep track or expect it. It was kind of forced on me by the reges. I admit I didn’t object to it and enjoyed the bit of extra money it gave me. I am merely trying to state that I did not instigate it nor did I even go after it. It was just the system that was used.
One day, an admin person from the reg office came to ask me, regarding a list of pc’s who paid the prior week, which ones I was responsible for so they could calculate the commissions. When the person was in the HGC, Bitty Miscavige (not sure of her post at the time, but somewhere high up in CMO INT) was there also and she asked her what she was doing there. She explained very matter-of-factly why she was there. Bitty turned to me and said in a VERY angry tone of voice “If I get one more report about you I will personally route you to the RPF!!!!” Up to that time I was not in any ethics trouble so this was a bit of a “skipped gradient” regarding ethics. I was terrified at the time.
At this time there was also a heavy ethics atmosphere at the base (again this was around ’91 – ’93 time period) and each night the entire crew went to a briefing where COB detailed the items that were discovered that day about out-ethics on the base. That night the subject was me. I was named as if I was doing something illegal, out-ethics and off-policy and as if it was something I was hiding that had now been exposed. It was made into such a crime that the gasps from the rest of the crew were loudly audible at the mention of the heinous out-ethics I was involved in. It was as if I was the only person doing this and as if it was all very hush-hush and a secret (all reges did this with other staff and especially D of P’s). At the end DM gave an “amnesty” to cover anyone else who might have been involved in this. This was the end of the “bird dog system”, a system prominently displayed in BLS, the book LRH chose to make the “bible” on how to successfully reg (ref LRH ED 236 INT where he specifies that the why for low GI was the lack of use of the tech in this book).
The next day, DM came to my HGC. He purposely bumped into me, in a “playful” but meaning sort of way, and said “It’s not good to have withholds from me.” In my feeble effort to defend myself I said “Sir, it wasn’t a withhold and was known about by everybody.” His response was “I (emphasized) didn’t know about it!”. That ended any attempt I might make to clear up my name on that score.
Around November 1993 I was told by HCO that a new reg was needed in Dept 6 and that I had been chosen. My previous meager experience as a reg consisted of a failed Flag World Tour stint in 1987 which ended with me doing mest work on the decks just to destimulate from it (while I make no excuses for my failure on this post, there were many reasons for it and all of them could be covered under off-policy and out-tech situations that existed with regard to the tour at the time).
Understandably, because of my last experience as a reg, I wanted no part of this posting. In the end I finally acquiesced and moved to that post. Surprisingly, to me anyway, I did quite well as a reg and at one point during the time from 1993 to 2009 when I routed out, I was even the number 2 reg for the year.
Life as a reg was the best and the worst depending on how the stats were. To his credit, when Harvey Jacques took over as Dir Reg (previously working doing big book deals for Bridge), he did a lot to establish the area. He had very little help but built his own area according to many basic policies (hatting, esto ing, cramming, videoing reges to improve their “reg tech”, etc). He took the department to heights it had never seen before. Many of those years were very pleasant. When the GI was great we were treated like Kings, but when it was down we were treated just as severely the opposite.
Rather than detail all the outpoints one could look at over those years I will fast forward a bit.
I’m not sure what year it actually started, but at one point Int events became a very big deal. They were, however, engramic for the reges. Up until that time I actually enjoyed going to events as a staff member. They were uptone and a time for reviewing all our accomplishments in recent months.
When the change occurred, it could all be summed up under the subject of “quotas”. There was always something to sell, some new release and the quotas given were astronomical to say the least. The usual “no one secures until all quotas are met” became the order of the day. We tried various ways to handle this so it was livable, and one time we even succeeded in making our quota BEFORE the event (always a dream, but realized in actuality almost never). That was a joy, to be able to just watch the event and enjoy the after event festivities knowing all our quotas were met.
The bulk of the time was like “Night of the Living Dead”. Many times, if you were behind quota, you were told to work through the event, selling on the phone to people in other time zones and that you would “see the event later” (which often didn’t happen). In any event, the after event evolutions became more and more gruesome. We would see the people after the event and try to make the quota. When that failed, around midnight or so, we would then get on the phones and call the west coast where it was 3 hours earlier, then Australia, Europe, etc. This went on until we made the quota (which almost never happened as the quotas themselves were unrealistic) or until someone figured out a way to present what we had done as a “highest ever event release” and would get us OK to go home. Usually about 3 am.
Now you would think that would be enough to make a horror movie out of. But there was more. As I mentioned earlier, our only hope to get home at some decent hour was to do “pre-event sales” like starting a day before the event. You had to be very careful as the release was supposed to be a secret until it was announced. Often we would sell the release without telling the public what it was, only that “You will definitely want it!!”. One time an Int exec came to us the afternoon of the event day and said “You are of course not selling any of the release until after the event, right?” with the implication that doing that would be out-ethics. Hell, what other way could we even hope to make anything like the quotas that were set!! So now we were on a “withhold” from Int execs as to what we were doing. It was like some sadistic game where you had your hands tied, tape over your mouth, and you were expected to produce. Like there was absolutely NO reality (like an arcx assessment) about what it took to do these release evolutions.
Well as bad as that was, by the end of the week that the event occurred in, things got back to normal and we could just do our posts again (until the next event).
This all changed when the Basics were released. For me this was the beginning of the end that led to me routing out. The Basics release was the “release event that never ended”. The intensity of this release was about 100 times that of a normal release….and it just kept going. In fact it continued until the day I left (and is probably still going on).
I was a bit of a “black sheep” on this evolution, and this actually got to be well known. The pressure to sell was beyond anything I had seen in my more than 2 decades at the FSO. The quota’s themselves fostered criminality since a staff member HAD to make their quota OR ELSE. So they did anything and everything needed in order to “report” that they had made a sale. Some of the illegal things that occurred during this period were:
Debitting money for books from account without authorization
Repackaging started packages of intensives to make money available for books (a practice that up until this time was considered a gross financial irregularity if a reg ever did this).
“Finding” unused hours in PC folders that could be re recreditted to the account and would be IF they donated a portion toward Basics (this ended up being the scam of all scams which put back on account money that didn’t exist at all and actually cost the org hundreds of thousands of dollars as they were debiting money that wasn’t there for books that then had to be paid to the book account from current income. Shooting themselves in the foot comes to mind as a phrase).
Scams like promising the person that if they buy the many Basics packages being demanded that “someone else will sell them for you and put the money back on your account” (in the instances I got to know about on this, every one of those was an outright lie).
Arranging for one person to loan another person the money for buying several Basics packages just to “bridge” the money until that person got their money and paid them back.
This is a practice forbidden by policy, I believe HCO PL “Handling of Refunds and Bounced Checks” Finance series 3-1R, I think. Any reg caught doing this in the past was crucified literally for doing so. I witnessed this being done openly by non-reg personnel (as all staff were regging for the Basics now, almost full time). The worst one I remember was when an MAA got another new FSO staff member who had money to loan someone they didn’t know, something like $ 17,000 (maybe it was even more) for Basics, to be repaid by a specified time. That time came and went and no money was forthcoming. This was finally resolved when a scathing report was written to the RTC MAA and then she did get her money back.
For me there were many aspects to this evolution that disgusted me. It is hard to say what was the worst. Definitely near the top of the list was the “dog eat dog” attitude that staff then had between each other. It was like a constant war going on. Fighting over public to reg for Basics, doing underhanded things (like the D of P asking to see the person for a “D of P Interview” which was actually a Basics reg cycle).
The staff descended on the public almost like a pack of wolves when they arrived at the Base. Many times they took them off the official arrival line onto service and sequestered them in another location until they got the basics they wanted.
The public I regged on a regular basis must have sensed that I was not part of that scene (probably because I was not hounding them constantly for Basics but just did my post) and they sometimes came to me about their mishandlings and I did what could to set things right for them when they did.
At one point due to all these shenanigans, I estimated I was spending between 30 and 50% of my time simply handling accounts that were screwed up due to unauthorized Basics debits. Not to mention trying to reg the public for their service while they were already upset about their account. (Most of the time the account problems weren’t even known about until they were in my office, doing a normal reg interview for services and I would then go to look at the account. That would often be the first time anyone knew there was a problem. Guess how hard that made my job!)
Now, add to all this the major push on IAS, Ideal Orgs, Superpower, etc and boy was my life as a reg becoming miserable. I really managed to stay away from all this stuff (not to say that I didn’t reg for IAS, which I did as I did have a quota on that as well), so when I tried to reg someone for service (the real and only reason regging existed to begin with) I was met with “Gee, I’d love to buy that package but I just donated $ XX,000 to (IAS, Basics, Superpower, Ideal Orgs)”. I also ran into the fact that public who protested making those donations as they had to pay for their Bridge and couldn’t do both were basically told that buying their Bridge was a first dynamic activity and it was implied they were out-ethics to do so. Huh? The whole reason the org was there was to deliver training and processing, so paying for it was out-ethics? Did somebody lose sight of the purpose of Scientology?? This is nuts!! Then no one should ever do the Bridge based on that.
Very early on in this Basics evolution (around say Sept/Oct 2007), my junior, who really hated the long hours, started doing (unbeknownst to anyone) off-policy things to “make the quota” so we could go home on time. Well, I have to admit, at first I was very happy about this as I could just do my post while she handled the Basics quotas.
I then noticed some outpoints in some of the things she was doing and tried bringing this up to my seniors. They “looked into it” and said they all looked fine. At this point I only noted some minor things that looked a bit off, I still had no idea of the kind of things they later discovered.
It was discovered that she, in collusion with Treasury, had agreed to repackage a public’s intensives and debit Basics from them. When the public later came to Flag and discovered this, she was livid. The account did get fixed, but upon investigation it was found my junior had done this type of thing to the tune of about $80,000. She was, correctly in my opinion, sent to the RPF.
Due to the fact that I now had no junior, I was given an OK to not have a Basics quota as I couldn’t do all of my normal post production plus a Basics quota without even having an assistant (all other reges had an assistant and some had 2 as this was found to increase the income tremendously by this simple little action of having an assistant).
So, I continued to do my post. Other staff started to notice that I “didn’t do Basics” and I began to be ostracized a bit. Many staff on key posts were too busy making their Basics quota to do their own normal post. This included posts like D of P, MAA, Cashier. This made my job harder as trying to re-sign HGC pc’s, which was something a Dept 6 reg does as his primary income source, became very difficult as the D of P was not available because he was in a “Basics interview” (for sometimes hours at a time) or “Basics are flapping” so he couldn’t talk, etc. Pretty crazy that the normal org functions suffered as a result of this evolution.
In addition, as I didn’t have mutual out ruds with other staff and their illegal and criminal handling of Basics (not all staff were this way, but those doing a high volume of Basics sales were quite often involved in financial irregularites), I became a whistle blower of sorts and therefore very unpopular.
The area I became most unpopular in was the MAA office. I uncovered and wrote reports on all the financial irregularities that came across my plate. Realize also that I wasn’t going around looking for this stuff, this was just what I tripped over in doing my normal post. It included the already mentioned debiting of accounts without authorization, repackaging intensive/training packages to use money for books, taking and invoicing checks that were KNOWN to not be covered by funds (mostly written under duress to do so even though they didn’t have the money), threatening off-policy ethics actions if they didn’t donate and some stuff that defied my imagination like having a person from Italy write a “counter check” on a Bank of America account in Euro currency with no account number!!
I even received a veiled threat from a senior MAA when I wrote a KR on one of his juniors. I felt like I was an FBI plant in a mafia operation and I was about to have my cover blown. It was pretty scary actually.
Just for the record, so you don’t hear about it elsewhere, early on during this evolution, in November 2007, I did something really stupid. I blew. Where did I go? Crazy, but I went to Las Vegas. Why? Also crazy. I had some money and thought maybe I could run it up into a more sizeable amount at the tables. Yes it was nuts. I admit that. I was nuts by then in a sense. I don’t even recall the specific incident that set me off to do that. How I left the base without being seen was another trick. In the midst of this insane act, I also felt bad about leaving my post in the middle of a week. Being on GI lines, you “confirm” money once the public agrees to pay even if the logistics take another day or 2. So, since I blew on Saturday morning, I had money confirmed that needed to be gotten in. I also had reg cycles in progress that should be followed up on. So, while on the plane, I wrote all this up in great detail. If I recall it was something like 9 pages of details. When I got to Las Vegas and found a hotel, I asked them to fax it to Flag at midnight their time and asked for the fax to not show the number it had come from.
Well I guess they didn’t or couldn’t do that and that is how they found me. The next morning I got up very early and went out. When I got back mid morning, 2 FSO staff were waiting for me at the hotel. They were doing the “blow drill”. They also made it clear to me that they don’t do this for everybody and implied I should be honored that they were sent to get me. I got that the order came from RTC. After many hours of talking I agreed to return to “route out properly” and was told it would take about a week.
It was 19 months later when I finished my routing form and got final OK to go. During that time I did something else very strange. Usually, when someone is on a “Leaving Staff Routing Form” they do MEST work while getting their sec check, ethics handlings, etc. My senior at the time asked me to stay on post until they could get a replacement for me. At the time I was regging $ 200,000 (on a bad week) to $ 300,000 or even $ 350,000 on a good week, so this was a loss of income no one wanted to have to deal with. I had no problem with this as I actually liked my post and felt I helped my public in many ways other reges couldn’t or didn’t due to my background and experience as a D of P. It was a bit odd though, as only a few staff knew my real situation, so I was on a withhold from other staff as to my current scene.
So, I worked as a reg while doing my leaving sec check, the attempt to do the TRD on me (which failed miserably as they wanted me to run as enemy lines those things I had written in KR’s and when I pointed that out they dropped it) and other actions which went nowhere. My original auditor, I found out much later, was going through his own ethics situation at the time, so even though we had gotten onto the end ruds, we ended up doing a whole other sec check since his auditing was suspect.
There finally was a replacement gotten for me but it took some time before he got up to any decent level of production. As well, I took this time period to do several hat write-ups that were specific to how the lines on that post ran at the Flag AO where I worked. Finally, when I completed all that, I told my MAA that at the end of the following week I would no longer be on post but would do MEST work only. At the end of that week I routed myself to security and began doing MEST work at the Hacienda.
I actually look back on that period as a pleasant experience. The MEST work itself was therapeutic, but I also didn’t have the insanity of the quotas, pressure, yelling and screaming that I had as a daily regimen while on post as a reg. I voluntarily worked harder than any security guard could have ordered me to and I got to be well liked at the Hacienda as I did all the exterior cleaning of the entire property (scrubbing, sweeping, carting debris, etc) as well as many of the interior common spaces (fitness center, crew lounges, canteen, etc). I even amazed the security guards by cleaning areas that had not been cleaned in years and did it so well some of them thought I had repainted these areas!!
Well, I got through all my sec checking and ethics handling and finally got the OK to go and routed out via security.
As a comment, my MAA kept trying to get me to do my conditions or at least start on them. I had a BIG problem with that. First, I didn’t think I needed to do them. I had made 100’s of millions of dollars (not an exaggeration) for the FSO as a reg from Nov 1993 to about April 2009. Why would I need to do conditions? How many other people on the planet could say that? A few. Strange but that was how I felt. The second reason that I told the MAA was, how could I come out of Treason without deciding to stay? Didn’t make sense that I could come out of “Treason” and still be leaving. My thought process sort of locked up on that one.
In any case I finally did route out.
I am rebuilding my life now and it is going very well. I felt PTS to the FSO before I decided to leave and now I feel freer than I have in 25 years. I had earlier been in computers before joining the S.O. in 1985. I tried other things, made a bit of money but nothing really viable. I then decided to take a stab at getting back into that industry. Well, in the past 25 years in computers, EVERYTHING changed. The internet was a fledgling idea back in 1985 and not widely used. Today it IS how computer networking is done. Well, I was self taught to begin with in 1970 when I started, so I figured I could do it again. In March of this year I started studying in earnest. I then got a small job and then another etc. Now I am making a decent living and I am well respected by my clients. In fact I use an LRH datum having to do with the re-sign line in the HGC to measure my quality of delivery. LRH basically says if a PC refuses to re-sign there is out-tech on the case and it is Qual’s job to discover what it is and correct it. There is even a whole line devoted to just this one fact.
Well in what I am doing now I feel this applies. If I don’t get repeat business from my clients then I consider that I have failed to give them a quality product that they are happy with. So far I’m batting a thousand as all of my clients have re-signed for more and/or have originated glowing referrals to friends of theirs which resulted in more work for me. I accomplish this by applying another simple datum from LRH from HCO PL “Conditions of Exchange”. I apply “exchange in abundance” in all my dealings with my clients and that is something they have never seen before and it is received very well.
I am happy to be counted as an Independent Scientologist and consider I am in the ranks of many I respect, including, but not limited to, Marty and Mike.
I also want to thank Marty for his help in bringing me to this point. I had concerns and he took the time to really help me through them so I could openly announce where I stand.
I made a couple of posts earlier under the name “John Gault” as that was a character of author Ayn Rand that symbolized to me the kind of person who does not tolerate suppression of any kind.
I’m glad to be out in the open and possibly some of you know me. Now we can openly be in touch.
Hy Levy
Independent Scientologist
Moving On Up a Little Higher 