Introduction by Haydn James
My wife Lucy and I turned over the running of Birmingham Org and returned to Scientology management in Los Angeles in 2005. But not a year had passed when we were shocked to hear that, back in Birmingham, Peter White had been declared an SP. Feelings of “are you kidding me?” and outrage accompanied our horror.
You see, in addition to being a dear friend, Peter had been a very valuable staff member in Birmingham, a top class Grad V auditor, very smooth with natural TRs and great beingness. Having graduated from Birmingham University as an extremely gifted musician, Peter mastered auditing with the same ease with which he played a variety of instruments and it spoke volumes that he put his promising music career on hold to help us all at the org.
And it was only recently (2004) that Peter had been dubbed the “James Bond of Scientology UK” because of his classy British appearance, including black tie & tuxedo, and eloquent acceptance speech, all beamed around the globe as part of the International Auditor’s Day event, at which he was presented with the Class V Org International Auditor of the Year award. And boy had he earned it, auditing well in excess of 2000 well done auditing hours in the previous 12 months. More than forty hours in the chair, week in week out.
After he was declared Peter seemed to disappear, until recently, when in the spirit of reconnecting with friends and relatives I managed to track him down and reached him while he was in Paris where he was conducting the musical Les Miserables.
His account makes fascinating and chilling reading on how Miscavige’s squirrel tech has messed with Scientology’s orgs and auditors.
Shaken But Not Stirred
Hello Independents,
Having been out of Scientology for nearly as long as I was in it, a short but mostly sweet 5 years, it had felt like a disappointingly closed chapter to me for quite a while. I would occasionally look on the internet to try and find out how things were going, but generally just came across anti-Scientology material, which I had little interest in reading so stopped looking.
So what a relief it was to hear from Haydn out of the blue and be introduced to the world of the independents, where the true tech can be celebrated AND the failings of the current management of the church can be critiqued in the same breath. How refreshing!
I was on staff for most of my time in Scientology, training as or posted as an auditor. There is much I would like to write about but what perhaps is most pertinent and hopefully useful to others is to comment on my own experience of how DM’s squirrel definition of an FN messed things up for auditors and pcs and how, as a result of this, less than a year after being awarded International Class V Auditor of the Year, I found myself a declared SP.
And let me just say right from the start that Dan Koon’s article about DM’s illegal alteration of the definition of an FN was such a relief for me to read because I had lost count of the number of times I was made to word clear that squirrel definition, all methods over and over until my brain creaked!
We had some Qual terminals back in Birmingham that pushed that squirrel definition but then our Class VI Snr C/S came back from training at Flag and there was a real ‘crackdown on FNs” which took the enforcement of the squirrel definition to a whole new level.
From that point on auditing became so un-enjoyable and difficult for both auditor and PCs. Having to watch for and count the illegal number of swings, I found myself overrunning PCs more often than not. And then I’d have to waste the PCs auditing time by engaging in countless rehabs of bypassed FNs and EPs which produced a clumsy kind of stop-start session that seemed to bypass almost as much charge as it handled.
And taking the PC to the examiner at the end of the session became a nerve-wracking experience because I knew that the illegal definition of an FN was being policed there too so if that needle didn’t swing the proscribed number of times, or the PC didn’t FN because they were too concerned about how the examiner stared at the meter, both auditor and PC would be plunged into frightening rounds of unnecessary correction and repair.
At the same time I noticed more overrun happening in my own auditing too, which had never grinded before.
When push finally came to shove I found myself in an untenable position, the same position the squirrel definition of an FN puts every auditor. You can only do one of two things. EITHER: sit there staring at the meter, waiting for it to ‘fully F/N’, comm.-lagging, thus breaking the auditing comm. cycle and thereby throwing the pc out of session (and of course also potentially overrunning the process). OR: call the F/N you know exists by every indication other than the squirrel definition but risk suffering the resultant heavy ethics.
Caught between a rock and a hard place, I decided to act on behalf on my PCs. I went ahead and resolved the unsolvable problem by calling FNs according to common sense. What we now know to be the true LRH definition. But back then, as the weeks passed, instinctively using the real definition of an FN, the pressure on me became intolerable.
Unable to resolve this problem in the long term I decided to leave staff. Auditing others now seemed like hard work, getting audited seemed like hard work, expanding the org now seemed to be very hard work (which is another story); and that just didn’t match with the ‘huge expansion’ that we were being told about by DM in the briefings and events. Of course I felt it must be me, I just wasn’t up to it and that I was better off going and being the musician I’d always wanted to be. But now I know differently.
I didn’t want to leave Scientology at all, but of course my wanting to leave staff was met with ferocity because the hierarchy saw it simply as ‘counter intention to the Golden Age of Tech’ and a ‘manifestation of my overts’. Under extreme pressure I dutifully wrote tons of O/Ws, many about falsely calling FNs, which of course ACTUALLY WERE FNs.
I find it fascinating that if I had changed my mind about leaving staff I would have been dealt with “leniently” and welcomed back into the fold with open arms, but because I insisted on leaving my O/Ws were used as evidence of ‘gross out-tech’ and that I had made ‘no ethics change over a long period’ and so I was declared a suppressive person. And I also find it fascinating that the chairman of my committee of evidence wasn’t even trained per Miscavige’s own dictates – he wasn’t “Golden Age of Tech” — but they didn’t let that stop them using me as an example to anyone else that didn’t play ball with DM and anyone else that wanted to leave staff.
And I have had no contact with the org or my friends there since, not until Haydn found me, recently.
I am now flourishing as a conductor, musician and composer, but it does not compare to my achievements as an auditor and it saddens me that DM has corrupted not only the administrative lines of Scientology but auditing tech itself, which makes him directly responsible for the fact I am not auditing and that other auditors and pcs are getting messed up, the world over.
Peter White (007)
Moving On Up a Little Higher 