I have been in Scientology since 1971. Not long after I became involved, I took a course that changed my life forever. It is called the Primary Rundown and its purpose is to completely handle any difficulties one has with study.
When I finished the course, I wrote a letter to Mr. Hubbard that he published as an Executive Directive. Here is the text of that letter, as he published it and with his comment.
This letter does use some terminology you may not be familiar with. I'll put these definitions at the end of my letter. Refer them over as you need.
Primary Rundown Success Story
The following success story is of great interest to those who are hammering away at the Primary Rundown, and those who wonder what it is, those who flinch and those who are trying to skid through it on pretence, and those who are honestly trying.
L. RON HUBBARD
"Dear Ron,
For what seems like many a year and is but a few months, I've been wondering what I was going to say to you when the time came to sit down and write. I knew the time would come. I didn't know when, but I knew that when it did, it would be a very special occasion for me.
I've been in Scientology a little over a year now, and as the wins began to mount up, many questions passed across my mind. How to thank a man whose discoveries have given me back the love of my family, who made it possible for me to leave behind a fistful of grinding somatics, who threw wide the doors of communication, love, knowledge. As problems dissolved, as lumps and pains evaporated, I wondered, "Is it time for 'the letter'?" Each time, 'til now, the answer was, "Not yet."
About a week or ten days ago, I felt the time coming. Thoughts began to crystallize. Ideas took form. Let me explain what happened, along with some background.
In early June, I started the Student Hat portion of the Primary Rundown. I had completed Method One, Life Repair, Straightwire and the Drug Rundown. I imagined that the course would be time consuming, but inasmuch as I was a writer, (a professional wordsmith, I imagined), I anticipated no difficulty at all.
Wrong.
The seemingly endless lists of words became one big glop of mass. Somewhere along the way I'd heard about the "Wall of Tapes" on the Briefing Course. Well, I coined a term, "The Wall of Words."
To really convey what a shock this was to me, there's a bit more background need-ed.
I was graduated from College Phi Beta Kappa, with Highest Honors in Economics, and in the top 1% in my class. I was awarded fellowships to attend Harvard, Stanford, Columbia and the University of Virginia. I chose Virginia, and my first semester I was one of a handful of people in the Graduate School to make straight A's. To put it mildly, I was a 'bright' student. Of course I never understood why I had those long, terrible periods of 'rotting' when I could barely drag my body to class. And I never understood why, when I sat down to write something, I would feel as if someone had slipped a syringe in my ear to fill my head with molasses. I tried all kind of unusual solutions to this latter changes in diet, working nights, working early mornings, exercise, plenty of sleep (12 hours a night), and so on.
Finally, I got fed up with Graduate School after 2 1/2 years of working on a PH.D in Economics. I left for New York City with my sights set on becoming a writer. Within 6 months I had published my first article in Barron's, a sister publication to the Wall Street Journal. in this article, I published the "inside story" on what was going to happen in Chicago at the Democratic Convention. When the riots and chaos I predicted in fact occurred, the article suddenly received nation-wide publicity, was reprinted in the Congressional Record, and was quoted in a Senate document and reprinted in a book.
Cocky was I? You can believe it.
But there was still this other side to it. The week in which I wrote that article was literally one of the most agonizing weeks of my life. I worked over 100 hours, rewrote the article ten times, and pulled in every somatic and undesirable condition ever experienced by man. Writing was not fun.
So along came the Student Hat. My Method One had been great and had located gobs of misunderstoods and blown them. But it only does what it does, and never came close to clearing up the thousands of 'not understoods' or 'partly-understoods'. I should add, parenthetically, that from the time I left the 8th grade until I started the Comm Course, I used the dictionary less than a dozen times.
So, with this as my intellectual history, I collided with an unresounding 'thunk' into the "Wall of Words." I spent nine hours on the word 'of', a week on 'time'. And synonyms - my God, they drove me crazy. I'd look up a word, and the dictionary would give me a definition and then some synonyms. I knew that there were very few words in the English language with identical meanings, so I set about differentiating synonyms. To do this I required large sheets of paper which I used to make 'flow charts'. I'd write five or six synonyms at the top of the page; then under each, the words in that definition I didn't understand; and under those, more words. Some word chains went 200 or more words. When I'd finally get all the words written down, the mass from each would be sitting on me. The only way I could get through one of these lists was for my supervisor to put me on the cans, and do Method 5 word clearing on me.
The first tape list took two months of night and some weekend study. Then slowly, things began to pick up. The second list took less than a month. Some nights my points would rise to 180, but it seemed that shortly thereafter, I'd run into a nest of not-understoods and my points would plummet to 9 or so.
The third tape took less than three weeks; the fourth a week; then three days, two days. When I hit the seventh tape list, I came flying out the top and essentially was super-literate. I did the seventh tape in a day, and the 8th in a day. My points were four and five hundred per hour.
The rest of the course took six days, six long ones to be sure, but just six. Last night I finished the Primary Rundown and received an incredible round of applause from my classmates at Celebrity Center who, like me, knew what it took to confront the Wall of Words. As I stood there with the warm waves of applause rolling over me, I knew the time had come to write.
I feel that in the area of writing and study, my doingness is restored. It is now quite easy for me to do what I want to do -which is write. No longer do I feel the need to gulp a quart of coffee to get a running start on my work before the blahs envelop me in their sticky goo. At the first sign of a blah now, I get that hunted look and head for the dictionary.
I find it such an incredible win to be able to do this. I've always known my ability was there. And a lot of doingness has been too, but it's always been so uncomfortable just to do. I knew things did not have to be that way - and that kept me going - but at times, I was very discouraged.
As a young child, I had an insatiable lust and love for learning. Probably the first word I learned was 'why'. Yet by the third grade, the love was gone. In its place a compulsion to know. With the completion of the Primary Rundown, that love is back. I feel a big part of me has been restored.
As for the future? Given the incredible velocity of change in Scientology, I really don't know what I'll be doing in more than two or three years from now, at least in terms of specifics. I'm now Freedom Associate Editor. I'll do my tech training to Class IV and then OEC and FEBC. Meantime, I'm finishing two books on Scientology celebrities (you'll hear about them when they're done), and there's a screenplay and novel I've outlined. And, of course, Clear and O.T. In a couple of years, I want to take six months, come to Flag as a paying customer, train up to Class 24 Or whatever's tops by then, and get my case terminatedly handled.
Looking longer run, I know I'm in Scientology for the duration. But as well, I have strong purpose lines in the arts, in education, and in fact have outlined plans for a school to be called the Renaissance School which would have study tech as its foundation and Renaissance men, men who are masters of the arts, ideas and action, as its product.
Rather than just a "Thank you", I'd like to close this letter with a little poem l wrote some months ago. I think it says what I want to say.
THE PHILOSOPHER
It has been said, by poet and sage alike, that within each man burns the fire of ten thousand different suns. "Then tell me why?", pleaded the poet, "Why has man grown dim?" "Yes, tell me why?" sang the minstrel, "Is there so much less of him?" "I know why," uttered the sage. "There is a blotch on the souls of men." "Don't tell me why," said the philosopher. I'll find out."...and he did.
With love and appreciation, Bill Good
Unfamiliar terms may include the following. For any other words, of course refer to a standard, English dictionary.
Student Hat: the term Hat is basically means "the job of." In various industries, an actual hat tells people who does what. A fireman wears one kind of hat; a police officer another kind. So a Student Hat would be what one needs to know to do the job of a student."
Primary Rundown: This was the course I took. It consisted of three parts: 1) Some counselling to locate misunderstood words in previous studies. When you run into the term "Method One," you will know this was one of several different forms of this counselling, also called word clearing. Method 5, mentioned later, is another way of doing it. 2) Looking up every single word that occurs in the Student Hat Course. This was the "wall of words" I refer to and it was about 10,000 words. 3) Again taking the Student Hat Course only now, I took it after having looked up every single word in the course. It was awesome.
Life Repair, Straightwire, Drug Rundown. These are the names of counselling procedures. Life Repair basically fixes what's broke. Straightwire deals with memory and recall. The Drug Rundown repairs the damage done by drugs.
The Briefing Course is a huge course in Scientology. It teaches the core of Scientology counselling procedures. It has over 300 tapes of Mr. Hubbard's lectures on it--hence the term "Wall of Tapes."
The various references to "points" refers to the fact that one measures one's daily progress on a course by keeping track of certain activities by way of a point system.
Celebrity Centre is the name of the Scientology Organization where I did my courses. It is devoted to people prominent in the arts, business, sports, etc.
At the time I wrote this, I was the Associate Editor of Freedom Magainze.
Still more terms: OEC and FEBC refer to the Organization Executive Course and Flag Executive Briefing Course, both courses in Mr. Hubbard's organizational technology.
Both Clear and OT refer to mental states one achieves through the Scientology counselling procedure. I have long since achieved both states.
