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The following first appeared in the private email list IVy-subscribers,
which is available to all those who subscribe to the
printed magazine, International Viewpoints.
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Can a leopard change its spots? (Parts 1-3)
by Phil Spickler

Part 1
22 Aug 99

       Well, I've never been one to say anything is impossible, and although
most folks would aver that a leopard can't change its spots, and although no
one in recorded history has ever seen a single case of a leopard changing its
spots, I remain self-content with the idea that it's possible, but highly
unlikely -- perhaps improbable, to say the least.

       Now in the past few weeks or so, there have been a few comments from
here and abroad, possibly based upon a couple of my not-so-subtle innuendos,
that the same possibilities I might extend to a leopard I would not, in spite
of all my legendary forgiveness, compassion, and understanding, be willing to
extend at this late date in our lives to an English chap with a long history
in and around Scientology, namely, Herbie Parkhouse.

       So I got to thinking about leopards and Herbie, and wondering why I
wouldn't hold a leopard to its spots, but hadn't ever established any means
to determine (metaphorically speaking) if Herbie had managed somehow to
change his spots.  What follows might be considered a comic history, and
should, given the passage of time, be seen as an effort to abstract the humor
out of certain experiences that will soon follow.

      It was a very pleasant spring and summer in Washington, D.C. in 1958,
as preparations were being made for the Freedom Congress and the kinds of
Clears that were being made using Help, Step 6 and Connectedness as the heart
and soul of the procedure.  Anyhow,  prior to the Congress, there appeared at
the Washington establishment a lovely, vibrant, blonde, blue-eyed lady from
South Africa who bore the title Allison Parkhouse.  And she had put to the
test Ron's idea that you could live your way to Clear if you were truly and
honestly and determinedly willing to put Help first and foremost into all
situations and on all dynamics that you could claw your way into.  Alison
Parkhouse was not only Clear, she survived a most difficult and grueling
checkout by Ron himself to determine if there was the slightest bit of
reactivity to anything that he could throw at her, and by gosh by golly, she
was a Clear if there ever was one.

       Meantime, when Congress time rolled around, one of the happy arrivals
from South Africa was Allison's husband Jack Parkhouse, who was top gun in
the South African Org, and thus came my first meeting with the brother of
Herbie Parkhouse.  Jack Parkhouse in those days was very fair to look upon,
an extremely cultured example of England's best productions in the category
of gentleman-making, with an air of ARC that could be felt in quite a vast
space around him, and a natural communication cycle that would be the envy of
anyone laying claim to such an ability.  And it was from these experiences
that I came to assume, nay believe, that anyone bearing the crest of the
House of Parkhouse would be much the same and that we would find ourselves to
be kindred spirits on the spot.  Which is my way of saying, we would not
behave as though we had a long time track as enemies, which we were glad to
continue in this lifetime as part of some unstated GPM that we had been on
opposing sides of for at least several millennia.

      The scene shifts now to June, 1963, at St. Hill, England.  I had just
arrived to undertake the Briefing Course, and was so blown out (Ascension
Experience, if you will) from some extremely successful goal-finding in Los
Angeles that I felt as though I could have made the transpolar flight from LA
to London without needing an airplane.

        I had imagined from my results that what must be going on in England
at St. Hill would be like heaven to behold, in which Ron and many OTs would
have achieved states of OT-hood that would be at the peak of our wildest
hopes, and that I would enter this great brother- and sisterhood and six or
seven weeks later come out of this as not only as great an auditor as I could
ever aspire to be, but "stably exterior with a grand succession of
perceptions and abilities at my hand."

      (I can tell, looking somewhat into the future as this is being written,
that in order to save the life of my faithful transcriber and not too heavily
bend the ear of any listener, that after a little more this will be called
"Part 1" of two or perhaps three parts, which will all come under the heading
of "Can a leopard change its spots?")

       To complete Part 1, let me say briefly that what greeted my eyes at
St. Hill, England, was, geographically speaking, quite lovely, St. Hill
having been one of the royal residences of the Maharaja of Rajpur, and it
really looked it in its beautiful country setting; and East Grinstead was and
is a lovely little hamlet in Sussex, with at least one tea room that was so
old that a 20th-century person of modest height would have to bend his head
down and watch for low-hung beams to navigate the establishment.

     However, the condition of Ron, Mary Sue, the St. Hill staff, and its
numerous students, or should I say prisoners, was something else to behold.
After two or three years of fooling around with goals and GPM research the
very air around the place was like gelatin, and you needed a spiritual sword,
or a real one, to cut through it.  The atmosphere, in a word, was heavy, as
heavy as I've ever seen, given that so many of the students, staff, and yea
even Ron were so heavily enmeshed in enormous solid case masses for which no
real correction had yet been devised.  Talk about bad indicators!  talk about
people who had been in the "sad effect" for month after month!  talk about
skin tones of gray and green!  talk about sessions with wild explosions of
dramatization and sickness!  talk about people blowing in an effort to save
their lives!  and you have a modest picture of St. Hill in June of 1963.

       You also are touching the moment when one of my greatest shocks
occurred,  when someone pointed out to me in hushed tones a fellow that he
named as one of the main instructors of the Briefing Course, and someone to
watch out for, namely, Herbie Parkhouse.

       I said to this chap, "This is quite impossible -- I know a fellow, an
English fellow that is, big in South African Scientology, who is supposed to
be the brother of this chap.  He not only looks nothing like him -- not the
slightest hint of genetic or family resemblance -- but Jack Parkhouse is a
paragon among all peoples.  This chap looks like a thug to me, and the tone
of his voice and the look in his eye suggest that he is far from any of the
hoped-for ideals that we expect to find among people in high Scientological
positions.  Are you sure there is not some mistake, and this is someone else?"

        But the friend, in hushed tones, continued: "This is no mistake; and
you can expect the first thing they're going to try to do to prepare you for
the course is to break you of any notions that you know anything about the
subject, the tech, and auditing, and that your case state could not possibly
be good."

      My disbelief continued, and I said, "How long have you been here?"
This chap said, "I came for seven weeks, and I have been here a year and two
months."  Having known  this chap in Washington and elsewhere to be a
high-toned successful auditor and instructor, who now looked like a
shambling, somewhat unkempt mess to me, I could feel my anchor points
gradually closing in prior to collapse as a strange feeling rose in the
stomach area and I wondered to myselves, "What in the hell have I gotten
myself into?"

       To be continued --   All the best, Phil

Part 2
23 Aug 99

        "Justice codes in America afford anyone convicted of
         first-degree murder and sentenced to death an appeal
         process that can go all the way to the Supreme Court.
         This procedure can take 8 to 10 years, or even more,
         whilst the accused and convicted is imprisoned on
         what is called "Death Row."  By the time the automatic
         appeal process concludes, the individual in question
         may be a pretty fine and decent person who would never
         dream of doing something that was done 10 years ago.
         But the system is timeless, and if the conviction stands,
         the death penalty is exacted, and perhaps a spiritual
         penalty simultaneously."   --- Anonymous

        The setting is St. Hill Manor in mid-June of 1963.  The days are
lovely, and the twilight lasts easily to 10 or 11 PM; and yet among the
stately oaks and beautiful gardens of St. Hill, things are not so lovely for
the human beings stuck to that location.

       Upon arrival at the Hill, for reasons that you might have been puzzled
by at first, you had to surrender your passport, as though for some reason
you couldn't be trusted to want to complete the wonderful course and the
co-auditing that went with it, whilst enjoying the in-person lectures of L.
Ron hisself.

       Ron at that time did most of his work, or "research," through the late
hours of the night, and was rarely seen abroad until well into the afternoon,
and thus was not privy to the day-to-day abuses that were being promulgated
by his henchpeople.  The training staff, as I remember, consisted of one
Herbie Parkhouse, Fred Hare, Jenny Edmonds, Ann Grieg, and the course was
administered by the not-so-sharp Reg Sharpe.  In addition, there were a few
fairly subdued people from the Z unit who walked around with a dazed grin on
their faces, who had been charged with helping the staff supervise the course.

        The course consisted of four units, W, X, Y and Z; and if you
succeeded in graduating as an HGA Class IV (the highest class at that time),
you were permitted to leave St. Hill and return from whence you came.  There
was a special unit, which I think was called the Goon Squad, where some folks
were forced to spend months doing endless CCHs and overt/withhold-type
processes, which was sort of a precursor of the famous RPF.  These people on
the Goon Squad were people from all over the world who had come to do the
Briefing Course who were deemed to be so poor in their skills that this
special unit was created, mostly to punish them and bring them to their
senses so they could then master the Briefing Course itself.

       There was a steady but thin trickle of people that kept arriving to
take the course, but from mid-June to almost the end of October when I left,
I doubt that five people graduated from the course, even though quite a few
of the people on the course had been on it for a year or more.  You ask, "Why
did they take so long?"  Well, one of the big reasons was that our Ron, who
was marching around as screwed-up as anybody could get in the middle of the
GPM carnival, kept creating and adding new checksheets to the course -- a
practice that some years later was considered to be a suppressive thing to
do.  And so just as folks might be getting ready to graduate from the Z unit,
they'd wake up one day to find there were one or more new checksheets that
must be fully mastered before they could depart.  Pretty tricky, eh what?

        This of course was happening before the existence of the notion of
"out-int" and its effect on someone, or the Int Rundown as a remedy and
relief from such difficulties.  As a result, it wasn't bad enough that very
few people had this GPM thing going well; there were all these people being
held at St. Hill, many from organizations all over the world who had sent
them to St. Hill expecting to get them back again in a few months -- people
whose homes and families and marriages had gone to rack and ruin because they
could not leave St. Hill without Ron's permission.

       Well, anybody reading this out there knows what happens to someone
when they feel trapped, must leave/can't leave, must get out/can't get out
etc. etc. etc. So to say that there were a lot of desperate people with a lot
of out rudiments in the area of int/ext and out lists, with all kinds of
heavyweight stuff being done day in and day out over these out rudiments
would give you a pretty good idea of just how packed-up the individuals and
the group were at that time.  The instructors and their cases were just as
bad off, if not worse, since they had to continue carrying out Ron's
instructions about keeping the poor devils locked in with their noses to the
grindstone.

HERBIE AND PHIL

         As previously mentioned, when I arrived at St. Hill I was Mr.
Floating Tone Arm, and had pretty good confidence regarding my skills as an
auditor, having trained directly under L. Ron Hubbard at a number of courses
when he was actually present on the course and took a personal interest in
what was happening.  In order to disabuse new arrivals of the notion that
they might know anything, the first order of the day was to invalidate their
knowingness as thoroughly as possible, and when they finally broke completely
and admitted that they knew nothing, you could then rebuild them in one image
or another.

       I was escorted into the training room of the Briefing Course, where I
saw an old friend, Bob Ross, sitting in a chair behind a table as the pc, but
no auditor.  I was escorted to the auditor's chair and told to get to work
auditing Bob Ross, just like that.  Having gotten some cockeyed notion from
earlier training that it might be a good idea to establish some communication
with the person in front of me, I proceeded to make this effort, while Bob
kept giving me cautionary looks and shaking his head "No, no, don't do that."
 Well, sure enough, within moments, three of the instructors, led by the
resolute Herbie Parkhouse, descended upon this session, noting that I was
doing something that was considered forbidden at that time in that place, and
each on their clipboard had what was called a pink sheet, and they started
writing up these pink sheets, which I knew nothing about at the time, while
poor Bob Ross groaned with despair at what was happening to my proud and free
soul at that moment.

       The pink slip consisted of something that told you about something
that was wrong with your auditing and what you needed to do, in terms of
study and practice, to correct said malfeasance.  It may have included
writing up 250 or 500 or 1000 words of O/Ws, just to make sure that you
realized what a dastardly person you were.  Needless to say, I found it
somewhat difficult to conduct this session with Bob Ross, and I kept turning
to these loving instructors and politely requesting that they get the hell
out of the space so that I might do something for my suffering pc, mostly to
no avail.

       From that point on, Herbie Parkhouse and myself commenced our own
personal GPM, since watching this worthy in action, not only with myself but
his effect on other sessions and people throughout the Briefing Course, was
so far from any notions of what Scientology and its basics were about that he
and the other instructors appeared to my eye as existing to oppose the finest
possibilities of what could be accomplished with training and auditing and a
safe space.  And they did so with a duplicity that reflected an enjoyment in
having so much power to inflict so much punishment on so many -- sort of the
reverse of Winston Churchill's famous statement about the heroic victory of
the small British Air Force over the giant forces of Germany's Luftwaffe, in
which he said, "Never have so few done (or given) so much for so many."   And
here at St. Hill it was "Never have so few done so much to harm so many."

        One of the wonderful things that made it possible to survive at St.
Hill in those grim days and had just about the greatest case gain possible in
it was the meeting and making friends with so many wonderful people from
around the world.  I shall close this section by adding that I became aware
of numerous factions within the various levels at St. Hill who often, in the
pubs of East Grinstead and elsewhere, seriously considered killing Herbie
Parkhouse to bring an end to his awful behavior.  That's really going some,
but 2 months later I found myself as one of the people that could seriously
consider it as being a good idea to "off" him for the future hope of
Scientology and the world.

     In Part 3, I shall get down to the nitty-gritty of affairs between Herbie
and Phil, and lest this continue too long, I will take you to our last
meeting at the business center of Scientology located in Clearwater, Florida,
called the Flag Land Base, in which Herbie and I, sitting at the swimming
pool, exchanged our last few injections of venom, this being 1979 or 1980,
after which there is a 19-year silence between us, until one day I get an
e-mail from Herbie telling me that he used to be an instructor on the St.
Hill Briefing Course, and wondering if I could help remind him of who I may
have been at that time.  WOW!

       In Part 3 I shall endeavor to further fill in this small little GPM
with Herbie and Phil as the opposing terminals, and what each of us went on
to do in and with Scientology in the intervening years, mine concluding in
1980 or thereabouts, and Herbie's which I have been told carried him along
until about 1991.  This is one of the best opposes I have given myself
wholeheartedly to in this lifetime, and I know everyone out there can share
with me the pleasure that comes from really detesting something or someone
that "deserves" to be detested, and to feel the reciprocity from the other
terminal.  It's a Wow, and I have never lost the fun of re-telling this
story, since it seems so fantastic in retrospect -- I don't know if I believe
it myself.

     Toodle-oo and ta-ta, and we'll see all you old beans soon -- Best, Phil

Part 3
28 Aug 99

      "And as I end the refrain, thrust home!" --
           Edmond Rostand, "Cyrano de Bergerac"

       Sometime just after the 1st of this year, after approximately no
communication between one Herbie Parkhouse and me (Phil, that is) for the
last 20 years, came a short communication, privately, from Herbie to Phil
which approximately said, "I'm Herbie Parkhouse and I used to be an
instructor on the Saint Hill Special Briefing Course back in the early '60's,
and your name sounds familiar to me.  Could you please refresh my memory by
reminding me who you are and when you were there?"

       Well, upon receiving this, I thought to myself, "Well, I'll be darned!
 What brought this old nemesis back on my lines?"  But having had a very good
day, on which I had only had upsets with 15 or 20 people, I thought, "By
gosh, by golly, I'm going to remind this character of who I once was, and see
if I can find out what he's being these days, since the last I knew of him,
he was being a figure in that highly exemplary (just kidding) organization
known as the Guardian's Office Worldwide, that group which represented the
worst of L. Ron Hubbard's case, and had done, and is probably still doing,
more harm to the hoped-for possibilities of Scientology as a movement than
you could ever shake a stick at."  And Herbie was supposed to be a big gun in
that organization in the Finance area.

       So I took the time to write Herbie and remind him of the 1963 Briefing
Course, and the bitter condition of enmity and enemy that existed between us
practically from the first moment, mentioning just a few of the highlights of
that period, and then reminding him of the few interactions following 1963
that occurred, culminating in our final communication sitting out by the
swimming pool of the Fort Harrison Hotel in Clearwater, Florida, wherein I
was asking Herbie what nefarious plan or project had brought him from the
foggy gloom of England to the overheated high-humidity west coast of Florida
(as it later turned out, I think he was part of the project that was forming
the much-feared organization called the RTC); and he, Herbie, was trying to
convince me once again that because in 1968 I had given at ASHO a short
session to a Hollywood movie star by the name of Steven Boyd, in which an
ASHO C/S had requested a rehab of his Grade IV -- this session, which took
about 5 or 7 minutes, and resulted in a big F/N, VGI's conclusion -- it was
Herbie's contention that that session probably had something to do with the
fact that Steven Boyd, some years later, dropped dead on one of the very
fancy golf courses in the LA area.  He had, of course, at the time of his
death, gone through the Scientology bridge as far as you could go in those
days (pre-OT 6 or 7) and had had all kinds of extensive auditing.  But
Herbie, at that last meeting and some previous times, either directly or
indirectly would suggest that the session I gave had something to do with the
death of Steven Boyd.  I at the same time would be working as hard as
possible to convince Herbie that it was his presence in Scientology and on
tech lines that had murdered many people spiritually, and that he was a very
bad thing for a movement like Scientology.

       So, as my readers can see, we were pretty antagonistic to one another,
and didn't miss any opportunities to stick the knife in and turn it.  But to
get back to what I e-mailed to Herbie: I took him up through that last
meeting in 1979, and I said to him something to the effect that the only
reason I could imagine him contacting me was that he was probably doing
low-level intelligence work for one of the Scientology surveillance systems,
keeping track of enemies or potential enemies of the Church.

      But to my everlasting credit and my ever-present willingness to drop
grudges and carry on in a new unit of time with lots of ARC, I said (and this
is not an actual quote) something to the effect that if he was now being a
more or less decent person, and was interested in recovering the kind of
theta possibilities that could exist between us, free from these earthly egos
and their misconception-filled nature, that I should be willing to see about
constructing such a future relationship, and that he should let me know if he
was interested in this possibility.  And I signed off with "Best to his
family" and the hope that something nifty might come out of this; and there
was never any answer to that communication.

        It wasn't until Ant mentioned in a post recently that he had put
Herbie on IVy for a little while in January that I had any understanding of
how he (Herbie) happened to hear of me and communicate; and it wasn't until
Michael Zippel and a few others wanted to know why I seemed to have such a
bad opinion of Herbie that I thought the possibilities of both some
history-writing and some explanation for those who are interested in some old
oppterms might possibly be fun for all, since in the truly larger scheme of
things that I really like to inhabit, it is clear to me that on the stage of
Life or existence there have to be many parts for the great play to be
complete, and that some people, thank goodness, have to be willing to play
the parts of all the bad guys and the bad girls that make up a very important
part of the whole cast.

       Regarding bad guys and pleasure moments, here's two examples of 3rd
dynamic benefit: in reverse order: I was extremely pleased when I heard of
the resignation of Richard M. Nixon as President of the United States; and
earlier, though hardly comparable, was when I heard that L. Ron Hubbard had
written something to the effect that Herbie Parkhouse was never to be
permitted on the tech lines of Scientology ever again, if my memory serves me
correctly.

      I end this part with the following hope, nay, postulate: that it will
come to my attention in the near future, through intermediaries or directly
from Herbie Parkhouse himself, that  Herbie did, some time ago, leave the
Church of Scientology under some circumstances or another, so that he is no
longer part of its organizations and stands in the position to it of no
longer furthering its most harmful plans and programs for Earth and its
people, and that like Ebenezer Scrooge, he was visited by the ghosts of
Scientology Past, Scientology Present, and Scientology Future, and was able
to see what happened to his original sweet self, and what he got turned into,
and what in final triumph he has now become, which is a wonderful, amazing,
reborn being, if you will, and that he would love to make this known to me,
and that we could once and for all drop away the warring parts in the game of
life that were never anything more than that, and that we might now enjoy
spiritual communion.  That's my hope, and I leave it in the hands of any that
might wish to assist in this grand denouement.

       Thanks for listening -- with high hopes for good futures for all
concerned -- As ever, Phil