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How could this have happened to me? (Part 1)
10 Feb 1999
by Phil Spickler


My dear fellow-listers,

Having just returned from an all-universes, all-galaxies search for
previously undiscovered Service Facsimiles (ways to make others wrong) to
add to my already-considerable collection, this very evening I was sitting
in my small, rather crooked den, which is lit by a single guttering candle,
and was chatting with my best friend, a chap named Morbid, who has an
insatiable appetite for terrible tales.  And so what follows is my personal
history and experience of the 22nd Advanced Clinical Course, given in
Washington, D.C. for 6 weeks during the winter of 1960.

Having grown somewhat bored with the monotony of a successful job as a
construction engineer working on the terminal building and control tower at
the airport that later would be named Dulles International Airport, that
name being a crime against nature -- originally the airport was to be
called Chantilly International Airport, since it sat near the small town of
Chantilly, Virginia, where a Civil War battle had been fought just prior to
the first battle of Bull Run.  To be sure this has cleared everyone, I
speak of the American Civil War (United States, that is).  Anyhow, that
beautiful name was eventually lost to political philandering in the same
way that beautiful Idyllwild Airport in New York was eventually changed to
Kennedy.  Anyhow, I was making good money and had a fairly interesting job,
but one of my dominant souls craves other kinds of action and excitement,
and likes to take the stability of my whole life every so often and throw
it up in the sky and let the pieces fall where they may, and I found in L.
Ron Hubbard someone who could almost always promise me this kind of action,
such as to be found in the great crapshoot known as an Advanced Clinical
Course.       Therefore, I took a leave of absence (actually quit, much to
the dismay of my employers) and signed up for another great adventure.  In
that period, if you had ever paid for an ACC, you could take all the rest
that followed for a rather small administrative fee -- possibly one of the
last bargains ever to be found in Ye Olde Church of the Venerable $.  Ron
himself was wisely Down Under at Melbourne, Australia, enjoying the warm
summer days, giving one of the famous Melbourne ACCs, whilst the one in
Washington, D.C. was being tended by the likes of Jan and Dick Halpern, who
at that time worked very closely with Ron on occasion to carry off such
hijinks, and were two rather brilliant Phoenix-created OTs who drove around
Washington, D.C. in a magnificent Mercedes 300SL gull-wing coupe, one of
Mercedes' most unique and unforgettable cars.


How could this have happened to me? (Part 2)
11 Feb 1999

Dear Listers,

To pick up the thread, you may remember that I was relating this terrible
tale to my good friend Morbid when finally the single guttering candle that
lights my crooked den went out, which became the concluding point for Part
1.  In the interim, after crawling about for some hours in the darkened
crooked den, my trembling hand fell upon another candle; and the Zippo
lighter which I haven't used since 1991, which is when I stopped smoking
tobacco, lived up to its name and lit on the first snap of the wheel.  And
so now, guttering candle #2, whose flickering flame throws odd shadows all
about the crooked den, promises enough light, since I gave up telling
stories in the dark after two of my children had to be permanently
strait-jacketed -- anyhow, here's Part 2.

Please note that in 1960, people arrived for courses like an ACC from quite
a few different parts of the country, and in a wide variety of conditions
or case states.  And there was a secret, not-much-talked-about hope that
this ACC might handle some of the screwy ways you had been feeling since
the last ACC -- in fact, perhaps you might come out of it feeling or being
Clear, or at least happy.  No attention was paid to previous auditing
and/or the results you might or might not have attained from it.  You were
more or less expected to be a single-unit thetan with a mind and a body,
and the most important thing you might come out of this ACC owning would be
the latest and the greatest procedures, processes, and the best skills to
use them.  And of course if you could fulfill the case history requirements
of said ACC through auditing, either at an HGC or in the field, you could
earn the coveted title "Doctor of Scientology," or DScn., which seemed like
quite a big deal in those days to us former idealists.

As I looked around the course room, I could see one or two people present
who had the dubious distinction of being considered "dangerous pcs" --not
so much dangerous auditors, but dangerous pcs, who had been known to attack
auditors, not just verbally but physically, usually to the detriment of the
auditor's physical being.  I breathed an advance prayer to the Gods of
Auditing that I should be spared this fate, and to my early delight was
paired off with a young, attractive woman who played piano and sang
professionally, and until I found out what this course was going to be
about, I thought we would get along beautifully.

The first part of the course had been planned to last for a week or two,
but due to some difficulties in the mails concerning taped lectures that
were supposed to reach us from Melbourne, as well as bulletins that were
essential to the progress of the course, we spent, as I recall, the next
four weeks working on the following premise: anything and everything that
was wrong with the guy and his dynamics, spiritually, mentally, physically,
was all because he had done something at some time in some place that
possessed the character of a real overt act, and that all his disabilities
in this lifetime at this time existed simply because this terrible deed or
deeds was being withheld --possibly not consciously -- but the badge of his
difficulties on the dynamics was the red flag that pointed to what the
nature of the overt was.

One of the questions that was the centerpiece of this theory, which had
many variations, and which was asked while the auditor kept a steely eye on
both the pc and the meter, was as follows: "What would you have to have
done and now be withholding to have that ________?"  And in that blank you
would insert a motivator that this chap was suffering from, from any one of
his or her eight dynamics.  So, just to keep it light, you could insert, if
he was having trouble catching catfish, you would ask, "What must you have
done and now be withholding to have this great difficulty catching
catfish?"   And then, with the help of the E-meter and your own ability to
steer and encourage, you might take this poor chap, your pc, down a trail
of overts and withholds that, if done well, would indeed, like magic,
relieve said pc of the considerations and postulates and difficulties
concerning the difficulties of catching poor catfish.

Now then, folks listening to this terrible tale, picture this room,
rectangular in shape, with about 40 little tables running around the edges
and a little chair on each side of the table, and two people sitting in
these chairs, one auditing, and one receiving auditing, and a distance
between the tables of maybe a couple of feet, and the privacy of 40 of
these folks being made very, very public.  This was the ACC where the
person's survival and future sanity depended on intentionally violating the
privacy, the secrecy, the withholdiness, of a human being, and we were
doing this with a vengeance.  The effect on folks was quite different than
getting off an overt or a withhold or a missed withhold in a nice quiet
auditing room with just you and your auditor.  There were at least 79 other
people, not counting the instructors, that might be able to hear some
really juicy tidbit that you had long ago decided "I would rather be dead
than have this known publicly."  It was not uncommon, if something really
horrifying or disgusting was being told, to have all the other sessions in
the room suddenly become very quiet, so that everyone else could hear what
you were getting off.  This raised the stakes on the resistance to getting
things off to a pretty high pitch, and it wasn't until much later in the
course that folks could look at one another without shame, without
blushing, without open looks of disgust or dislike or holier-than-thou
attitudes, and all the other things that keep us imprisoned from one
another behind our facades of respectability.

This course and that simple question and its variations, real or imagined,
really took quite a look at the subject of karma, or the overt-motivator
sequence if you will, and all the things that people build around
themselves in order to look OK to one another, given all the standards,
known and hidden, that we subject one another to concerning notions of
right action and wrong action.

This is where I started wondering if the sweet-looking young woman in front
of me was really the person that I was going to have an easy time making
such fool confessions to.  She was also looking similarly at me and
wondering if I was going to start raising an eyebrow at some of the things
that were going to be coming up about her real and imagined overt/withhold
time track.  Well, of course, everyone in the room was pretty much feeling
that way and wondering if before this was over they were going to end up
being blackmailed, imprisoned, lynched, or would they ever again be able to
face the world and feel like decent human beings.

The room was quivering with emotion, with fear, with resistance, with the
common thought, "If I'd known this was what we were going to be doing, I
wouldn't have come here."  In retrospect, and from an exterior viewpoint,
it looks pretty funny -- the guilty expressions on some of the faces, the
protestations of innocence, the devious efforts to escape disclosure, the
feelings you might get as a pc when you were taking a hard stand on
"There's no way I'm ever going to tell you or anyone else about ______ -- I
would rather be dead, or better yet, I'd rather you be dead, so there's no
one to tell."  At these points, one or both of the Halperns, who looked
pretty cheerful (in fact, they were the only people in the room who looked
cheerful) would come and stand around your session and do that effortless
OT action of creating a completely safe space and generate feelings of
assurance that you could live through it and that you'd be better for doing
it, until finally you could make a new postulate about this awful, horrible
thing, and openly, if somewhat haltingly, get the whole story out into the
public, to your auditor, to your instructors, and to your fellow students.
Talk about case change per minute of auditing!

Which is precisely what I propose to do in the next installment of "How
could this have happened to me?"  Good night, and all the best -- Phil


How could this have happened to me? (Part 3)
12 Feb 1999

"Tis a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury . . . ."

As you may recall, I've been recounting this terrible tale to my dear
friend Morbid, who takes great delight in these things.

Somewhere along the way, Ron had pointed out that what we were doing
concerning the invasion of privacy and taking such intensive looks at
overts and withholds, that doing this would be a very, very good thing for
auditors to be subjected to; that in the future it would help them to help
their pcs confront difficult matters and know that they could get through
them and out the other side much the better for so doing.  He (Ron) said,
and I paraphrase, that if an auditor hadn't been cleaned up this way, that
he might tend to"pattycake" with the pc's overts and withholds and get into
a sort of a tacit (unspoken) agreement with the pc that went something
like, "If I don't ask you, you won't ask me."  Ron felt that he had
discovered that some auditors actually did possess the computation in which
they feared that if they invaded the pc's privacy too greatly, the pc might
suddenly look up from his or her case and say, in a loud, piercing voice,
"What about YOU? Do you have any secrets, lies, half-truths, things that
you don't want anybody to ever find out about??"  Anyhow, this ACC was
dedicated to the proposition that those that lived through it would never
again "rabbit" on the pc or leave their pc sitting, perhaps forever, in an
unconfessed and continuous condition of withhold or missed withhold.


I, that's me, Phil, or shall I say that composite that goes under that
label, found some years later, when working as a Qual auditor and Power
auditor at ASHO, that I often obtained what seemed to be somewhat
miraculous results in short order with the poor souls that entered my
auditing room.  My not-so-secret secret was that I could almost always find
on pcs that had come in from the field, and even sometimes on folks that
had been around quite awhile, that one or more overts and subsequent
withholds or missed withholds had been missed and become quite chronic, and
in some cases the pc was even missing them on himself, since they were
hovering just below the level of that state which we call conscious.  Given
the complex nature of folks, I'm sure you can see how this was possible.
Nevertheless, this all led to the notion of the resistive case, and was one
of the big things that made cases very resistive until such things saw the
light of day.

Dropping back now from ASHO, 1968 to Washington, D.C. 1960, where you find
me in the second week of the 22nd ACC, here's some of the things that had
happened and were happening on the course.  One poor chap who was auditing
one of the dangerous pcs failed to handle an origination by said pc about
needing to go to the toilet, and instead treated it as though the pc was
blowing in an effort not to confront a withhold.  That was a fatal
assumption, because to the shock and horror of 34 other sessions in that
room, there was suddenly a loud shout and the unmistakeable sound of a fist
striking some part of the human facial anatomy, followed by a chair tipping
over, with more angry shouts; and then out of the corner of our eyes we
could see this violent pc dragging his auditor upside-down over to a large
sort of barrel-shaped wastecan and stuffing the poor auditor into it, head
first, following which Jan Halpern quietly and calmly escorted the
dangerous pc outside of the courseroom to the toilet, leaving the auditor,
legs waving back and forth as he vainly struggled to get out of the
container.  Several of us broke session and went over and pulled this poor
chap (who shall go unnamed) out of the trash and ministered some first aid
to him.  It was interesting to note later, when comparing notes with other
auditors who had been in the room at that time, that through this violent
period the tone arm positions of most of the pcs in the room came down
below 1.0 on their Hubbard Electrometers, most rapidly.  It had defnitely
made the space feel quite unsafe, and we all felt pretty bad at not having
gone to the rescue of this poor chap, who was outgunned by about 7 inches
and 50 or 60 pounds on the physical side of things.  One of the learned
lessons was that when auditing violent and dangerous pcs, it goes best if
your auditing and handling is flawless.  Even better, don't audit violent
and dangerous pcs on the kind of stuff we were messing around with on that
course.

The auditor ended up with a broken nose and a black eye, but continued the
course and was assigned a different pc, and the difficult and dangerous pc
was given to a giant of a fellow from The Dalles, Oregon, a wheat farmer
who was big enough and tough enough and gentle enough to somehow get Mr.
Dangerous through the course.  Later, Mr. Dangerous, sometime in the 1970's
I believe, had a mission somewheres in the Northwest, and got involved with
the wife of one of his students, who, after duly considering the nature of
the problem, shot the formerly violent and dangerous pc to death.  I hope
no one infers from this that this all happened because of the auditing 15
years earlier on the 22nd Advanced Clinical Course.  On the other hand, it
might have had something to do with it.       To my shock and horror, I was
assigned to a difficult if not somewhat dangerous pc that someone else was
having grave problems with, and to my horror I found out that she had on
several occasions been assigned to psychiatric hospitals prior to coming
into Scientology and had been given several courses of electroconvulsive
shock treatment in an effort to handle some of her problems and upsets.  I
was getting along famously with this rather impressive young woman, who
possessed fairly heroic physical proportions, when one afternoon when we
had been hot on the trail of some rather embarrassing indiscretion, she
said to me, "If you ask me that question one more time, I'm going to slap
you in the face as hard as I can."  In an effort to appear suave and
unflappable, and to be quick on the uptake, I said to her, and I quote,
"Now my dear, as you know, in auditing, it is essential to maintain 2-way
communication with the pc, and to keep up the reality of what is occurring
in the session, and therefore, if you slug me, I shall, by the rules of the
Auditor's Code, have to slug you back just as hard."  I'mp leased to report
that this stopped her dead in her tracks, and she said, "Do you really mean
that?"  And in my most cheerful possible voice, I replied, "Yes, of
course."  To my everlasting relief she got a big grin on her face and said
something like, "Now what was that question you were asking me?"  and we
got along quite well after that.

If anyone is still reading this horror story, I must inform you that at
that very moment that she had threatened to whack me, I was invoking that
old Ron prescription that goes something like, "Auditing is whatever you
can get away with."  It worked, and the pc and I got along so well after
that that she eventually told me that her husband, who was coming to visit
her on the weekends from somewhere I believe in Pennsylvania, thought that
Scientology and Scientologists were a bunch of crooked idiots, or words to
that effect, and would I please stop in and do something about him, because
it was really goofing her up to be doing the course and having him so down
on it all.  She informed me casually that he was a heavy-equipment
operator, about 6'4", 270lbs, with quite a temper.  Well, as you may know,
in those days you might have to be the whole org to your pc, and do
whatever had to be done, even at some risk to life and limb to make sure
that your work with that pc was concluded on as big a win as possible for
that pc, with no excuses for failure.       I'd gotten lucky and was having
some marvelous wins by virtue of confronting and communicating about things
that I never dreamed would come to view, let alone be made public.  The
persona that I had started the course with, the ego with its myriad of
defense systems, ranging from early warning to 10-foot-thick armor-plated
perimeter, with all manner of force fields and capacity for unlimited
retaliation, had been completely shattered, torn to shreds, evaporated,
dissolved, caused to vanish, and there I was, like a new baby thetan,
innocent, competely vulnerable, and pleased to be temporarily at least
devoid of the enormous network that had been so carefully built over who
knows how much time to defend that which wasn't really me anyway.

In short, I said to my pc, "I'll be over Saturday night -- let Gordo know.
If necessary, you can stay with him and hold his hand as I talk to him."
In the next part of this terrible tale, I hope, dear readers, to tell you
of the amazing occurrences that took place in my visit with my pc's
husband, who by the way was physically 6 inches taller than my miniature
self and outweighed me by 130 lbs. of muscle.  Was I intimidated by all
this bulk?  Tune in for the next exciting episode of "Phil vs. the pc's
husband's overts and withholds" and you'll find out what happened.

Toodle-oo and tra-la, see you soon -- Love, the Anointed One


How could this have happened to me? (Part 4)
14 Feb 1999

Hello one and all, and thank you for leaving at least one of your spare
thetans sitting on the edge of its metaphorical chair eagerly awaiting what
follows.  In this case the house lights go up and are kept bright to reduce
the potential terrors that the next words may bring to my dear listeners.


After a modest repast in our humble lodgings at the Elmwood Hotel, which we
regulars referred to as the Wormwood in view of its rather ancient and
decrepit condition, I made my way furtively down 19th St., carefully
sidestepping muggers and other night creatures, and soon arrived at the
door of the apartment where my pc was staying and boldly announced my
presence by knocking on the door and saying these words: "Phil here."
Shortly thereafter the door was flung open by an extemely large chap, who
said something like"Whaddaya want?"  I said, in a slightly squeaky voice,
"Is ____  here?"  This chap stepped away from the door as I scurried in and
called down the hallway, "Somebody's here ta see ya," at which point my pc
arrived in the living room, and shortly thereafter my hand was being
engulfed in one of the biggest fists I'd ever hope to look upon, and we all
sat down together, and my pc said to her husband, "Phil has come here to
talk with you and tell you about Scientology and what we're doing here, and
hopefully to improve your opinion of these matters."  My pc's husband
looked a bit uneasy, but agreed to the meeting as his wife got up and said,
"I'll leave you fellows to talk; I'm right in the middle of doing some
cooking and cleaning -- see you later."

Thirty minutes later, as the result of a little demo I was giving this chap
with my trusty E-meter, we had unearthed and pretty well flattened out a
very unpleasant missed withhold that this guy had been harboring for some
years which was successfully destroying him, his wife, and their marriage.
The exact details of this tremendously charged subject I will spare my
listeners, and conclude by telling you that this chap and my pc became good
and loving friends and spouses almost overnight, and from that moment on he
went on to support her in her efforts to recover her sanity and to work as
an auditor well into the future.

Feeling like "all in a day's work," and excusing myself to allow their
moment of bliss to expand privately, I took myself, the minor
miracle-maker, and stepping quite lightly, returned to my humble digs.


The ACC rumbled on, day after day, week after week.  Please to note that in
those days, on course, each day you audited for 2 and a half hours and each
day you received 2 and a half hours as a pc.  This could get a little hard
on both auditors and pcs, since many of the sessions had no reason or need
to go for 2 and a half hours, and it was possible to definitely run into
areas of protest, areas that later might be called overrun, not to speak of
bypassing such states as Clear, Clear OT, Thetan Exterior, just to name a
few; and by continuing the auditing past these marvelous moments you could
drive in the anchor points of both pcs and auditors, who knew quite well
that they really should have stopped.

This became a particular difficulty on this course because the tapes that
we should have received from the Melbourne ACC, as well as bulletins,
either didn't arrive or arrived only for the last week or so.  They
contained some wonderful information about the Pre-Havingness levels and
rundowns and processes that were to have been part of this ACC.

But alas, we spent between 4 and 5 weeks essentially engaged in the biggest
and wildest hunt for overts and withholds that has ever been engaged upon
in the last godillion years.  People definitely got very, very, very good
at finding the overts, real or imagined, that could and would explain ANY
sub-optimum condition on each of the 8 dynamics, which did wonders for
raising the cause level and the responsibility level of these folks for the
condition of their dynamics.  Anybody trying to pull a motivator on this
course and make it stick would be promptly laughed out of existence -- this
was one of the great efforts, intended or non-intended, to once and for all
make true the maxim that "a thetan can ONLY be at cause."

For some time after this course I definitely felt somewhat removed from the
human race, and it was a bit difficult to look at humans and their foibles
without being able to clearly see what each of them must have done to get
into the condition they were in.  There was even a period of some weeks
when the usual feelings concerning members of the opposite sex, or any sex
for that matter, had completely vanished.  This scared me a little bit, but
I remained willing to live along and see if I would ever be able to rejoin
the human race, or whether I had looked too far and gained too much truth
and understanding to ever voluntarily wish to participate in human
existence.

It was truly awesome to see how much I and other human beings had put
around themselves (a) in order to remain in reality as a human being; (b)
to protect that which they thought of as themselves from harm; and (c) the
terrible effect that it was having on the higher potentials of ARC.  This
awful story, of course, has what might be called a happy ending, since in
an effort to avoid the Void, I quite knowingly and cheerfully re-engaged,
with ARC, my fellow humans, and thus was able to regain, as a point of
reality, sufficient aberration to enjoy the incredible entertainment
spectacle and lively possibilities here on our favorite little dirt ball.


Further up the track, and in a later bedtime story that I shall spin for
you, I should like to speak of an understanding that far surpasseth
anything mentioned so far.  It's still good to know that when working on
overts and withholds, when a chap regains the ability, the willingness, to
freely communicate about these matters, to let him off the hook at that
point and not attempt to find and look at every overt and every withhold
that could be possible in all of life, just as it's really not necessary to
run every engram that's ever occurred unless you've got about 20 billion
years of free time on your hands, etc. etc. -- I think you get the idea.
On the other hand, what sometimes appear to be high-level OT type
difficulties or "oreful" things that can only be found zillions of years
ago as an explanation of what might be the case or the trouble, can be
cleared up pretty quickly by thorougly invading the privacy of the chap's
this-lifetime history, keeping in mind that most people, knowingly or
unknowingly, are heavily involved in all kinds of things that have moral
codes (listen to Ron's tape called "Moral Codes: What is a Withhold").


I close with these chilling words, and thank any that were able to remain
with me to this ending -- Exit Stage Right, Curtains Down, The End.

Love and best wishes to all,
Phil