LRH ED 182 INT                                                                               11 November 1972

To:  All Scientologists
       BPI MAGAZINES.

Subject:  A SUCCESS STORY

Ref:  Primary RD

       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 pretense, and those who are honestly trying.

—————

     “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 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 crystalize. 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 needed.

       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 kinds of unusual solutions to this latter — changes in diet, working nights, working early mornings, exercise, plenty of sleep (12 hours a night), and on and 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 nationwide 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 blew 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 are 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: ‘flow charts’.

       I'd write five or six which I used to make synonyms at the top of the page; then under each, the words in that definition I didn't understand; and then 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 superliterate. 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 Centre 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 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 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 more than two or three years from now, at least in terms of specifics. I'm now Freedom Associate Editor at the U.S.G.O. and will be building that into a weekly paper. 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 I 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,