Maria Cuervo
Gold Meritorious Patron
The old days before I was auditing and c/sing in Miami
I just realized I made a mistake. Kathy was a letter reg but she was not then regging. She had already Married John Sexsmith, the ED. I was just told stories by Leona that she was a letter reg stolen away from her post to marry the ED. When I was letter regging, there was a room behind us where one day I heard Sexsmith talking to someone about Kathy. Mind you I don't know these people today and I have nothing bad to say about anyone. It's just stuff I remember hearing and seeing, my own memory, and therefore only that. Not useful in general, just for understanding my experience there at that time.
This part of the story will all come back as part of a bigger picture concerning Kathy once I get to the part where I am in AOLA. She was a nice person. But my experience of her is that she was a bit nutty because driven by vengeance. So here was John in a room. I don't recall whose office it was since John's office was the ED's office, on the first floor at the end and it faced the front of the building. John had come upstairs to talk to the person on the third floor in an office that was right behind me. I was facing the other way, facing the back of the building so I had to turn around if I wanted to see anything. My "office" was essentially a corridor facing windows. The other side was composed of offices all along that corridor with doors letting out to the corridor where my "office" was. I don't remember actually seeing Kathy letter regging; I was just told that she did this.
John was back there talking frantically to someone about the fact that he thought Kathy was type 3 (his opinion and not mine since I do not know her well at all and haven't seen her in 30+ years) and that she needed to be handled, specifically, he wanted a divorce and needed help with logistics.
So during the time I was letter regging, John was trying to disconnect from wife Kathy.
My escape from letter regging hell
Here was what I did. I wrote a KR (is that the right word?) to the ED himself explaining the situation. I did not route it through Leona! Straight to the ED and I hand-delivered it to his inbox. Here is my own paraphrase of the letter I wrote:
1. I am a letter reg here, Maria, and I speak Spanish.
2. Although the org has plenty of Spanish speaking registrars, it has zero Spanish auditors.
3. Miami is filled with Spanish-only speakers who need to get onto the bridge.
4. It is an untapped market and even if we wanted to tap it right now we don't have auditors to deliver the services were we to sell them. We are talking about a market worth 100s of Gs.
5. Does it make sense for Maria to be letter regging in English when she could be trained to audit Spanish-only speakers?
6. Train Maria as an auditor so that we can take advantage of this situation and raise the stats/make things go right!
Then I signed it. Money talks. BS walks. Within 24 hours I was pulled off letter regging. I was now stationed in the training room to start my TTC training. Leona was furious. And now that the word had come down there was nothing for her to do, what could she do to reverse it, nothing, but she could blow off some bypassed charge. She marched herself down to the training area where I had already started training, came right over to Cuch, the amazing Miami Org D of T at that time as if daring him to stop her on her mission. Cuch did not even try. He was tranquility personified, a stone statue that smiles to each passerby and whose smile gives the perfectly encoded message each passerby needs. Cuch was Buddha on Scientology steroids. If Buddha was calm, Cuch was calm with the pure intention of calmness. Understanding the pure meaning of BPC and its therapeutic powers and also its very limited power, i.e., none, to change the past, Cuch stood motionless, parted the veil for her so to speak, as the fury breezed through and made her way to where I was seated. I was then, with all fairness scolded for having bypassed standard lines to get to the Ed directly with my scheme. The dastardly plot I'd hatched was that transparent to her! It was nothing short of an effort to crash stats for her area! And I was the source of the down-stat because quotas were not being met! I offered to write some letters doing lunch or after work but the goddess had given her judgment. She said "Oh sure, right" or something close to that and stormed away. I never spoke to her again really, during all my years in Scientology, and even later. Whenever she would come into the training area she ignored me. I don't remember if I C/S'd her folders later but I am sure I would have given her case the same attention I would have given any other. I felt bad in a way that I had caused her to be down-stat but the genie could not be put back. Once Div 6 and the reges and the ED and other execs realized that future Div 6 stats were in play, hundreds of thousands of dollars in fact, there was no way in hell that they were going to let me anywhere near the letter regging area again. The 'idea' had gotten away from me now and belonged to the powers of the Miami Org.
There was no purif and no survival R/D if I recall correctly. This was winter 1976 going into spring 1977. I'll be up front and say that while I did believe in the tech, my enjoyment of being in the TTC had more to do with the fact that I was not doing something mindless but at least was learning things. A big plus is that I could move around. I felt less physically stressed as a student because the space was less confining. It was a large room where one minute I might be reading at a table and looking up words. Another minute I would be making something in clay, another I was doing TRs. Each day I could sit in a different chair. I also got to talk to people, both staff and public who were in the training area. There was a phone in the Training Div and I recall even receiving phone calls from friends outside the church.
I was a bit of a hippy in my thinking in those days and I was still doing "OT" stuff. However there was no one to tell and not that anyone would have disapproved anyway. For example, sorry the following will be crude sounding but I was out on a motorcycle with a guy, before I married Jeff and before we were cemented as thing. I was already in Scientology, probably a letter reg when this happened. The guy was Indian from India and he was supposedly an Indian priest. I knew him because one of my part-time jobs I had when first at the church was as a waitress in an Indian restaurant. BTW, even though I was not Indian, the management there at the restaurant took my picture in a sari, put a dot on my forehead first of course, and used the picture in a national magazine ad that went on for years. The man from the motorcycle also worked there. Anyway, I said so you believe in all that nirvana thing? He said, yes. So give me examples of what you can do I asked. He went on telling me all the neat stuff.
I said, wanna know what I can do? I had never tried the following but heck, I was positive I could, intention right. He said yes, but from his body language i could see this was all just abstract knowledge stuff. He was not really expecting anything to happen, just that I would TELL HIM about something I could or had done.
So we got on the bicycle and then right at the second we drove off from the front steps of the Miami org right where he had picked me up I made him spontaneously come. Well sorry to be so blunt but the guy said WHAAAATTTTTT? I felt sorry for him. If it feels better, I came too I told him.
What a crazy chick I was. BTW, don't tease me about it since I am positive that "power" was based around the insouciance of youth and is no longer a threat to anyone. I never use my super powers on others, although in that case he did not seem to mind.
After that time period when I was still in transition and talking to people from B4 scientolology, I slowly ended those relationships and connections. Especially as my relationship with Jeff (JD) sort of became an inexorable thing. No I never did anything like that again. Ironically, these sorts of things were NOT approved of in the CoS. Being OT is not the same as talking about being OT. If you have OT stuff going on you will be called a squirrel and it's assumed you are reading non-Scientology occult books. So I slowly stopped doing any "OT" things since it was just a big no-no. It was ok to talk about having done them as long as there were no waves. (Translate: I could talk about using OT powers to be taller. But I could not walk into the org the next day being taller. And I dare not make anyone else taller either.) OT is all about goals. Not being it. If one becomes OT then it's swell to talk about being OT and to sit there glowing from wins. But no OTS actually come in to an org and do a DEMO, unless you are Ingo Swann who did live performances and wrote the Remote Viewing manual. He was a scientologist I have heard but I am sure that his "OT" powers were with him well before he was associated with Scientology and had nothing to do with Scientology. I could be wrong, but I doubt Ingo was invited into orgs to do demonstrations or trainings on his OT skills. Once you are an OT you become non-standard since you are not using the tech but just being OT. There is no OT tech on the OT levels. The OT levels are about removing the obstacles to being OT. I know this because somewhere along the way I read the levels all the way up including NOTs before they were removed from the web. Even at the very top it's all about removing impediments to OT. There is no list of OT abilities (what ancient Indians called "Siddhis") in Scientology. There is not a list of techniques for each of those "abilities" either. If the technique is like Ingo's and it's bending spoons or remote viewing, there is no official Scn tech that shows how to do either, unless you include the US Govt. manual Ingo wrote (although never admitted to writing) on RV (remove viewing.)
I don't have huge stories on the TTC. I did notice around me sometimes that people thought the meter and learning to use it was a big hard obscure thing to do. I am not an engineer but while I didn't get the inner workings of it all, the basic using of the meter was easy for me and I didn't fret if I got things slightly off now and again. (And I didn't tell anyone I had flubbed either and had no sense that this was out-ethics on my part, just a practical desire to avoid big 'to-do's about nothing.) I was not a creaky wheel that needed help from the D of T much of the time. Mostly I did zipped through courses, did the practicals, a to b no complaints. The minute I started auditing I started to have public paying Spanish pcs. As the pc moved through TRs (objectives) and onto a new level, I would be just finishing that level as a student! So if I was just finished training on level 1, I would be auditing grade I, and sometimes I'd be auditing a level AS my practical for the course. I don't know if this would be considered standard but since all the pcs were happy and f/ned then no one complained. Me either since when auditing pcs I got to basically be in charge, take a break, etc. I had more resting time and hanging out moments since I was dealing with a public. In between sessions, during session break, etc.
I'll keep going on this soon. I have to think about how to write more on this period of time and since I won't give stories about my pc cases then it limits my material a bit to things that happen outside of session.
During this time I was really really struggling to somehow maintain the outside world and all its good times as well as to be on staff. I was full time but on weekends I was often off for a day and I could go to flea markets or a movie, buy some clothes or just shop with my eyes. My mom would pick me up once a week and we'd go to a Mexican restaurant a few blocks from the church and we'd have a nice meal. My parents would NOT talk about Scientology AT ALL. There was no room to discuss its tech, its wins, its promises. NADA. When I visited with the family on Sundays for lunch and it was always a great meal with wine and lots of relatives Scientology discussions were politely ignored as if they were non-existent.
I think this is the MAIN thing that any family member can do if their relative becomes a scientologist. Be firm that you neither want to be one or hear about what is entailed in being one. At the same time, continue to love the person and make a regular appointment to have lunch, go to a movie, have a family gathering. This continuity is hard for the Scientologist family member to avoid since it's a minimal family obligation. It also provides a visual contrast to the life outside v. the life inside. I do realize that for those at SO orgs the rules may be different. I don't know what the rules are concerning spending time with WOG relatives. At Miami it is possible it was frowned on too.
And here is where it was possibly my own personality that just ignored that detail of the 'rules'. I had a tendency to often do whtever I wanted, without caring or knowing if it was considered out-ethics according to the CoS standard. So I didn't really talk about it. It only came up as a PTS situation and when it did no one in Qual or Ethics every recommended that I disconnect, even though more than once the EO would tell me that a relative was SP. I think if I had been asked to disconnect I would have but if I had I am also sure I would have left Scientology a lot sooner. I don't know if I could have taken that stress too well. A lot of times it seems to those outside who have Sci9entology family who won't speak to them that this is easy for the person inside. I doubt it is for all of them, even if they put up a great "front" of not caring. The best approach, in my own opinion, is to create a non-judgmental arrangement for visiting (if the CoS where they are working allows it). Make it so that weekly or bimonthy meetings to get together are the norm. During those meetings I'd not even mention the church or criticize what they are doing. I'd just flaunt the wonders of wogdom instead. (Not that its perfect but...) If they tried to recruit me I'd just say well thanks but I'd rather not talk about it. Lets agree that I love you and won't criticize you and that you in turn let the thought of recruiting me go.....
Anyway, not sure anyone here really realizes that I don't in the here and now practice or believe in any Scientology tech at all. I am not for or against anyone else and whatever floats their boat. What makes me happy does not have to be what makes others happy. If someone else is happy in FZ, great. I never got a chance to be fully into FZ because of those awful letters that got sent to me when the AAC people secretly working for the CoS jumped into action to out me with fake, church-supplied proof to the FZ of that time about what an SP I was! This was fantastic in a way since I had a hard break return to the wog world and absolutely no scientology friends to turn to in either the CoS or in FZ.
BTW I think all these things, my stories, are probably of limited interest to any except Scientilophiles or those who were in Miami. I hope some of you are one or both of these so thank you for listening and any corrections or comments in my understandings of tech, admin, policy or anything else of those times. (Accuracy being of interest for historical purposes.)
I just realized I made a mistake. Kathy was a letter reg but she was not then regging. She had already Married John Sexsmith, the ED. I was just told stories by Leona that she was a letter reg stolen away from her post to marry the ED. When I was letter regging, there was a room behind us where one day I heard Sexsmith talking to someone about Kathy. Mind you I don't know these people today and I have nothing bad to say about anyone. It's just stuff I remember hearing and seeing, my own memory, and therefore only that. Not useful in general, just for understanding my experience there at that time.
This part of the story will all come back as part of a bigger picture concerning Kathy once I get to the part where I am in AOLA. She was a nice person. But my experience of her is that she was a bit nutty because driven by vengeance. So here was John in a room. I don't recall whose office it was since John's office was the ED's office, on the first floor at the end and it faced the front of the building. John had come upstairs to talk to the person on the third floor in an office that was right behind me. I was facing the other way, facing the back of the building so I had to turn around if I wanted to see anything. My "office" was essentially a corridor facing windows. The other side was composed of offices all along that corridor with doors letting out to the corridor where my "office" was. I don't remember actually seeing Kathy letter regging; I was just told that she did this.
John was back there talking frantically to someone about the fact that he thought Kathy was type 3 (his opinion and not mine since I do not know her well at all and haven't seen her in 30+ years) and that she needed to be handled, specifically, he wanted a divorce and needed help with logistics.
So during the time I was letter regging, John was trying to disconnect from wife Kathy.
My escape from letter regging hell
Here was what I did. I wrote a KR (is that the right word?) to the ED himself explaining the situation. I did not route it through Leona! Straight to the ED and I hand-delivered it to his inbox. Here is my own paraphrase of the letter I wrote:
1. I am a letter reg here, Maria, and I speak Spanish.
2. Although the org has plenty of Spanish speaking registrars, it has zero Spanish auditors.
3. Miami is filled with Spanish-only speakers who need to get onto the bridge.
4. It is an untapped market and even if we wanted to tap it right now we don't have auditors to deliver the services were we to sell them. We are talking about a market worth 100s of Gs.
5. Does it make sense for Maria to be letter regging in English when she could be trained to audit Spanish-only speakers?
6. Train Maria as an auditor so that we can take advantage of this situation and raise the stats/make things go right!
Then I signed it. Money talks. BS walks. Within 24 hours I was pulled off letter regging. I was now stationed in the training room to start my TTC training. Leona was furious. And now that the word had come down there was nothing for her to do, what could she do to reverse it, nothing, but she could blow off some bypassed charge. She marched herself down to the training area where I had already started training, came right over to Cuch, the amazing Miami Org D of T at that time as if daring him to stop her on her mission. Cuch did not even try. He was tranquility personified, a stone statue that smiles to each passerby and whose smile gives the perfectly encoded message each passerby needs. Cuch was Buddha on Scientology steroids. If Buddha was calm, Cuch was calm with the pure intention of calmness. Understanding the pure meaning of BPC and its therapeutic powers and also its very limited power, i.e., none, to change the past, Cuch stood motionless, parted the veil for her so to speak, as the fury breezed through and made her way to where I was seated. I was then, with all fairness scolded for having bypassed standard lines to get to the Ed directly with my scheme. The dastardly plot I'd hatched was that transparent to her! It was nothing short of an effort to crash stats for her area! And I was the source of the down-stat because quotas were not being met! I offered to write some letters doing lunch or after work but the goddess had given her judgment. She said "Oh sure, right" or something close to that and stormed away. I never spoke to her again really, during all my years in Scientology, and even later. Whenever she would come into the training area she ignored me. I don't remember if I C/S'd her folders later but I am sure I would have given her case the same attention I would have given any other. I felt bad in a way that I had caused her to be down-stat but the genie could not be put back. Once Div 6 and the reges and the ED and other execs realized that future Div 6 stats were in play, hundreds of thousands of dollars in fact, there was no way in hell that they were going to let me anywhere near the letter regging area again. The 'idea' had gotten away from me now and belonged to the powers of the Miami Org.
There was no purif and no survival R/D if I recall correctly. This was winter 1976 going into spring 1977. I'll be up front and say that while I did believe in the tech, my enjoyment of being in the TTC had more to do with the fact that I was not doing something mindless but at least was learning things. A big plus is that I could move around. I felt less physically stressed as a student because the space was less confining. It was a large room where one minute I might be reading at a table and looking up words. Another minute I would be making something in clay, another I was doing TRs. Each day I could sit in a different chair. I also got to talk to people, both staff and public who were in the training area. There was a phone in the Training Div and I recall even receiving phone calls from friends outside the church.
I was a bit of a hippy in my thinking in those days and I was still doing "OT" stuff. However there was no one to tell and not that anyone would have disapproved anyway. For example, sorry the following will be crude sounding but I was out on a motorcycle with a guy, before I married Jeff and before we were cemented as thing. I was already in Scientology, probably a letter reg when this happened. The guy was Indian from India and he was supposedly an Indian priest. I knew him because one of my part-time jobs I had when first at the church was as a waitress in an Indian restaurant. BTW, even though I was not Indian, the management there at the restaurant took my picture in a sari, put a dot on my forehead first of course, and used the picture in a national magazine ad that went on for years. The man from the motorcycle also worked there. Anyway, I said so you believe in all that nirvana thing? He said, yes. So give me examples of what you can do I asked. He went on telling me all the neat stuff.
I said, wanna know what I can do? I had never tried the following but heck, I was positive I could, intention right. He said yes, but from his body language i could see this was all just abstract knowledge stuff. He was not really expecting anything to happen, just that I would TELL HIM about something I could or had done.
So we got on the bicycle and then right at the second we drove off from the front steps of the Miami org right where he had picked me up I made him spontaneously come. Well sorry to be so blunt but the guy said WHAAAATTTTTT? I felt sorry for him. If it feels better, I came too I told him.
What a crazy chick I was. BTW, don't tease me about it since I am positive that "power" was based around the insouciance of youth and is no longer a threat to anyone. I never use my super powers on others, although in that case he did not seem to mind.
After that time period when I was still in transition and talking to people from B4 scientolology, I slowly ended those relationships and connections. Especially as my relationship with Jeff (JD) sort of became an inexorable thing. No I never did anything like that again. Ironically, these sorts of things were NOT approved of in the CoS. Being OT is not the same as talking about being OT. If you have OT stuff going on you will be called a squirrel and it's assumed you are reading non-Scientology occult books. So I slowly stopped doing any "OT" things since it was just a big no-no. It was ok to talk about having done them as long as there were no waves. (Translate: I could talk about using OT powers to be taller. But I could not walk into the org the next day being taller. And I dare not make anyone else taller either.) OT is all about goals. Not being it. If one becomes OT then it's swell to talk about being OT and to sit there glowing from wins. But no OTS actually come in to an org and do a DEMO, unless you are Ingo Swann who did live performances and wrote the Remote Viewing manual. He was a scientologist I have heard but I am sure that his "OT" powers were with him well before he was associated with Scientology and had nothing to do with Scientology. I could be wrong, but I doubt Ingo was invited into orgs to do demonstrations or trainings on his OT skills. Once you are an OT you become non-standard since you are not using the tech but just being OT. There is no OT tech on the OT levels. The OT levels are about removing the obstacles to being OT. I know this because somewhere along the way I read the levels all the way up including NOTs before they were removed from the web. Even at the very top it's all about removing impediments to OT. There is no list of OT abilities (what ancient Indians called "Siddhis") in Scientology. There is not a list of techniques for each of those "abilities" either. If the technique is like Ingo's and it's bending spoons or remote viewing, there is no official Scn tech that shows how to do either, unless you include the US Govt. manual Ingo wrote (although never admitted to writing) on RV (remove viewing.)
I don't have huge stories on the TTC. I did notice around me sometimes that people thought the meter and learning to use it was a big hard obscure thing to do. I am not an engineer but while I didn't get the inner workings of it all, the basic using of the meter was easy for me and I didn't fret if I got things slightly off now and again. (And I didn't tell anyone I had flubbed either and had no sense that this was out-ethics on my part, just a practical desire to avoid big 'to-do's about nothing.) I was not a creaky wheel that needed help from the D of T much of the time. Mostly I did zipped through courses, did the practicals, a to b no complaints. The minute I started auditing I started to have public paying Spanish pcs. As the pc moved through TRs (objectives) and onto a new level, I would be just finishing that level as a student! So if I was just finished training on level 1, I would be auditing grade I, and sometimes I'd be auditing a level AS my practical for the course. I don't know if this would be considered standard but since all the pcs were happy and f/ned then no one complained. Me either since when auditing pcs I got to basically be in charge, take a break, etc. I had more resting time and hanging out moments since I was dealing with a public. In between sessions, during session break, etc.
I'll keep going on this soon. I have to think about how to write more on this period of time and since I won't give stories about my pc cases then it limits my material a bit to things that happen outside of session.
During this time I was really really struggling to somehow maintain the outside world and all its good times as well as to be on staff. I was full time but on weekends I was often off for a day and I could go to flea markets or a movie, buy some clothes or just shop with my eyes. My mom would pick me up once a week and we'd go to a Mexican restaurant a few blocks from the church and we'd have a nice meal. My parents would NOT talk about Scientology AT ALL. There was no room to discuss its tech, its wins, its promises. NADA. When I visited with the family on Sundays for lunch and it was always a great meal with wine and lots of relatives Scientology discussions were politely ignored as if they were non-existent.
I think this is the MAIN thing that any family member can do if their relative becomes a scientologist. Be firm that you neither want to be one or hear about what is entailed in being one. At the same time, continue to love the person and make a regular appointment to have lunch, go to a movie, have a family gathering. This continuity is hard for the Scientologist family member to avoid since it's a minimal family obligation. It also provides a visual contrast to the life outside v. the life inside. I do realize that for those at SO orgs the rules may be different. I don't know what the rules are concerning spending time with WOG relatives. At Miami it is possible it was frowned on too.
And here is where it was possibly my own personality that just ignored that detail of the 'rules'. I had a tendency to often do whtever I wanted, without caring or knowing if it was considered out-ethics according to the CoS standard. So I didn't really talk about it. It only came up as a PTS situation and when it did no one in Qual or Ethics every recommended that I disconnect, even though more than once the EO would tell me that a relative was SP. I think if I had been asked to disconnect I would have but if I had I am also sure I would have left Scientology a lot sooner. I don't know if I could have taken that stress too well. A lot of times it seems to those outside who have Sci9entology family who won't speak to them that this is easy for the person inside. I doubt it is for all of them, even if they put up a great "front" of not caring. The best approach, in my own opinion, is to create a non-judgmental arrangement for visiting (if the CoS where they are working allows it). Make it so that weekly or bimonthy meetings to get together are the norm. During those meetings I'd not even mention the church or criticize what they are doing. I'd just flaunt the wonders of wogdom instead. (Not that its perfect but...) If they tried to recruit me I'd just say well thanks but I'd rather not talk about it. Lets agree that I love you and won't criticize you and that you in turn let the thought of recruiting me go.....
Anyway, not sure anyone here really realizes that I don't in the here and now practice or believe in any Scientology tech at all. I am not for or against anyone else and whatever floats their boat. What makes me happy does not have to be what makes others happy. If someone else is happy in FZ, great. I never got a chance to be fully into FZ because of those awful letters that got sent to me when the AAC people secretly working for the CoS jumped into action to out me with fake, church-supplied proof to the FZ of that time about what an SP I was! This was fantastic in a way since I had a hard break return to the wog world and absolutely no scientology friends to turn to in either the CoS or in FZ.
BTW I think all these things, my stories, are probably of limited interest to any except Scientilophiles or those who were in Miami. I hope some of you are one or both of these so thank you for listening and any corrections or comments in my understandings of tech, admin, policy or anything else of those times. (Accuracy being of interest for historical purposes.)
Last edited:
