..
Many mixed feelings & memories, simultaneously flooding in. I'll just write it as it comes without any attempt to edit my thoughts or trying to make it politically correct. It is what it is. . .
I knew Owen when we wuz both SO, running around on a ship or whatever. Then, later, he got promoted to "CAPTAIN" Starkey and they awarded him with his very own admiral's costume as a top planet saver in Dr. Hubbard's Salvation Navy.
Owen was a brilliant public speaker and crack sniper in "closing deals". Smart! Funny! Entertaining! Focused! Certain!
Yeah. Very very very very very certain!
And isn't that exactly what all loyal Bridge climbers and sector salvagers most aspired to? That unambiguously dreamy state of "total certainty" where doubts and blinks have been erased from ones effortlessly upward spiraling power dynamics and graphs?
On the other hand, Owen could be an ultra-strict disciplinarian, lowering the doom & gloom & boom of cult "justice" if anyone didn't do what Ron (or he) wanted them to. With the flick of his finger, Owen could banish a SO member to lower conditions on some remote SO vessel where mortifying acts of contrition, endless anchor scraping and confessions of evil would be one's only possible path back to good-standing and, therefore, eternal salvation. We're talkin' eating KookAid right out of the little packets, without even adding water!
Paradoxically (or do I dare say hypocritically), Owen the ethics sermonizer had a wicked "party" streak running in him that could just as easily wind him up drunk at a nighttime SO party, banging a registrar while both were standing up against a backyard fence (that happened, while he was married to Nan during the same time he was dispensing "unreasonable" ethics proclamations and com evs on others by day).
But, he never gave up on his beloved tech and "knowing how to know" even though he didn't know that his trajectory was tragically doomed all along, the inexorable end-of-routing-form for all Sea Org members when they are brutally fitness boarded, kicked out and "beached" when they can't produce a 100 hours of work per week struggling mightily against impossible targets to "Clear the Planet" and other Sisyphean loyal officer buffoonery.
Years after I had left the SO I ran into Owen who was still a "force" around Flag. I was public getting auditing and he was doing whatever they had him doing, but as always walking quite briskly with untold determination wherever he was going. We spotted each other and approached in an oddly friendly but uncomfortable moment. I wasn't quite sure how a hardcore SO member would greet their old "mate" now that I was a full-blown "DB"[SUP]1[/SUP] (having fully blown from the SO) and now committing the unseemly & disgraceful act of showing up for "paid auditing" as a member of the (gasp!) theety-wheetie "public"!
Well, here's the punchline, I suppose. Owen knew we had been friends and co-workers, but he also "knew" that he had to maintain "ethics presence" at all times. He also "knew" that he had to apply the tech to me in some fashion because it was unseemly that he be seen talking to a DB in plain public view in the lobby of Flag. Within a few moments I noticed something very strange indeed. Owen started babbling all kinds of critical statements about all kinds of people and things that we were not even talking about. I was thinking WTF??!! Then suddenly it hit me. I was a "1.1" (ya know, DB who blew) and Owen was using his trusty little TONE SCALE and going 1/2 to 1 tone above me. Antagonism. He wasn't antagonistic towards me but everything out of his mouth was antagonistic (in a ridiculous and irrelevant way) against OTHER things that had nothing to do with our conversation.
I watched him applying the tech to me and said nothing. It was a moment of startling clarity to see how blindly disconnected and "out of com" the masters of communication could be. In Owen's mind, he was "handling" me by bringing me "uptone". He did his duty. And, you can plainly see that it worked, judging by how uptone and theta this post is. LOL
In any case, sorry to hear of Owen's demise at the hands of his own trusted comrades. Sure, it might be "karma" that he doomed so many others to the same fate, but I think it may be much simpler than that when considering this principal:
Scientology generally degrades, ruins or destroys everything within its wake & gravitational influence, even itself.
That's the freight train that I think Owen ran into. Sorry about that old chap. Hey Owen, if you can hear or feel me in this post, let me suggest something, sir. Do a little reading about Scientology and Ron on the internet. It's never too late.
[SUP]1[/SUP] According to Dr. Hubbard, who was both a doctor and nuclear physicist, anyone who left their one-billion year servitude (to the Commodore and his Sea Organization) was a "DB" (Degraded Being). That's precisely what he wrote in his church's "scripture". No exceptions. Despite the horrific wholetrack implications of declaring so many of his Clears and OTs to be "DBs", the Commodore was nonetheless able to successfully discover new technology which enabled his SO to be able to accept and deposit the DBs' DBs (Degraded Beings' Degraded Bucks).