I had to get auditing on my PTSness. The person doing this auditing was a student and I had to help him get through some cramming before he could take me into session. We went up on the roof of the building in Lee Street to do a thing called “50-foot TRs,” where he read out lines from Alice in Wonderland and had to say them to me over the distance of approx 50 feet. Then he took me in for some auditing and it didn’t go well at all. I felt crap after it and had “red-tagged” (means had not been doing well after the auditing so a big red tag got put on my folder indicating it had to be fixed up immediately). I got taken back into session the next day and patched up but I still wasn’t feeling too good.
A few days later I’d gone to see one of the day staff to get my back fixed (she did adjustments) and I mentioned what had happened so she just calmly asked me for an “earlier-similar” type of upset to the one I’d mentioned in session and the next thing I knew I was back in 1930 and told her all about what I could recall of this particular time. I suddenly felt a lot better so I decided it must be real and we had a cup of tea and I went on my way. Just down the street from her house (it was a Saturday night) was a concert being given by an old folkie (I thing it was Tim Currie) so I went in and got glared at by the performer as I was late but I didn’t give a shit – I was feeling fantastic. I walked to the front of the hall and squatted in the aisle and listened and I had no problems just being there and listening to the music – a far cry from my old days of being totally stoned whenever I went to any sort of gig,
The staff courseroom in Qual took up most of the space there and was usually full of day staff doing their study. Everybody and their dog used to turn up – literally. One of the girls had a dog that she brought to work with her that would run into Qual and sit next to her – the guy being the course sup cracked us all up one day when he was calling the roll before course as he called out the dog’s name too – it was a very unserious place to be then.
There was a fantastic number of new staff who came on in this period – most didn’t stay but every week there were at least four new staff in the Qual courseroom for either or both of the orgs – all very earnestly counting the number of windows in the wall or measuring out how big the courseroom was – it was all part of the first course you did when you joined staff, called Staff Status Zero. It basically just took you around the building and got you to find where everything was.
There was a core of Sea Organization people who ran the Day organization and they used to have their meals in the tiny dining room next to Qual – some nights the laughter and general noise level was amazing as they sat together discussing who knows what but certainly having a wonderful time. None of them are still around that I can now recall – most have died and quite a few left the Church in the next few years.
There was also the famous Scientology touch footie team that I so wanted to be part of but couldn’t because they played on the weekends when foundation was working – I unsuccessfully tried to get off for just a few hours to play but my seniors wouldn’t buy it, so I eventually gave up trying.
There was also a hell of a lot of partying going on – mostly the Day staff people but a few of us Foundation people would turn up and then go to work Sunday morning a little hungover after sleeping on someone’s loungeroom floor. Most of the Foundation staff had steady daytime jobs and didn’t do much partying at all – and all the young women tended to join Day rather than Foundation and I tried to see how I could change orgs but my enquiries never led me anywhere. But the parties were fun – usually near the beach somewhere and then everyone would go for a midnight swim if it were warm. I think I only ever got a minor telling-off once for turning up more dishevelled than usual one Sunday morning after a particular strenuous night – it wasn’t that I was drinking much at these events, but being back in the org by 8:30 Sunday morning was always really tough when all the other party goers were still sleeping in whatever house we’d used.
My pay was minimal IF anything at all. At best I got $10 a week but usually nothing when the average wage in the workforce was around $250 a week. That was all going to change when we Cleared the Planet in the next five years or less so I stuck at it and talked up how good it was and how happy I was now and how I wasn’t doing drugs any more nor spending nights at the pub nor having casual sex with strangers.
I’d begun something called the Sweat Program, something everyone who’d joined the Church and had previously had taken LSD had to do. It involved wearing a rubber-lines tracksuit and running for an hour every day. One also had to take certain doses of vitamins and minerals as well. The theory was that getting the circulation going well every day plus the vitamins would dislodge the LSD crystals that were lodged in the body and flush them out, usually in the sweat as one ran. There were certainly moments when I was “tripping off my head” while doing this – purple spaceships following me and such were fairly common occurrences during this time. It felt good getting fit again and having the drugs “come out” was a bonus – I was feeling so much better while doing it but ended up stopping as I just couldn’t fit in the time. I had been doing it after I got home from the Church and that meant I started running at 11:30 pm at the earliest and finished 12:30am then had a cool-down and a shower and got to bed after 1am every morning and then had to be up before 7am the next morning to do it all over again – it was just too much to keep up. Some of the staff who were in Division One of the org (which handled recruitment, communications and justice) had to finish it or would have to be moved to another Division – as the guys I knew all had full-time jobs during the day as well, I’ve no idea how they stuck it out.
At the end of 1979, the Church moved into its new building in Castlereagh Street in the Sydney CBD. It was a far cry from the tatty old building in Lee Street where it had been. I spent some of my own time helping build the new auditing rooms on the second floor. Then just before we moved, the first un-official Scientology happening was a wedding. It was my senior, Peter Crutchfield marrying his wife Kerry. It was an absolute hoot and I remember thinking I’d never been to a wedding that was just so much fun. When they’d finished exchanging vows, Kerry turned around to the “congregation” and yelled “I got him!” and we all cheered loudly. I never did ask Pete what he thought. That night I got pleasantly drunk for the first time since I’d joined Scientology. There were a lot of drunk people there – there was a continual procession of people going over the road to the nearby hotel to buy cans of beer and bottles of alcohol. By the time we’d finished (which was very late) the hotel had run out of canned beer.
The move to the new building took place over one weekend. All of the Day staff were expected to turn up and help and some of the Foundation staff were given jobs to do with moving: the rest of us were expected to somehow keep doing our jobs while the move went ahead. The idea was to “not stop production” while the move occurred. I stayed back after regular work hours to help clean up and put everything in the right place and helped with some of the truckloads of furniture. It was a real “gung-ho” (everyone pulling together) experience and something I’d never experienced before. It all went smoothly and come the Monday morning the front doors opened at the new location and a lot of us were stiff and sore but very happy. The only cost to the Church had been the hire of a truck – everything had been moved on its back. The labour was all free.
The first thing I noticed was that the Guardians Office people had taken over the best of the top floor office space to themselves. There were two people in a space that, on the lower floors, ten or more of us were expected to share. I never could work out why this was: I was told it was because “they” have to impress the visitors they had as they were working to stop the Church being attacked by the “SPs” – SP is short for Suppressive Person, in Scientology that is an anti-social person who specializes in destroying the good things in life and promotes the bad. It’s an essential part of Scientology doctrine that SPs are behind every attack on Scientology and that SPs always have crimes they’ve committed that they are terrified others (especially Scientologists) will find out about, so they attack Scientology to stop this. So the GO and its later incarnation of OSA spend a major part of their time tracking down these crimes and attacking the Church’s enemies with them. I was told not to think about it as “they” knew what they were doing and were doing a great job making the environment around the Church “safe” for us all to be free to live as Scientologists. I felt a vague disquiet about this but said nothing, just shut up and went back to work.
Not long before this, I had had a volunteer for the GO ask me to donate money to send some people to Saint Hill GO International headquarters to train up to handle all these SPs. He was taken aback when I refused point-blank and quoted a line from the most-used Policy of the Church called “Keeping Scientology Working” – “Attacks only occur because of no results or bad results.” I told him we needed to get Scientology being applied right rather than trying to handle attacks all the time. He looked at me like I’d just given him a maths problem he couldn’t solve and tried to come up with something to say but ended up mumbling something and wandering off empty-handed. I couldn’t believe he’d not understood what I said. I was sure there were others who had the same strange paranoid view as he did. But I just parked it as one of life in Scientology’s imponderables and went back to work.
One great thing about the new building was the basement had a real kitchen and dining area that was set aside for staff. One of the women on staff began to bring in hot meals on the weekend and we actually had somewhere to sit and eat like “normal” businesses did. It only lasted a few years before the space was swallowed up by offices – staff welfare was never a major concern.
It was in the dining area that I first really got acquainted with the Sea Org – the “Elite” of Scientology who work 7 days a week, 14 hours plus a day and sign up for “A Billion years, more or less” to work for the aims of Scientology. An American woman was giving the recruit spiel to someone else and I got interested. Then she found out I had had LSD, which meant I was un-qualified to join. She never spoke to me much after that.
Hubbard had recently released something called the Purification Rundown, a sauna sweat-out with mega vitamins that replaced the Sweat Program I’d never finished. It was supposed to take only a few weeks to do and I was eager to start. The only problem was I had a part-time job in the daytime that was keeping me alive and it was only for a trial period and I wanted to hang onto it in case it worked out and later became a permanent gig. I stuck it out and about six weeks later began the Purif, as it had become known. EVERY day I had to go out to a gym a few miles from the org, get changed and go for a run then sit in the sauna and sweat. I had to do 2 & 1/2 hours to start with and build it up to five hours, with some breaks from the sauna when I was too hot. I was “twinned” with another staff member called Tom and we soon got sick of running to start with so we played squash instead. Then we began to take a break after a few hours of sauna and play squash again. This got stopped, so it was just back to jumping in the pool to cool off then back in the sauna. For the first few days, all I could smell was MJ coming out of every pore in my body, and I felt really stoned too. Then there was speed coming out and some LSD and dental drugs and finally heroin. One night I was trying to do some word-clearing on someone in the org and I had to keep vomiting in the garbage bin. He naturally was alarmed but I just explained to him that “it’s just the smack coming out man” and he dubiously agreed to continue. Then one morning I was sitting in the sauna and everything went clear and still and I really felt like I was there for the first time in a long time. I couldn’t remember having ever felt so clear-headed. I’d finished, and it felt fantastic. I had enormous amounts of energy and began to paint again – not that I ever had much time but at least I could do it again. I’d stopped being able to paint when I began to take LSD in abundance, but now that block was gone. My physical strength was greater than it had ever been. I looked well and felt well.
Not long after this (in August ‘80), one of my friends on staff turned twenty so he, I and his girlfriend went to see the Cure at a club down the road from the Org. They weren’t a well-known band then and we had a great night. I drank my usual amount but found out the next morning that The Purif had diminished enormously my tolerance for alcohol – I couldn’t move until well after lunchtime. My mum for some reason had a mixture of sympathy and amusement on her face when she kept dropping in to check on me the next morning
It was around this time that I decided that I wanted to be a Case Supervisor in the Church. My senior (bless him) was alarmed at this and tried to talk me into being an auditor – after all, one had to be an auditor and run cases before one could be a Case Supervisor and supervise auditors running cases. I didn’t buy it – I wanted to be a C/S. It took me another twelve or so years before I achieved this but it burnt away inside all that time. At the time, I had so much study to do just to be able to do my job that it looked like a pipe-dream but I never forgot it.
I was becoming increasingly broke and also anxious to get outside more and do something other than Scientology. I wasn’t getting any time on study during work hours and I was having trouble getting in some during the day – every staff member was supposed to do 12 & ½ hours study per week in their own time. When you had to also work another job just to survive it became incredibly difficult, and, as much as I liked study, I needed to eat as well. I had no wheels and my brother, who lived hundreds of miles away in the country, had offered to help me put together a really cheap motorbike. My application for leave to see my family at Christmastime the first year I’d been on staff had been knocked back because I hadn’t found someone to do my job while I was away – I was supposed to get someone to do my job and pay them as needed for their time. It seemed unfair to me then: it seems totally insane to me now. Anyhow, I got OK to have a few weeks off to go to my brother’s place and put together a motor bike and then return to Sydney. I was hanging just to get out of Sydney. I’d never been able to stay in the city for any length of time and the last year had been torture for me – I was hanging for some wide open spaces again.