First of all, I should make it clear that I don’t believe that any of the materials published after 1980 under the name of L.Ron Hubbard were actually written by him. Some might really be based on earlier materials or notes, but nothing can be trusted, and the frequency that the new management (well, not so new anymore) has come up with “notes which were found lately” has made the whole matter of “old but never released tech” very untrustworthy – I tend to think that LRH in his time was quite on the top of his own research and was able to decide what to release in HCOB form and what not. Actually it is not even clear what to think of bulletins of the 1979-1980 period – some have obviously been put together from earlier (but published!) material, so we better make up our own mind about those, too.
One of the things that caught my curiosity for some years already is the False Purpose RD. It came out in 1984 so was out of question for me – in the negative sense – but quite a few auditors and pcs I met since are convinced it was one of the better pieces of tech or even one of their best experiences in auditing ever. However there were also quite a bunch of pcs that swore that they have never had a more horrible experience than on the FPRD, some describing devastating cave-ins with long-lasting consequences.
So I wanted to find out about the technical background of it all. The following is a summary of noteworthy points which I found while studying the FPRD course materials for this purpose.
One of the first issues in the pack (checksheet of HCO PL 16 June 1984, I don’t know about later updates) is HCOB 28 Feb 84 “Pretended PTS“ which talks about persons who don’t improve on PTS handlings and continue suppressive actions because they are “on the other side of the coin“ and thus can’t be reached by PTS Tech. It is stated that those cases resolved under Sec Checking when additional questions for evil purposes regarding the target of their overt (e.g. the org) were added.
This is followed by Bulletins about Psychosis and “The criminal mind” (15 Sep 81), in which you find the statement:
„THE CRIMINAL IS NOT MUCH BENEFITED BY THE GIVING OFF OF CURRENT WITHHOLDS AND IS NOT LIKELY TO REFORM BECAUSE OF THIS.
One, therefore, has to get down to the basic evil intentions, as in Expanded Dianetics.“
However, this is directly followed by:
„There is another approach in that same area of technology which is finding what act the person really can take responsibility for. It is a gradient approach. The criminal is basically so subjective that an auditor will find, in the short run, that improving the reality of such a person is needful before any effective, overall improvement is obtained through pulling withholds.
Thus, TRs and 8-C and
even ARC Straightwire are indicated as first steps. If these are done,
and as responsibility rises, expect that overts could begin to pop up
almost of their own accord.“
Even if this is due to its date probably not an LRH issue any more, it at least concedes that you have to bring a person up to being able to confront their overts – which is in accordance with all of LRH’s earlier statements about the matter.
Several more HCOBs, some
“doubtful” (after 1980), some older, about
criminality, SPs etc. follow.
The student is all set in a frame of mind directed toward suppressiveness and criminals.
Then, after the ExDn Lectures, the actual FPRD tech is introduced. It starts with FPRD Series 1, HCOB 5 June 1984R “The False Purpose RD”. Here we find the basic stable datum of the FPRD:
“Where a being has accumulated nonsurvival purposes and intentions, he will be found to be having, doing and being far below his potential. Having committed overt acts (prompted by false, nonsurvival intentions and purposes), he then restrains himself from action.
Achievement, stability, certainty, respect for self, and even the thetan’s innate power can seem to deteriorate or disappear altogether.”
The point I am making is: note the text in brackets. Overt acts are prompted by false, nonsurvival intentions and purposes. Now compare this to LRHs “cycle of an overt”, which as a first step has that a being doesn’t understand the meaning of some word or symbol (or can we generalize: of a communication) of another, thus misunderstands the area of the symbol (or the user), feels different from or antagonized toward the user and so eventually makes him alright to commit an overt. (Tech Dic, ref. HCOB 8 Sept 64) Or look at the definition of overt act in the Tech Dic, taken from SHSBC lecture of 27 Oct 64: An overt act is committed in an effort to resolve a problem.
Finally we find the HCOB of 9 June 60, “The basic assumptions of Scientology versus overts”, where Ron presses home the point that a being is basically good and concludes in the sentence; “Only a being with valences commits overts harmful to others as he is behaving as he supposes the ‘evil’ valence would behave but as no unvalenced being does. (There is a lot more interesting data to be found, especially in the tech materials of 1960 and the red volume IV; one HCOB that should be mentioned in this context is HCOB 22 Dec 60, “Overt-Withhold, a limited theory”.)
Let’s look further into the course pack. Next is FPRD series 2 which gives the justification of the whole development. It starts out with this:
“In a recent review of several cases, I’ve unearthed some vital tech in the fields of pulling overts and handling evil purposes that had been ‘lost’ (buried) by certain SPs who’ve long since departed.”
Honestly, that
doesn’t make sense to me. The tech was long since buried, and
now LRH unearths it?
However let’s look further:
The issue continues with the assertion that Sec Checking Tech was lost out of practice after the advent of Expanded Dianetics (is that true?) and some years later put back into use (“with a vengeance”, the issue says!), but:
“But not all of
the tech was restored: The tech of handling evil purposes had been
omitted!”
And the conclusion:
“The fact is
that any auditing aimed at handling the basic factors that can stall a
case cannot succeed up to its full potential unless it includes BOTH:
A. THOROUGH, VIGOROUS PULLING OF THE PC’S OVERTS, AND
B.
TRACING THE OVERT BACK TO E/S OVERTS ON
THAT CHAIN AND BACK TO THE UNDERLYING EVIL PURPOSE AND CARRYING IT
THROUGH TO A FULL BLOW.”
Interestingly enough the issue gives a list of quite some reference HCOBs and PLs, mostly from 1979 to 1984 (none of which have anything to do with Evil Purposes, Expanded Dianetics or Sec Checking), but it unfortunately misses to point out any reference that sec checking tech included anything like “tracing back the overt back to the underlying evil purpose”.
If you look at the index of the red volumes, you will find out that all entries for “evil purpose” have to do with the Expanded Dianetics Tech and none with Sec Checking.
So far, we can see that the
FPRD tech starts out with a wrong stable datum, contradictory to
earlier stable data on overts, and includes a lie about the fact that
this is basically “lost tech” resurrected.
The next few issues introduce the tech of the FPRD (starting off with some HCOBs and lectures of 1961 about the Prior Confusion technology).
In brief it works like that: You have a list of questions about possible overts or evil intentions. On overts, you take the reading ones earlier similar to F/N (including asking for justifications, which per the HCOB 10 July 64, “Overts, order of effectiveness in processing”, is not advisable below Grade IV, but is here introduced as a from now on general tool in running overts, e.g. in Confessionals). After that you ask whether there was an underlying evil purpose to that overt chain, and if this question reads (or the reading basic question was directed to an evil purpose rather than an overt), you spot it and the prior confusion that came before adopting the Evil purpose, if necessary finding earlier instances of adopting the purpose and earlier to that prior confusions. Finally, when you get the first moment of the first prior confusion, the whole thing will blow with a big F/N and win.
The datum that a fixed solution is preceded by a prior confusion is undoubtedly correct and stems directly from LRH references. See the following quote from HCOB 2 Nov 61, included in the Tech Dic under “prior confusion”: “All somatics, circuits, problems and difficulties including ARC breaks are al preceded by a prior confusion. Therefore it is possible to eradicate somatics by sec checking the area of confusion which occured just before the pc noticed the somatic for the first time.” We will come back to the second sentence in a moment, but let us first look at the first.
LRH doesn’t mention postulates or purposes there. The FPRD bulletins equal here the evil purpose with a postulate and state that a fixed postulate is preceded by a prior confusion. Actually this might not be a contradiction to LRH tech. We must remember that the main application of the prior confusion technology was and is the Problems Intensive on Grade I, where you ask the pc for self-determined changes in his life and spot the prior confusions which went on before that change. You could argue that a change (with which the person wants to solve the problem connected with the prior confusion) is based on a postulate and that this after all is not so dissimilar to a postulate that gives the person an evil purpose. You could even say that taking on an evil purpose is a kind of a self-determined change in the life of a person.
But if we accept that we still are left with another question: In the Problems Intensive, the area of the prior confusion was cleaned of overts and withholds regarding the terminals involved in the confusion. (Later this was changed to prepchecking the time period, but repetitive prepchecks also uncover overts and especially withholds.) This was meant to unburden the whole area connected with it.
In the FPRD, we have the overts
later than the prior confusion, so instead of solving the prior
confusion by handling the overts, here the overts are solved by
handling the prior confusion. And actually the confusion is not
handled, but just its earliest beginning spotted. So this is quite a
different application of the “prior confusion”
technology. Maybe it has to do with the fact that the FPRD tech is
based on a different assumption re the prior confusion: If you listen
to or read the LRH lectures on the subject, especially the SHSBC
lectures 3rd, 10th, 11th, 12th and 17th Oct 1961, you tend to think
that the person got himself into trouble and into the confusion by
non-confront and overts and especially withholds. But in the FPRD
series 3, HCOB 7 June 1984, it says:
“I have just made a breakthrough of magnitude on the subject of the prior confusion while engaged in whole track research. This tech has a broader application than was originally envisioned.
What has actually been spotted here is that the psychs on the whole track created a confusion originally and used the overwhelm of that as the knockout for the implant. They didn’t, at that stage of the track, have any other tools to knock beings out. So the mechanism of prior confusion is very early and very dominant.
This breakthrough on the prior confusion comes from spotting the first moment of the confusion.
This does not mean that a pc, in running back an evil purpose, is necessarily going to contact an incident containing a psychiatrist. But you as the auditor should know that that is what this tech discovery is based upon.”
So this means that the basic prior confusion here is other-determined.
I guess you can have different views on the validity of this assumption. But I want to point out that this tends to say that the person was put into confusion by implanters and made to assume an evil purpose. (This is something else as the self-determined change after the self-caused prior confusion in the LRH tapes.) If this were true, than you would try to blow a major engram (an implant) without touching more of its content than the earliest beginning and the evil purpose the pc took on during the incident. This might work if the evil purpose equals the postulate of R3RA, but still would be amazing on anybody but a person high on the bridge – because per Dianetics tech you run a chain of incidents downward to get at the basic, most charged incident, and then run it maybe many times through to unburden it enough so that the pc finally finds the postulate in it and erases it!
Another point to consider is the fact mentioned in the HCOB of 9 June 60, “The basic assumptions of Scientology versus overts”, quoted above, that all overts are based on an out valence situation. So the FPRD would not go to the basic of out valence and try to improve the valence rather than the being.
I am open to new viewpoints and things I might have overlooked in this analysis. My most important points are:
Added to that of course are the
problems of administering the Rundown to persons not fit for it. My
personal assumption why some pcs had very bad experiences or even
cave-ins on this Rundown is the heavy stress on overts and evil
purposes. It violates the HCOB 23 May 71 VIII, “Recognition
of the Rightness of a being”, and is certainly out of
gradient if given to a person below Grade 2 or even Grade 4 (which is
okay to do as per the FPRD HCOBs).
I would be glad to receive any technical comments on this.
Heimdal,
November 2005