S2EP1 - Mark Shreffler Part I - Working with L. Ron. Hubbard

Scientology Outside of the Church presents "An Evening with Mark Shreffler" Part One, where we discuss his early days in the church, communication, and his participation on the Pro Tr's pilot.Enjoy!

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Transcript

0:00:22 Jonathan Burke: Thanks for listening. This is Jonathan Burke with the advanced of the Great Plains. This is our first show of 2017. We haven’t had a show since what, probably May of 2010. We kind of set it aside. It was really hard to find people to do interviews with. Frankly, I couldn’t get anybody to say yes to an interview. A lot of things have changed in the field since then. A lot more people out. Stranger and stranger things going on with the Church of Scientology itself.

0:00:51 Jonathan Burke: The field is booming. More oT’s, more clears being made probably than ever before. And we’re going to get things rolling again with some more radio shows in 2017. Our first show tonight is going to be with Mark Schreffler, our very special guest. Mark has a long history as a disseminator in Scientology and outside of Scientology. He’s disseminated to tens of thousands of people over the years and gotten many, many people into Scientology inside the church, and is now outside the church himself.

0:01:22 Jonathan Burke: And this will open our first conversation with mark of two. The first question will be asked by Carrie Todd.

0:01:31 Carrie Todd: Hi, Mark. Let’s start at the beginning. Could you give us a little information about yourself and what got you into Scientology to begin with, please?

0:01:41 Mark Shreffler: I’d be happy to carry. It’s nice to be here with you guys again. I went to, well, grew up in Los Alamos, New Mexico, home of the atomic bomb. And like all the other young men there, I grew up wanting to blow stuff up. So when I got to high school and college, I spent them in military school in southern New Mexico, and had a wonderful time there. Great time. But I had a few epiphanies about the fact that we were basically learning how to kill people.

0:02:16 Mark Shreffler: I was like, this really isn’t my purpose in life. So I went in a very different direction when I got to college, studied philosophy, psychology, and anthropology, and very heavy course load. I finished that and went to India for a couple of years. Had some wonderful experiences there. Some of the people that I met were quite fantastic, and I had some experiences that left me wondering, how is it that people are healed?

0:02:49 Mark Shreffler: Because I was providing some doctor functions as one of my jobs in this little village out in the middle of nowhere. And these aspirin that I was distributing were causing some fantastic recoveries from things as wild as tularemia to infections and boils, something as pedestrian as digging thorns out of somebody’s foot. So it was a wide range of interesting experiences, all of which were healed by dispensing these aspirin. Well, sometimes a little physical application was required.

0:03:27 Mark Shreffler: But I was astonished at their healing rate and then discovered later in my time there that they weren’t actually even taking the aspirin. They were taking them home, putting them on their pooja and saying a little prayer, and voom. These conditions were just vanishing left and right. Puzzled me greatly. But now fast forward a couple of years. I was back in the States on a little visit and discovered the dianetics book.

0:03:58 Mark Shreffler: And the first 40 pages of that book blew my mind. That explained everything that had happened in India, all these strange and bizarre experiences in terms of physical healing. And I became quite passionate about it. I started auditing people right out of the book, not knowing there were any centers around. And then one day, somebody passing me on a student mall in Albuquerque saw my dynamics book and said, you got to stay away from these people. They just want your money.

0:04:29 Mark Shreffler: I said, what people are you talking about? And he told me, there’s a center up on Manal, opposite the Kmart. Thank you very much. And I got my car and went up there and walked in and actually started off with a book purchase. I said, I want a copy of everything this man has written since 1950, which kind of stunned this person. And so she took me down the hallway, showed me the bookstore, and suddenly I was in love.

0:04:58 Mark Shreffler: This is amazing. Look at this library. And I looked into this room, and it was just wall to wall books. Said, you know, I’m actually not interested in anything but those things written by hubbard. And she said, well, that’s all we have here. Oh, my God. That’s astonishing. So I knew I’d fallen into a huge battle. Honeydehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehe down the hall, they were doing a course, and I asked them if they had a course I could do in just a few days.

0:05:29 Mark Shreffler: And long story short, I did a communications course. It took ten days. A little inconvenient for me at the time, but the fact is, what I got from doing this communications course, as simple as it was, is a brilliant, brilliant course. I was completely gobsmacked. But then I had to run back to my stuff going on where I was living at the time. And that started me. I finished up my actions, and I went across the water to england, because I found out that the closest english speaking organization was London, which is interesting, because I took off to london overland.

0:06:15 Mark Shreffler: I was on the boat from ostend over to dover, and I got off, and this customs guy says, so, sir, what are you coming into England for? And I’ve been across this border many times. I said, I’m going to do some salmon fishing up in Scotland. And I thought I’d look into the church of Scientology in London. And his complexion changed, and he started asking me all kinds of questions. I mean, going on and on. I said, why are you asking me all these questions?

0:06:44 Mark Shreffler: I’ve been in England many times. They said, well, sir, we don’t allow foreign Scientologists into England.

0:06:52 Carrie Todd: That’s unusual.

0:06:53 Mark Shreffler: Which was astonishing to me. I said, well, what is Scientology? Because, you know, all I knew is that’s the place where I get dianetics, which is the only thing I had any reality about. I wanted to know where I can get more dianetics. And they said, the Church of Scientology in London. So I said, okay, they’re probably sharing quarters or something. So I innocently announced my interest to go to the church. And then I asked to see the guy. Senior, I want to see your superior.

0:07:25 Mark Shreffler: And the superior came out, and he obviously trained the earlier guy, gave the same canned answers and so forth. And they put me on a boat and sent me back to Copenhagen or back to Ostend. Didn’t let me into the country.

0:07:40 Carrie Todd: Oh, my gosh.

0:07:42 Mark Shreffler: That was a. It was very rude. Plus this embarrassing stamp in my passport. So I went back there, and I discovered the closest organization was in Copenhagen. So I went there, and I walked in. I was very pissed off, to say the least. I said, okay, I just tried to get into England and was kicked out because they were saying scientology. They kicked me out because of Scientology. And I still don’t know what the hell, but I want to know what the hell is going on here, because I want to hit somebody right in the nose.

0:08:18 Mark Shreffler: It’s either going to be you guys or it’s going to be those guys. And the person called the assistant guardian was the next person that I saw. And she was delightful. She was absolutely delightful. She handled all my questions with references, spent a couple of hours with me, telling me all these various stories and backing them up with documentation. And I thought, okay, you’re the good guys. This is what I thought. And I would have expected that from a man who wrote this book, which I was still quite enamored with.

0:08:51 Mark Shreffler: Anyway, I got my first auditing there in Copenhagen, which was objective processes, which, of course, was weird for me. You know, follow my hands, contribute to their motion, this kind of stuff. I think this auditor is just practicing or something. On a number of occasions, I said, when are we going to do dianetics? It was right out of the origination sheet and the training manuals. But I never did get to that. I just got halfway through and then decided, okay, I had this rather interesting incident happen. Long story short, I ended up going back to Paris. When I got there, there was a call waiting for me from London.

0:09:34 Mark Shreffler: They’d been expecting me since I left New Mexico, because I told them to call ahead, tell England that I’ll be coming across. And this guy named Hamish was on the phone. He says, where are you? I said, well, I’m here. I mean, back in Paris, I got kicked out of it. When I told them that tale, they said, and they said, what are you gonna do now? I said, well, I’m gonna go back to the States and continue with this dianetics.

0:09:59 Mark Shreffler: He said, why don’t you come here and join staff? Did you hear what I just told you? And he said, yeah, but if you come in via Ireland, they won’t check your passport. No kidding. Is that a fact? So that’s right. That you can come in by a. So the next day, I was back in Ostend on a boat to Dublin this time, and sure enough, I got to Dublin. I went through customs, no problem, jumped on a train, came across the London, and I joined staff the London ore.

0:10:34 Mark Shreffler: And I was there for a year until I was getting chased all over the place by bobbies, who discovered I was in the country. It was quite a little drama. But the point is the enthusiasm I had after reading the dianetics book and being so switched on to the workability of this technology, I didn’t care what it took. I’m going to find out more about this getting kicked out of countries. And so I get chased by bobbies all over London.

0:11:04 Mark Shreffler: I’m doing this. And so. But finally, after a year, I had to take off again just because of this rather situation with the police. So I went back to the states and continued. I joined staff in Cincinnati, Ohio, and I spent twelve years on staff in various organizations between London and Cincinnati and Detroit. Then the San Francisco experience began. So that’s basically my history in a nutshell. That lasted until 1989, when I left staff and went freelancing.

0:11:43 Mark Shreffler: And I just. I had business. We’d started a number of consulting companies that were extremely successful because the administrative technology that Hubbard developed is quite a fantastic, miraculous, in fact. So we created some companies that’s handled just about every dentist and chiropractor in the United States, which is, by the way, not the public to be interested in. As much as I love those people, they’ve already been trained, and they just take what they know and go back into their practices.

0:12:16 Mark Shreffler: But anyway, I don’t want to deviate. That’s a brief story of my history. When I. And I got the. When I finished that tenure, I took off and started just touring the world and doing events all over the place. And that was tremendous fun. Lots of friends made everywhere. I got to see Scientology all over the world.

0:12:38 Carrie Todd: That’s really cool.

0:12:40 Mark Shreffler: That was a lot of fun.

0:12:42 Carrie Todd: So you said your first course was the communications course?

0:12:47 Mark Shreffler: That’s right.

0:12:48 Carrie Todd: And how did you find that?

0:12:51 Mark Shreffler: Well, it was. It was brilliant. It was brilliant. I’m definitely one of those show me guys. I want to see it with my own eyeballs and so forth. And this course left nothing to the imagination. I mean, you went in there and you’ve got to have some hard bark on your ass to get through this course. There’s no question about it. But I was completely impressed with how simple these exercises were. I mean, this is a communications course that left no stones unturned.

0:13:29 Mark Shreffler: It was thorough, it was simple, and it was just so fundamental that many, many different issues in my life were just disappearing. This wasn’t business life and stuff. This was just my thought process simplified. My communication skills, obviously, were amplified tremendously. My willingness just to be there comfortably was greatly enhanced. You would be amazed how many conversations begin because people are uncomfortable with the alternative of silence.

0:14:07 Mark Shreffler: You wouldn’t believe how many problems people create for themselves by opening their mouths. But this course was quite fantastic. I was completely impressed with it. It took me ten days to get through. And I mean, as I like to say, I felt like I was sucked through 100ft of garden hose. But I came out the other end of it and it was a new day. It was a. It was a great way to start this adventure that then lasted for what, 40, 45 years?

0:14:44 Mark Shreffler: Dang thing I am. I haven’t finished.

0:14:47 Carrie Todd: Right, so let’s fast forward to the pro TRS pilot that you were a part of. Could you describe that?

0:14:57 Mark Shreffler: Yeah, I was on the internship for dianetics auditor at the time, and there were twelve of us. And we got a tape one day from communique from LRH, one day that said he wanted to see a copy of an audio tape from each of the interns. And so immediately thought, okay, great. LRH looking over our shoulders. This is pretty cool. And so we turned in the tapes, and a couple of days later, a communique came back that said, all crew auditing is to stop immediately.

0:15:39 Mark Shreffler: And as the intern supervisor was reading this communication, we were looking at each other going, what did you do to your PC? Mine are doing great, because he was stopping the auditing. I mean, this is how big this problem was. We had briefing course people. We had one class eight. We had a whole bunch of grades, auditors and so forth. It was a broad selection of auditors on this internship, and all crew auditing is supposed to stop.

0:16:17 Mark Shreffler: That, to me, seemed pretty severe, because I know my PCs were winning, and so was I, and it’s going great. But then a couple more days passed, and the order came down that all flag interns are to report to the international training and get their OT and TR zero, flat, flat, flat for 2 hours.

0:16:41 Carrie Todd: Oh, wow.

0:16:43 Mark Shreffler: And that was the beginning of what became the most important thing I ever did in my life. That was, without any doubt, looking back over my entire history in scientology, the most important thing that ever happened to me. I created an entire career out of what I learned on that course with LRH. It was quite something. So, anyway, the word went out, because he’d been working on these trs, you know, since 61. I mean, he was serious about the TRS.

0:17:15 Mark Shreffler: If you don’t have your communication in, which is what is accomplished by these training routines, if you don’t have absolutely great trs, the supervisors at upper levels aren’t going to be teaching their levels. But these drills, you’re just out of communication. And if you’re out of communication, you’re just like a psychiatrist. You’ve got to get these things in. Well, this all became very, very real to all of us, because these guys coming in were class eights and class six, and grad five auditors, the lead auditors and css from every on the planet.

0:17:53 Mark Shreffler: So one of the other points is, suddenly I had a whole new bunch of friends from all over the world, which prompted the later tour that I did around the planet, because I already had communication points in every. So that went for me. It was about eight months that I was there before I got a pass from LRH. And that was a. The amazing thing is, God, we could spend an entire podcast talking about that pilot.

0:18:32 Mark Shreffler: It was unbelievable, the kind of things that happened. I mean, when we did, we did the long confronts again, and this time, we actually did them correctly. And I didn’t realize I was doing them incorrectly before. But then when you read the bulletin, and what does that word say? And you tell him what it means? And he goes, okay, let’s have a look at what that word means. And you look up, the word in your head kind of spins on the axis. Like, no kidding.

0:19:05 Mark Shreffler: I didn’t realize that that’s what that word meant. And suddenly you’re passing through these training routines. It researched a whole lot of different things, because we were not there just to get our own TRS in, to get our own communication skills correct, but we were there to find out why this had not been happening in all of the prior years. I mean, LRH was, like, at the end of his stick on this particular subject.

0:19:37 Mark Shreffler: So we developed the method nine technology, the false data stripping technology, all kinds of things that later resulted in the key to life course and the life orientation course. And in a very. Actually a wonderful reference that modified his earlier references on the TRS. So it was a lot of work that went into it, and we were taking all kinds of notes about what we were doing that was causing changes. For example, there was one particular attitude that I had on my communication cycle that was just something that I was adding in there.

0:20:21 Mark Shreffler: And Ron noted this. It was very small, wouldn’t have been noticeable for anybody from New Mexico, because we all did it in New Mexico. But he had me read chapter six of Dianetics 55. Dianetic 55 was basically Dianetics 1955. It was written five years after the Dianetics book, and it was all about subject of communication. And this. This chapter on communication was chapter six. He had me read this for the gram, and I did.

0:20:59 Mark Shreffler: I read it, and then I sat down and I did a video, a tr four video, and that went up. And when it came back, he said, okay, I want you to go back and clay, demo every paragraph of chapter six.

0:21:16 Jonathan Burke: So you were that guy?

0:21:19 Mark Shreffler: I was that guy. Oh, yeah. I’m actually mentioned on a bias in a number of places in the trial. Troublemaker. I caused a lot of pain for people who followed me. I haven’t confessed to that very often, but every paragraph, and I have to say, that was a life changing experience. That was. That was really something we also needed to do. I was the first one to do axiom 28 in clay. And that was a fascinating thing, because axiom 28 is simply the comp formula basically causes this effect within tension, attention, and so forth.

0:22:03 Mark Shreffler: And he said, do this in clay. And then, then it was like he was pausing. He said, I want to see large clay, fake ears. He wasn’t monkeying around with these little miniature dolls that you see in many courserooms. I mean, they literally brought a dump truck full of clay. I mean, there are 200 students here, all moving through the same materials. We had a monstrous clay area, but I did my axiom 28 in foot tall clay figures.

0:22:41 Carrie Todd: Oh, my gosh.

0:22:42 Mark Shreffler: I mean, this was. This is like you’re walking into somebody’s living room. These are like real people that did the whole thing in these large clay pieces. And again, it was one of those experiences that you have and think, God, I wish everybody in the world could do this. People would literally walk by this clay demo and have cognitions. Wow. You know, I had to go through all the work, man. It was a hell of a lot more complex than it finally turned out to be, but we actually had this whole clay demo. It wasn’t just a part of it. It was the entire thing on a couple of long tables, and it was.

0:23:28 Mark Shreffler: There was nothing fun about it when I started, but by the end of it, I was not only blown out of my socks, but I loved doing clay demos. I really saw the value of these things. Not these little, tiny, tiny little dodo clay figures, you know, substantial clay. I’m not suggesting that everybody needs to do foot tall figures, but whatever large figures, you know, you’ve got to get as much mass into these as you can.

0:24:02 Mark Shreffler: I felt like I could have a conversation with any one of these clay people. That was a breakthrough for me. The axiom 28.

0:24:12 Jonathan Burke: So, when did you finish this pilot?

0:24:17 Mark Shreffler: I was like, September of 79 I finished, but I was the 7th one to finish. It was. There were a couple of hundred of us in there.

0:24:25 Carrie Todd: Oh, wow.

0:24:26 Mark Shreffler: But here’s an interesting thing, you guys. I was number seven. Marianne O’Donnell from Washington was number six, and the first five were all Mexicans who had arrived at the pilot without speaking any English at all. They knew no English.

0:24:48 Carrie Todd: Wow.

0:24:49 Mark Shreffler: There had been no translations of any of this material in Spanish. And five of these mexican guys were the first people to finish the pilot.

0:25:03 Carrie Todd: Why do you suspect that was?

0:25:06 Mark Shreffler: I know precisely why it was. It seemed like the people who took the. I was the highest trained of the first ten people who graduated, and I was a dianetics. I hadn’t finished the internship. We had started the pilot when I hadn’t yet finished the dynetics internship, but I was the highest trained of the first ten. The ones that took a really long time were the class sixes and the class eights who had been auditing for 1520 years because they had accumulated so many affectations and fixed ideas and attitudes in their comm cycle.

0:25:50 Mark Shreffler: They were stiff and robotic compared to the LRH standard. They just had a whole lot of barriers in the way that the rest of us hadn’t had enough chance yet to build up. That’s the simplicity of it. The Spanish had nothing to get out of the way because this is the first they’d ever even heard of the subject. So they went in with no preconceived notions, with no earlier experience auditing. Oh, that seems to work. I’ll keep saying okay, okay, or whatever the hell it was that they would say.

0:26:22 Mark Shreffler: But these other auditors. In fact, there was one guy, a class eight, who was cs from Aola. I’m not going to say his name, but does he? He was very much in the course room because all these people had been around for years together, but he was doing the same cram several times. And then LRH sent a comm that said, this is no case gain. Send him to qual. And of course, you know what no case gain means, right?

0:27:04 Mark Shreffler: It’s like what? I mean, that brought the whole course room to kind of standstill, and off he went. I mean, he was, he was introverted like you wouldn’t believe, walking out of the course room. I mean, pale and pasty face.

0:27:17 Jonathan Burke: Rightfully so.

0:27:19 Mark Shreffler: Yeah, yeah. But his issue was that he was so much into his own status. He had this presence and this being, this was completely artificial. And by sending him to quall, his life was saved. I mean, they cracked his egg, and he had cognitions and realizations and changes like you wouldn’t believe. When he came back into the course room, his hair would almost turn color, but he did eventually make it through.

0:27:51 Mark Shreffler: But he had to get rid of this affectation that he was wearing in his TRS. As good as his reputation was, the point is, the standard that we thought was the standard up until 1979 was not the standard that LRH had set. He was thinking much higher standards, much better results. When he said miracles. As usual, he wasn’t exaggerating. Later in the pilot, as a matter of fact, I wasn’t a seasoned auditor, but my trs were getting pretty damn good.

0:28:27 Mark Shreffler: And there was a lady from one of the other courserooms who was badly mashed into her head with some, some sort of study barrier. So they sent her over to our course room, and my supervisor picked me out to go do a word clearing correction list. I don’t even know if they still have word clearing correction lists in the church. With what I understand from this conversation yesterday, they have even their own dictionaries in the church now. But this is a word clearing correction list and there were no auditing rooms available.

0:29:05 Mark Shreffler: So we went into the bathroom across from the pilot course room, and I sat on the sink and she sat on the toilet. And I had my e meter on one knee and the list on the other knee. I said, you’re comfortable? All right, well, I guess you can. And so we just did this work clearing correction list, and we went through it, back pack, back pack, and everything was fine. She went through and needle was loosening up very nicely, but her indicators definitely weren’t coming in.

0:29:39 Mark Shreffler: So I said, okay, you got through the list, now we’re going to go through and I’m going to assess it again. And I did. Now here I am, I’m going down this list, and I’m right in the middle of one of the questions on this correction list. And the needle just went free. This is a free. I mean, this was the nicest effort I’ve ever seen. It was, this is, we were in the old wooden boxes at that time. The new meters hadn’t come out, but this was the most astonishing floating needle. Just, I mean, I had to blow down watching her needle float. It was such a wow.

0:30:23 Mark Shreffler: And so obviously, I just stopped reading the question instantly and watched this fn. And I looked up at her and obviously she was in the middle of a moment and she looked up at me and I was looking back at her and just looking at her and, you know, not disturbing her in any way. And she blew out of her head. She was so, so blown out. And the needle went dial wide. And this was the first dial wide fn I’d ever seen. It went into a floating tone arm on a word clearing correction list.

0:31:07 Mark Shreffler: And I just sat there and watched her this and this and this. And I just realized this. I mean, my gosh, this is like an elves whip, for crying out loud, sitting on a toilet. This was, oh, man, I was so excited about this because I really could see in the real world the effect of really good trs. I mean, really good trs. They weren’t in yet. They weren’t even in yet, but they were very good. And so I said, okay, we’re going to wrap this up.

0:31:43 Mark Shreffler: Very gentle ending. And she stood up and wobbled on her feet a little bit, put a hand under her elbow and opened the bathroom door. And we walked across into the course room. We had an examiner area over there. And we walked in and the course room, this busy, busy course room, stopped. And they looked because everybody saw her walk into that course room, you know, an hour and a half earlier, and she couldn’t see the end of her nose and walking in. Now she was a completely different person.

0:32:17 Mark Shreffler: And I mean, the whole course room, like, wow, check that out. And I was. I don’t think I’ve ever been more proud in my life for having helped this young lady discover what it was that she needed to discover to release this much charge from her universe. Anyway, everybody redoubled their efforts and so forth. So, anyway, that pilot was discovery after discovery. I will tell you one fantastic story about that occurred on this pilot, but I will never forget it had an impact on every single student in the course room. It’s a story about LRH, and I hope I’m not rambling on. No, go right ahead.

0:33:06 Carrie Todd: Yes.

0:33:07 Mark Shreffler: Okay. I was running the video line because people now were, by this time, up to tr four, and they would drill it and drill it, and then they would go in, and they would cut a video. And if the missionaries liked it, dan Kuhn and his second were the missionaries for this pilot. That’s when I met Dan Coon, in fact. So if they liked it, it’s going up lines to LRH, who is not very far away. I mean, in terms of speed of traffic, it was very fast turnaround.

0:33:44 Mark Shreffler: And then Ron would watch the video, and he’d turn around and send it back with the cram, the instruction, or whatever. So now I’m running this video line. So, because I always had a video up to run, so I was always running the video. I’d go back and do my correction, and once that was done, we’d send off the tape, and then I would be running the video line. And so I was positioning the camera, and there was an auditor PC. The meter was turned on there between them, and the video was over the shoulder of the auditor.

0:34:19 Mark Shreffler: So it was capturing only the meter and the PC. And, of course, the audio was capturing the comcycle. So you can see the tone arm. And, I mean, you’re getting tone arm on a PC in a 92nd video, just using TRS alone. This is quite, quite a thing.

0:34:39 Jonathan Burke: Now, if I may interject something here. Yesterday, when we were talking about this, you had said that, I guess, early on, you were using meters that were off. Can you throw that in there?

0:34:54 Mark Shreffler: The very first. The very first videos that went up, it was just using a e meter as a prop, but it wasn’t turned on. And as soon as LRH saw those videos, he immediately corrected and said, no auditor worth installed could sit in front of a dead meter, turn those meters on. Because when it started out, it was called the TRS and metering pilot, but if you don’t have your TRS in, you’re blowing smoke if you think you’re going to get a meter to read the way it’s supposed to read.

0:35:26 Mark Shreffler: So we gave up on the metering aspect after a little while just to get these trs, and we eventually brought them back in. But let’s forget the meters. But when you went in, now you’re through your tr four and you’re doing a video for Ron. The meter is there and it’s turned on. PC has the cans. And then as the director of the thing, I would tell the coach to start and the coach would give the student a start.

0:35:56 Mark Shreffler: They would run 90 seconds, and I would give the coach a sign and he would, and the coaching session, and that would put in a can. So, I mean, this thing, this pilot was going on now for a long time. Now we’re up in this six and a half, seven months that I had been there. A lot of these guys arrived a little bit later, but most of them were there within the first three weeks. And mind you, we all have lives.

0:36:28 Mark Shreffler: We have missions to run and orgs to run. And I was the only public person on this pilot. Everybody there was an.org staff member. Their orgs were paying the bill. I was paying this bill. I was really getting sucked through a garden hose on this deal. I was a mission staff member. I worked at the Cincinnati mission. So I’m paying for this out of my own pocket. So I have an additional amount of necessity level. Right. To get through this.

0:36:57 Jonathan Burke: So you were saying about Dan Kuhn and getting it to LRH and everything?

0:37:04 Mark Shreffler: Yeah, yeah. Well, but now I’m running. Now I’m just running the video line now. And then the video. If they. If the twins here liked it, they’d show it to Dan in his second, and if they liked it, then it would go up to Ronnie, and that’d take a couple, maybe three days before it would come back. Because Ron wasn’t just overseeing our pilot, he had all of his other traffic to handle as well. In retrospect, you know, I have no idea what that traffic could have been, but I did know that we’d be out breaking for lunch, and a friend of mine from the flag bureau would be saying, God, I’ve got Ron all over my lines on this major project we’re doing.

0:37:45 Mark Shreffler: How many lines is he on? Everybody gets the idea that Ron’s just working on their stuff because of the volumes of things they’re sending to him. So. But he was actually just coming to the end of his tenure with, with any connection with the church, which I later found out. In any case, one day I came in, in the camera, we have an order. And the order came to me that said, we need to change the cameras. Now we’re going to have three cameras.

0:38:17 Mark Shreffler: We’re going to have a camera on the PC over the auditor’s shoulder, as we already had. Then we’re going to have a camera of the entire session, and then we’re going to have a camera that’s back on the auditor. Now there’s three cameras on this session. And I was like, what in the hell? And, you know, the tone arm is beginning to pack with the amount of time this pilot’s taking. And so I sat down and I wrote a letter to Ron, and we had a big box on the supervisor’s desk. Calm to Ron.

0:38:53 Mark Shreffler: And we were always putting stuff in there, but this now was like, okay, I was pissed. And I sat down and wrote longhand on full scat paper, three full pages, both sides. Dear sir. God damn it. I mean, I’m writing this letter, sir, you know, I’ve been on this level since da da da da da da da. I mean, we were the first people in here, and we’ve been bashing. Then this happened. Now, the check sheet started off with two steps, and then it went to five steps, and now it’s up to 67 steps.

0:39:35 Mark Shreffler: And, I mean, I walked every damn one of them. I’m just blowing my stack. And then there were the freaking clay demos. And then the method nine. The wall of method nines. Oh, my God. That took us a month and a half just to figure out what a method nine was. I am absolutely just venting my spleen just to get it off my chest. Who am I going to tell about this, you know? I’m not going to tell one of the missionaries. I’m not going to tell one of the supes.

0:40:07 Mark Shreffler: I’m not going to turn to one of my classmates. And I needed to vent lrh as you. I don’t know if you guys are around, you’re around, but Ron is still here. But the thing you knew you could always do was talk to Ron when something was going sideways, he would get it fixed, and there was just no q and a in that man’s universe. But anyway, I just needed him as a terminal, and I vented and vented, invented, and basically laid out the entire history of the pilot. And then this happened, and you’re not gonna believe what this.

0:40:47 Mark Shreffler: I couldn’t even believe what I was writing, but I was just writing it to get it off my chest. It was just getting in my way. And the one thing I knew was true is that Ron can have it. He’s not going to be pissed off with me about communicating. So I finished this and said, listen, ron, you know, okay, never mind the money this is costing me, never mind the time this is taken. I am only here because I know I am never going anywhere until I meet this standard. And I’ve been getting huge wins, I’ve been having huge advances, but I’m just sitting here going, Jesus, what is it exactly that you want?

0:41:36 Mark Shreffler: And so that’s it, Ron. I just. I will do fricking anything if it agrees with my own point of view. And I haven’t had any disagreements so far in this pilot. I would. When I would first read the materials of the cram, I would have a little upset, but then I would find my misunderstood word and go, oh, gee, how about that? Makes perfect sense. So, you know, you’re going through a lot of human emotion and reaction when you’re going through this stuff, but you find your misunderstood word, and it’s like a peaceful morning, you know, in July.

0:42:14 Mark Shreffler: So I’m venting. And then I just said, ronnie, just tell me exactly what it is that you want from me, and by, I am going to get it for you. And, you know, love, shref. And I folded it up and stuck it into the communication box to Ron. And I went back to my word. I felt a hell of a lot better just having said it, because I knew I said it to Ron. And it’s like, you know, he can have it. At least it’s out of my head.

0:42:44 Mark Shreffler: And I went back to my studies with my twin. And now it’s two days later, and into the course room walks an officer that nobody in this course room recognized, a woman. Beautiful. I mean, this woman shined. She actually emanated a wavelength. And she had her officer’s cap on and the lanyard about two inches in diameter from her shoulder with eggs all over the bill of her cap. And she walked into the courseroom, and she went up to Joe Ray and who was the supervisor, and of course, as soon as she arrived in there, this whole courseroom goes to a stop. It’s like, who the hell is that?

0:43:39 Mark Shreffler: And she leaned over to Ron and she said, do you have Mark Schreffler in your course room? Jill Ray?

0:43:44 Carrie Todd: Oh, no.

0:43:45 Mark Shreffler: And every face in the room turned to me, all of my friends in Ron going, what the fuck did you do now? Oh, my God. And Joe Ray said, yes, sir, I do. He’s sitting right over there. And I was kind of moved behind one of the pillars in this course room, but everybody now is looking over at me. And she said, would you mind if I had a word with him? And she said, absolutely not, sir. Be my dad. She said, thank you. I mean, this woman had such ethics presence that as she walks through the course room, the people she’s passing are standing up.

0:44:36 Mark Shreffler: This is ethics presence. I don’t know who this person is, but I’m definitely standing up when she walks by. And she was delightful. She had a very nice carriage to her. I don’t know what her name was, never did find out what her name was, but I’ll tell you, this was the picture of ethics presence. And of course, I was on my feet immediately. And she walked up to me and she said, you’re Mark Schreffler.

0:45:03 Mark Shreffler: And I said, yes, sir, I am. And she said, I have a message here from LRH for you. And she handed me this envelope. And, I mean, you couldn’t hear a pin drop in this courseroom. And I took the envelope and said, thank you very much, sir, for bringing me this communication. And she said, it’s my pleasure. Will there be a reply? I thought, oh, shit, I’ve got to read it right now. I really didn’t want to read it right now.

0:45:41 Mark Shreffler: I said, oh, please, pardon me. And I pulled this letter out, and it was from Ronnie, and I read his response to my communication, and I looked up at her and I said, sir, please tell Ron for me that he will have compliance. And she said, I’m sure he’ll be thrilled. Thank you, Mark. Yes, sir. Thank you again for bringing me. And she turned and she walked out, and all those people who had stood up when she came into the courtroom were still on their feet.

0:46:20 Mark Shreffler: And she walked out of the. And everybody looked over at me again, sort of get back to work. And Joe raced it. Okay, Shref, what the fuck does that. She didn’t use those words, but she said, okay, what the hell does that letter say? Come on. And everybody was like, come on, man. What the hell did Ron say to you? That a messenger actually hand carried the message, but I realized that this was an acknowledgement to my earlier communication and that the classroom would not understand this acknowledgement if they didn’t understand what I wrote in my communication.

0:47:09 Jonathan Burke: Right. The context.

0:47:10 Mark Shreffler: So, yeah, they have to have the context. Of this. So I said, okay, I’m going to tell you. And I stood up and everybody was saying that it was like story hour. I’m going to tell you what I told to Ron that he is responding to with this communication. And then I just basically went back through my entire communication to LRH. Now, mind you, there wasn’t a single person in this course room who didn’t have the same bypass charge that I had, right?

0:47:39 Mark Shreffler: We all had gone through this war together. We were brothers and sisters, man. We were. But, you know, this isn’t something you talk about outside of the pilot area. You just never get to talk about this stuff. But I actually laid out the entire history of this pilot and of all of us as a common body in this letter. And in fact, I would say, then I told him this boom, boom, boom, and a whole part of the courseroom would break out in laughter. No shit. You said that to him?

0:48:10 Mark Shreffler: Honest to God, yeah. Yeah. Oh, man, I feel that way. I mean, this courseroom was blowing charge. I was talking about this stuff. Mind you, none of us have been talking about any of this stuff. And here I am telling them what I said in the letter to Ron, and everybody’s just blowing charge on the fact that I’d say that because I would have said that, but it didn’t occur to me to say it to anybody. It was the wildest thing.

0:48:33 Mark Shreffler: But anyway, I got the end of this history lesson and then I opened the letter and I pulled it out. And I mean, talk about a vacuum of silence. It was dead quiet in there. And I said, this is what Ron said to me. Dear Sref, all I want from you is standard Trs. Love, Ron.

0:49:02 Carrie Todd: Wow.

0:49:03 Mark Shreffler: And there was the silence continued for about 5 seconds, and that courseroom went into action. It was the perfect acknowledgement. Whenever you got a communication back from Ron, and I had letter correspondence with him for years, whenever you got a letter back from. Now, mind you, he had many people writing letters in his letter unit, but occasionally he would write one himself, an acknowledgement, or he would originate a letter to you.

0:49:30 Mark Shreffler: And his letter always stood out from the rest like a lighthouse on a beach. It was just obviously from Ron because it was simple, it was to the point, and it was absolutely without attitude. It was just real communication, as was this one. Dear Sref, all I want from you is standard Trs, mind you, six pages of bypass charge. He got it. He totally duplicated it. And this acknowledgement really told me he totally got the communication because the one thing I was interested in was the question I asked him.

0:50:14 Mark Shreffler: What do you want from me? All I want from you is standard TRS. No hidden data loan, no conversation about it. It’s in the references. Everything that I said about trs that you need to know is in those references. That’s one thing we definitely learned. There’s no hidden data line. There’s no verbal tech about these things. Find your misunderstood word good. Found that good. Now you’ll see improvement. But anyway, that was an experience I have cherished ever since just because I felt very close to LRH in that moment, and so did all of my friends on this pilot.

0:50:52 Mark Shreffler: They redoubled their effort. Mind you, this pilot was already making more student points in a week than any continent was making in a month.

0:51:01 Jonathan Burke: Wow.

0:51:01 Mark Shreffler: I mean, these people weren’t just sitting around picking their fingernails. These people were dedicated scientologists trying to duplicate a very important piece of technology. So when, for example, your question, Kerry, about the communications course. It was the most important course for me when I began. But over all of these years, now I understand why. It’s the only course people really need to do, the only exception being if they have a PTS condition, if they have a suppressive influence in their environment, you’ve got to handle that first because this course will so affect them and so enhance their lives.

0:51:40 Mark Shreffler: If it’s an introductory course or if it’s an advanced course, it will bring about such a dramatic improvement that if there is a suppressive agency in their life, that person is going to go nuts when he sees this person improve like this. So you’ve got to handle the pts elements first and then get a person onto and through a good, hard trs course and their life will change. I absolutely love to promote that particular course well.

0:52:09 Carrie Todd: And actually, your story illustrates the importance of communication because your entire classroom, your entire course room totally felt acknowledged with that letter he wrote you.

0:52:23 Mark Shreffler: Absolutely. You’re absolutely right. You’re absolutely right. But the standard is quite something. And the fact that TRS, well, like Ron said in the tape, what is Scientology? He said, these drills are positive jewels of geniuses. I would be the first person to admit that these drills are positive jewels of genius, but I would be the first one to throw them away. If they got in the road of anybody’s communication, remember that and use them accordingly. This is also the tape wherein he mentioned that these drills are steps on the road to clear all by themselves without any further processing.

0:53:04 Jonathan Burke: Ultimately, how did it end for you? As far as how did it all fall into place?

0:53:09 Mark Shreffler: Well, the end result of it was just an LRH pass on my tr four video. You know, the interesting thing about that was it was this the one before my last video to Ron, that tape went up and I. And I walked out of that session, that video session, feeling fantastic. This was. This was incredible. I got. I got nice tone arm in a 92nd session, because, you know, you know, the coach. The coach knows the guys trs are in when he goes into session. You can’t do anything about it, right?

0:53:50 Mark Shreffler: He just goes into session and you can see he’s in session. It isn’t like he’s mocking up being in session, whereas in the beginning, when you see people brand new with working on their trS, their coach has to mock up somebody who’s really chewing on stuff. And really. But at the end of this pilot, your coach goes into session for real. And it’s not because of any tacit agreement that that’s what’s going to happen or anything else.

0:54:18 Mark Shreffler: You just got an auditor sitting there who’s got his trs and that PC is interested in his own case and willing talk to the auditor about it. So you ask him, do birds fly? And he’s, honest to God, looking at birds. Well, I came out of this session and I just felt fantastic about it. I thought, yep, that’s it. This is my pass. I thought, I can. I gotta go get my reservations, you know, my airplane. And I just had this little tiny niggly feeling in the bottom of my spine.

0:54:50 Mark Shreffler: But this is a fantastic video. And the crash instruction came back and said, this man has an overt. Pull it now. That hit like a ton of bricks. It indicated, I must say. But it really caught me flat footed, because just like two to three weeks prior to that, LRH had put the entire pilot through an ow. Light up all of us. He sent down a list of the areas he wanted us to examine. Write up our ows on all of these areas, 35 categories on each of eight dynamics.

0:55:48 Mark Shreffler: And that was an extensive write up that took a month and a half just to get through that write up. And, you know, books, books of OWS now. So I’m working away on my ows and stuff, but I’m also one of the meter checkers. I’m sitting there on an e meter, and when somebody would finish his ow write up, he’d come over and he’d hand it to me and the police have a seat, and I would read through his ows, and.

0:56:22 Mark Shreffler: Very good. And I would thank him for his ows, and then I would give him the meter check. And of course, if I got a read, go back and continue writing. If his needle was floating, he’d get power of forgiveness and off he would go, blown out of his socks and continue with his studies. So I was not only doing my own write up, I was reading all the ows of all these other people. And while reading theirs, I’d be going, ooh, gosh, I forgot about that.

0:56:52 Mark Shreffler: And I. And I would be taking notes on my, my little notepad. Yeah. Remember the time with the tricycle? Because their ows are actually reminding me of my own because I’m on the same cycle they are. So my ow write up was incredibly thorough. And you know how good you feel after a very, very good ow write up right when it’s actually needed, you know, not when it’s enforced upon you, but when you actually need to do it.

0:57:27 Mark Shreffler: And this is Ron on the line. He says, this is what you need to do next. And we all did it, and it was an incredible experience. In any case, here I am, a couple of weeks after that part of the pilot had been done. I’ve been given forgiveness. I had a very thorough. And now he tells me, this man has an overt pullet. There was no invalidation connected to it at all. It was just a statement of reality.

0:57:56 Mark Shreffler: And it was a little unreal to me, as many things had been earlier in this pilot. But as I had always experienced, when I find my misunderstood word or when I find what the thing is, it all makes sense. Well, I was sitting here puzzled about this, so I went in to see Dan in the safe. He said, so he says, I have an overt. He says, well, there you go. Go out and have a look. Yeah, yeah, I guess that’s.

0:58:28 Mark Shreffler: I guess I should. And I went out and I was. And then I realized what it was. It’s fascinating. Just one week before, I had a very good buddy named Ray Facto, who was one of the supervisors with the FSO. And he was on the RPF. He was old fishing buddies. And every night after the pilot, I’d go down there into the kitchen and see him on my way through to my room. And this night I was down there having a chat with Ray. He was washing dishes.

0:58:59 Mark Shreffler: And down at the other end of the kitchen was the steward, the chief steward of the land base. And I thought this was interesting for me because the whole pilot had been. Everybody on the pilot had been eating nothing but rice and beansen. Rice and beans was all that we got to eat for the last month. And a half. All we had eaten was rice and beans. Now some people went off base and they ate in restaurants.

0:59:29 Mark Shreffler: I just thought that was cheating, so I never did. In fact, I got to really like rice and beans. But the fact of the matter is I hadn’t completed this thing after all these months. I deserve rice and beans. I’m not duplicating this. So it was a means by which the missionaire was getting our necessity level up. This was Dan’s order, not Ron’s. And so I was getting pretty tired of rice and beans. I thought I would just like to have one meal.

1:00:03 Mark Shreffler: And then I saw the chief steward down at the other end of the kitchen and I turned back to Ray, my friend, and in a voice that would carry to the end of the kitchen, he said, ray, I’m happy to tell you that TRS pilot was taken off of rice and beans today. Man, am I relieved. And Ray said, no kidding. So you’re back on real food? I said, yeah, yeah, yeah. No more rice and beans for the pilot. I’m very happy about this.

1:00:30 Mark Shreffler: Okay, man, listen, I’ll see you tomorrow night and off I will. Sure enough, the next day at lunchtime, we all, we all had to eat a buffet style lunch because there were so many of us for one sitting that we all, and we ate in two sittings. You know how 100 of us would eat at a time and then the other hundred would go over? So I was in the first sitting and I came back and I’m standing in the line up to the table and Nick Fraser from New Zealand is walking up and down the table and it’s full of food, real food.

1:01:01 Mark Shreffler: And I said, hey, Nick, I stood on the line. I’m the only guy nattering within 100 miles of the land base right here. I said, nick, what’s happening up there? They said, hey, man, there’s no rice and beans up here, Mike. I said, what do you mean there’s no rice and beans? And I strutted up to the front of the line and I’m going up and down the food table taking in all this great food that’s been served for us.

1:01:25 Mark Shreffler: And, and I turned on my heel and I started to head back to the kitchen, but bounced off of my own Overton and turned to Nick and said, nick, go back to the kitchen and find out why we haven’t got any rice and beans out here. He said, Brian. And he turned on his heel and he went back into the kitchen and came back and said, they thought we were off of rice. And beans. They didn’t fix any rice and beans for us.

1:01:49 Mark Shreffler: And I turned to everybody in the line and said, okay, guys, we got 45 minutes. Let’s eat. And everybody went through the food line at that lunch. The second sitting, they had the means ready for them. But for my sitting, we all got a good full meal of real food. Now I realized that was the overt. I can’t even believe it. So I went into Dan and I sat down and I said, sir, I think I know what the overt was.

1:02:25 Mark Shreffler: And of course, Dan himself has wonderful TRS. I mean, a perfect cone cycle. And he said, tell me about it. And I was sitting there with him and I said, you know, remember about a week ago, maybe ten days, we went over for lunch and they didn’t have rice and beansenheid for the first sitting. And he said, yeah, I remember that. I said, well, you know, the night before I was in the kitchen, I was talking with my friend Ray, and I said something to him that I was just like, postulating that we were off of rice and beans.

1:03:04 Mark Shreffler: I was just like saying, you know, we’re off of rice and beans. And boy, I’m so grateful about it, you know, I was just postulating it. But I think the steward was there in the kitchen and he overheard this conversation and assumed that we had been taken off of rice meats. That’s what I think happened. And Dan, with a perfect half acknowledgment. Yeah. And I said, well, you know, as I look at it more closely, I realized that what I said with real intention behind it, I was like postulating, we’re not going to have. And I said, you know, the TRS palate was taken off of rice and beans today. And I really said it like a positive postulate, you know.

1:03:50 Mark Shreffler: And I think the. The steward got the idea that we were actually off of rice and beans. And I looked up at Dan and he said, yeah. I said, you know what, Dan? Truth of the matter was, I was sick of fucking rice and beans. I just wanted to have one meal with no rice and beans. So I told a lie to ray facto with the intention that the steward would overhear it and think that he had fumbled his comm lines. And of course, Dan was a missionary Wright from LRH who had ordered him put everybody on rice and beans.

1:04:35 Mark Shreffler: So I did that. I basically implicated the chief steward in my desire not to have any more rice and beans. I actually did that. That was me who did it. And he sat back and smiled and said, thank you very much, Mark, for telling me about that. And I said, well, you’re very welcome. I definitely feel better having gotten it off. And he said, actually, I knew about it that day. I said, you knew that? How did you know? I said, well, because when I heard that the second sitting had missed their rice and beans, I called the steward over here, and he came over and apologized and said, you know, Schreffler was in the kitchen last night talking to his friend facto, and said that, you know, pilot had been taken off the beans.

1:05:29 Mark Shreffler: And I thought there was just a foul up in the communication system, sir. And I didn’t fix him for the first sitting. And he said, so I actually knew you’d committed that overt the day you did it. And I said, well, why didn’t you. Why didn’t you say anything about it? He said, sherref, you’re the most upstat student I’ve got. You’ve always got a video to LRh. You’re running the video line. You’re here later than anybody else.

1:05:58 Mark Shreffler: You’re being nothing but helpful. I just thought it was a kind of a. It was just the act of a pirate. I thought it took some cheat. He said, I just laughed it off. That’s his shreffler. But he said, and I know that it was going to keep you from getting an LRH pass. I’d have busted your ass off. But the truth is, you know, you know, that was. That was totally okay with me. You were totally upset, and that’s the policy I was applying.

1:06:31 Mark Shreffler: So that was the story. The fact is, this was a video where I felt a little tiny, tiny tingling of doubt because of that overt. And then I. When he said, go in and cut another video, and I went in and cut that video. Now, at the end of that video, I know my trs are in. I don’t need LRA to tell me my trs are in. That perfect. That was a perfect session. And I walked out of there, and I went across the street, and I booked my plane ticket home, and two days later, the thing came to act, said, okay, srep, this is a pass.

1:07:12 Mark Shreffler: Well done. Love, Ron. But I knew it was a pass. Ron, acknowledging it was definitely fantastic, but it was like you’re acknowledging something that you’re being acknowledged for something that you already know. I didn’t need anybody else to acknowledge that my TRS are in. I just didn’t need it. So that was the story of the TRS pilot.