One Year Of Aberree And Scientology

ONE YEAR OF ABERREE AND SCIENTOLOGY

This is the last issue in Volume I of The ABERREE. It may amaze many of our readers as much as it does us to realize that next month, we'll be starting our second year of publication.

It has been an eventful year! On that, most of us in Scientology will thoroughly agree.

In March of last year, we were in Phoenix, and our dreams of becoming a theta clear were no nearer realization than the "guarantee" we'd read when told we were "eligible"--we had $800--to take the Third Clinical Course. We'd gone through six weeks of hard work, and were hangers-on with the Fourth Unit, hoping that by some miracle, the elusive goal we--and, so it seemed to us, most of the class--had missed, would coalesce and find us gazing down at the baldish, "horned" head three feet in front of us.

But on the less personal side, let us look at Scientology itself. Ron had just returned from wowing them in England and on the Continent, with promises "to straighten out Scientology" in America--a promise he is letting the CECS carry out by turning it into a stiff corpse almost ready for burial. The Philadelphia regime had been "shot from guns", and publicly not-ISed, and the school, under the personal ministrations of "the Maestro", had moved to Camden for a short life before turning away from that "largest and oldest publishing center in the U.S.", and returning to Phoenix with its "limited winter resort facilities". Dianetics still was in Wichita, where Ron, in a letter to The GHOST--at that time, the most potent voice in the field--said he expected "a lot more clowning on the part of the Mid-West". And "more suits to embarrass me".

During the last year, we have seen the "only one or two" special Clinical courses for "carefully selected students" continue on and on for anyone with the $800 tuition fee. We've seen the "science" changed into a religion and groups turned into churches and chapels. We've seen sub-organizations set up within the multitudinous parent organization in a confusing array of alphabetical miasma. Auditors have been categoried and ex-communicated for daring to disagree with any of the HASI policies, or pay tribute at new and inflated rates. And Dianetics, rather than becoming a "clowning threat", was given back Ron, free gratis, to be almost immediately disembowled of its original intent and cloaked in the ministerial robes of the theta church.

The former chain of schools, on which Scientology once leaned, is no more--and even the groups have devolved into assessed units that can listen to old Congress tapes and march monotonously from wall to wall in the new, simplified processing that is guaranteed to do nothing more than raise one's ability to do everything except stand up for his own rights and beliefs.

The blue jeans and the bearded faces that showed self-determinism and marked the early Dianeticist have given ground to charcoal black suits and medallions that compete with the ancient battle shields for size and design.

Yes, in the one year since the first ABERREE was printed to inform our many correspondents that Scientology was a religion--our ONLY intention when we got out the first issue--Scientology has changed. And if one thinks these changes are optimum, he has only to read the "Letters to the Editor" in another section of this magazine. The wailings are loud enough that even Phoenix should hear them, despite its barriers against so-called entheta.

In a recent Bulletin to the field, Ron wrote: "The focal pt. is upon Scientology, not its organizations or personalities." Which we think is a wonderful adage if only those points upon which we must not focus would keep out of our hair. When a sub-organization on which one must not focus attention insists that all members pay it tribute at the risk of being brainwashed of the knowledge for which they paid large sums in training, then that "pt." is a little too pointed to ignore.

But it's all a lot of fun. And we don't intend to take any of it seriously. Not even the note by Ron to auditors referred to in the paragraph above.

THE ABERREE

Vol. I, No. 10

March - 1955

The Non-serious Organ of "The Infinites", a Universe of Being as Unlimited as the Name Implies.

Published in the Dark of the Moon--Six to 12 Moons a Year--at 207 No. Washington, Enid, Okla., U.S.A.

Editor--The Rev. Mr. Dr. ALPHIA OMEGA HART, I-2, D.D., D.Scn., F.Scn., B.Scn.(2), HCA, HDA, XXdCECS.

Publisher--AGNES JOHNS0N HART, I-1, HCA, SEC., H.Kpr.

POLICY--If you must take it at all, don't take it so damn' seriously.

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