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Albert Ward

A raving made thetan is far more sane than a normal human being. But then as you audit, observe it for yourself.
L. RON HUBBARD

A sinister-looking man of about fifty sat down to dinner with us one night at the manor. I got the story on him from Richie Blackburn. A PTS-3 (an extreme case of Potential Trouble Source), Albert Ward had cracked up while doing the Clearing Course and was under twenty-four hour watch. Richie and two staff members from the Hill had been assigned to guard him in shifts. Albert Ward was not a tractable PTS-3, like Sam Veach. He sat quietly at the table, not talking to anyone and not looking at anything in particular, his mouth fixed in a smugly defiant expression, as though he were confirming to the world, "I was right all along." He appeared to be insane.

Richie told me that Albert Ward wished to return to America, but the organization were loathe to let him leave in his present condition. Ralph Wilkins wanted Albert to move to a hotel in town, but hadn't been able to arrange for a place where he could be guarded. Ralph was sick of the organization imposing PTS-3s on him for their own convenience, and some of his boarders were disgusted at seeing the place used as a dumping ground for the mentally disturbed.

After dinner I sat with several of the others in the kitchen while Richie prowled the corridor near Albert's room or tagged along behind him in the woods when Albert went out for a walk.

There in the kitchen I heard OT VIs Olga O'Brien and Mike Glassman discussing the OT III process, the third level above clearing. They referred to it as The Wall of Fire.

"It's like walking a tightrope over Hell," said Olga. "One slip and you're in it."

"I bet when Albert Ward was doing the Clearing Course he kicked in something from up ahead on OT III," Mike said. "Ron softened the original process because so many people were freaking out on it. Even the one we did was a revised version. There's still enough on it to drive some people insane."

The following night, Ralph Wilkins wanted to take Albert Ward to town but couldn't get the PTS-3 to leave his room. Mike Glassman stepped confidently down the hallway and gave Albert commands in a Tone-40 voice, a penetrating bark used by auditors to express Ultimate Intention to troublesome preclears. Albert wouldn't budge. Olga tried soft cajolement. But neither she nor anyone else could make Albert get into Ralph's van, and no one wished to use physical force on him, though Richie had a baseball bat ready if clubbing proved necessary. Richie was red-eyes and irascible after two sleepless nights on guard duty, and felt that Albert or the organization or both had some sort of vendetta against him.

Next morning I was informed that Albert Ward had left in a taxi by himself at one a.m. I never found out what became of him.

 

To conclude the theoretical part of the checksheet, we did clay demos of the End-Words Process. According to Ron, demos sharpened knowledge in an almost magical way, but I never got much out of them; a verbal exposition would have saved a lot of fuss. However, it felt good to be in a standing position for a change, playing with the mushy clay. Models of a GPM were required. I glanced around at other students' demos. All looked similar to Ron's model in his film: clay balls loaded on barges. A demo of a Solo Audit session had to include a small figure seated at a table with E-meter and an "auditing comm line" running from the figure back to itself, since self-auditing was our context. Labels bearing auditing questions were spaced along the comm line. All of the Solo Audit demos I saw looked like clotheslines.

While making up my demo, I had a dim recollection of something disturbing in the E-F Packs, one of the crazy implants of a bear or a gorilla ... or was it a spider? The material eluded me. I left the clay table and signed out the E-F Packs. If I could just find the bulletin and read it a few times the thought would stop bothering me. I couldn't find it, and still feeling uneasy returned to the clay.

To illustrate end-words I moulded two figures of a man, one propped up on his feet labeled Standingness, the other flat on the table, Lyingness. I motioned to the Instructor that I had a demo ready for his inspection. He took one look at the labels and blew up at me. "Man, those are highly-charged, restimulative words! They might even be in the bank! Use your head, forcrissake. Don't ever leave stuff like that lying around again!"

Later that afternoon I took sick. The clay table was in a strong draft. I felt flushed and feverish, and by six o'clock I wanted only to get into bed, and retired without any dinner.

I awoke early the next morning and couldn't get back to sleep. Something like a malevolent force kept me awake mulling over the coming Solo Audit. I lay shivering under the covers, thinking of all the words for what I was dramatizing. They ended in "-ness." One of them was Unhappiness. I had been in Sussex for several weeks, with perhaps moths to follow, away from city streets and old friends, subjected to discomforts and discipline which left me with no time to myself. I had denied myself what I considered "living" as a test of my determination. Now in the early morning hours it struck me that my life had become forlorn.

As light began to brighten up the room and the first birds of the morning shrieked in the treetops, a vibration shot through my stomach like a charge of electric voltage. It was fear. I lay huddled around the shock, repulsed by the feel of the sheets against my body. I was aware of the sharp, antiseptic smell of the English coal-tar soap on the windowsill above my heard, and the shrill buzzing of an electric-razor converter under the bed just below my pillow, sound and smell that keyed in primitive terror from the bank.

I needed a smoke and rummaged in the ashtray for a cigarette butt. I tried to sleep once more, but ended up going downstairs to the dining room, where there were unemptied ashtrays on the table from the night before. At six o'clock I got dressed and made myself a cup of tea. In my clothes and fully awake, I was able to identify the trouble. I was getting close to the reactive mind, was in fact at the very edge of its core and the chasm lay beneath me. I remembered the phrase "fighting the tiger." The words were now more deeply meaningful to me than ever. I was fighting the tiger of the reactive mind. Ron held that a thetan was basically superior to the bank. It would take a struggle to go with little sleep until Solo Audit and perhaps clearing, but eventually I would tear the claws from the beast and put an end to my fear.


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