||||| From: wbarwell Newsgroups: alt.religion.scientology,alt.clearing.technology Subject: Ranfello declaration Date: Thu, 26 Jan 2006 12:02:14 -0600 Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com Message-ID: <11ti3klclqadj0e@corp.supernews.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7Bit X-Complaints-To: abuse@supernews.com Lines: 552 Path: news2.lightlink.com!news.lightlink.com!gail.ripco.com!news.glorb.com!news.astraweb.com!router2.astraweb.com!216.168.1.175.MISMATCH!sn-xt-sjc-15!sn-xt-sjc-09!sn-post-02!sn-post-01!supernews.com!corp.supernews.com!not-for-mail Xref: news2.lightlink.com alt.religion.scientology:1902532 alt.clearing.technology:235141 ** AFFIDAVIT ** JOHN M. RAFANELLO 2441 Beachwood Drive ~6 Hollywood, California 90028 December 3, 1986 Dear Members of the Committee: I will not be appearing before you. The Comm Ev you are now undertaking ~ consider to be a cruel violation of Ron's intent and Policy. ! also consider ib to be a living violation of all the basic ideals that motivated me to be a part of the game called Scientology. However, I also fully and deeply realize that you who have initiated this action, and you who co-create it, do so out of a true sense of duty and love. I know that you not only consider this to be just and on policy, but that you consider it to be the safeguarding of the true path to freedom that all of us seek to follow. Thus I have no quarrel with what you do. I hold no ill will, nor will I ever do so. I respect the choices you have made and the path you follow. For I would be a fool if I were to challenge anything you do out of a sense of what is right. I admire and love all who act within their integrity and do what they feel they must. I trust that you will not judge me too harshly for choosing to do the same. When Ron was called before what he considered to be an unjust trial, namely the suit brought against him by his first son, he chose instead to send his deposition in writing. blaybe he considered he would not be dealt with fairly in the courts. Maybe he simply did not choose to subject himself to the ordeal. Maybe he simply did not wish to be distracted from the work he was doing. But for whatever the reason he chose not to appear in person and I have chosen to do the same. Some in the court considered that by not attending and confronting his accusers, he was, in fact, admitting to his guilt. Possibly some will consider the same of me. But that then is also their choice. In Ron's bulletin of 4 February 1960 titled the THEORY OF RESPONSIBILITY PROCESSING, he stated in paragraph two of page one, "The power of choice is still senior to responsibility. What one does against his will operates as an overt act against oneself" (Page 24 Tech Vol ~ Iv) Back in 1979 I called a Comm Ev on myself in an effort to clear a large number of false reports and accusations that had been circulated secretly throughout the system by particular staff members and members of the GO. Confrontin9 those reports and accusations, and the three months of the Comm Ev cycle, were possibly the most painful experiences of my life up to that point. At the time I could not believe the intensity of the suffering I created for myself, but when I read an excerpt from Ron's Justice policy, it enabled me to create the courage necessary to persist with the cycle. The excerpt stated, "The personal security of the staff member is so valuable to him apparently that when i% is undermined (by false accusations or injustice) he becomes less willing and less efficient and is the real reason for a PTS condition." "The only thing which can actually remedy a general insecure feeling is a renewed faith in justice." (HCO PL 24 February 1969 JUSTICE, page 185 and 186 of OEC Vol-o) In persisting with my Flag Comm Ev I was eventually cleared of all charges, yet when I went to do my next services at Flag, the ethics officer would not accept the results of the Comm Ev. Apparently the fact that it did not find me guilty was somehow adjudicated as proof that it had been done wrong. Thus the need to clear myself started all over again. After 22 years of co-creating these kinds of experiences, I have chosen not to create them further. I am most definitely guilty of a loss of faith in the Scientology justice system. Thus I have chosen what seems to be the only true path open to me, to be the sole judge of my own actions. ACTIONS I HAVE DONE. The following actions I freely admit having done. 1) I conducted seminars in Washington DC at the request of the Snr C/S and accepted pay for having done these seminars. I did this without the permission of WISE and with the knowledge that, in all probability WISE would not allow me 4 to do seminars in an org for pay regardless of the value and worth to Scientology. I did the seminars on my own volition because I felt they would contribute greatly to the individuals who attended them and to the forward progress of Scientology. In my estimation and apparently in the estimation of all who attended, that is exactly what occurred. Success stories from both immediately after the seminar and from some time after the seminar are in your files. I believe they demonstrate that the seminars greatly contributed to the expansion of Scientology. They resulted in increased love for LRH, the tech and for life itself. They motivated people to join staff, purchase services and better conditions in their lives. Seminars of this sort I have done for 22 years with similar results, and for 22 years I have been periodically accused of outnesses that stopped the seminars. The accusations came almost exclusively from people who did not attend the seminars. 2) I gave some one-to-one consulting to some Scientologists in the field and accepted pay for doing so. The statments above also apply to that activity. 3) I allowed myself to go to channeling sessions and listen to a person from another planet knowing that in all probability, ethics would not allow me to do this and would restrict, if not deny me further progress in Scientology. The details of this are in a report that was sent to the HAS of WISE LA and to Flag. (13 Nov 86) I also refused to write reports on other Scientologists who had gone to listen to this being based on the fact that I was not willing to contribute to the idea that they were doing something bad or ~rong. 4) I continued in communication and association with a person who has resigned from the Church, namely Norma Zamit, based on my love of her and my refusal to condemn her for the choice she had made. This I also reported in a KR to Flag which you should have a copy of. 5) I freely allowed myself to love and communicate to anyone I chose to, based solely on my own counsel, regardless of whether the Church or anyone else considered that they ~ere undesirable and should be denied any ARC. 6) I freely allowed myself to give service to anyone, again solely based on my own judgement of whether I could be of value to them and deliver a service that was worth far more than their contribution to me. 7) I allowed myself to lose faith in the ethicalness of the Scientology ethics and justice system as I experienced it being practiced over the last 22 years. I have maintained my love of Ron and the tech but I have also allowed myself to consider that the system holds the system as much more valuable than the individual and would readily cease to love and validate anyone who in any way disagreed with how things were to be done. 8) I have considered and said that I honestly feel that the trouble the Church got into is because it promoted for years, at nearly every event I attended that there are squirrels and suppressives and bad people who oppose it and per the axiom on reality that says, "Reality is the agreed-upon apparency of existence", our promotion has created and re-created this reality. (Axiom-26 Scn 0-8 page 32) If these things are now crimes against the churct] then I am truly no longer a member of this church and maybe I never was. I guess I was a member of what I thought the church was rather than what it was in reality. As corny and as "Old" as the statement is, I feel that love is the answer. And over the years I have seen love and caring take a backseat to any idea that someone might possibly be doing something wrong. To me, we get peace by loving peacenot by hating war. We get standard people by loving standard people not by hating those things we judge to be out-points. We get trust by trusting not by mis-trusting at the drop of a hat. Possibly ill reading this some may feel that I am not facing the potential consequences of my decision not to attend the Comm Ev. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. The pure agony and terror that I have felt when I have envisioned some of the imagined consequences is beyond the power of words to describe. For more than 22 years Scientology has been my life. The misery I feel when I think of losing all that I loved results in the creation of a depth of suffering I would have never thought possible. I fully realize that literally hundreds if not thousands of fellow Scientologists whom I have deeply loved and who have come to call me friend will now be required to cease having anything to do with me or suffer themselves the threat of the loss of their bridge. This is truly the hardest decision I have ever made. I have contemplated it and suffered over it for many years. Over and over through my years in Scientology I have seen people whom I considered to be loving, hard working, dedicated Scientologists turned to misery and despair and sometimes even to enemies of the Church they sought to give their whole being to. Over and over it seemed that the cause was the apparently never ending pain of encountering injustice and accusations in return for their efforts to support theta and freedom. The magnitude of pain I have known in seeing this is nearly impossible to describe. It seenled unjust beyond belief to me that these things would continue to occur in the name of keeping Scientology working. Instead of possible incorrect applications being knocked out I have seen the vitality and love of the people knocked out. It seems now that I can no longer remain a contributor to this and at the same time retain any sense of dignity and integrity. If I am to be punished for the work that brought so much joy and freedom to so many, if I am to be stopped from going free because I dared to grant myself the right to communicate to people I loved that were unacceptable to the Church, then I guess there is not a path to freedom for me within the Church. This realization I have avoided for 22 years. I have refused to believe it despite evidence that year after year demonstrated all too clearly that it was true. How so much wonderfulness got converted to so much pain is something I can intellectually understand but it is not somthing I can any longer contribute to. In my view and apparently in the view of many thousands who attended my events, I was one of the most valuable assets the Church had, and yet the choice of management, it seems, has always been to condemn and waste me and others like me who dared to become popular. I had so wanted to use my talents of delighting people to expand Scientology. Now finally after twenty-two years I see I must face the fact that this is not possible. Actually I am just beginning to realize how PTS and suppressed I have allowed myself to become. When Ron said in the justice PL that the real reason for a PTS condition was false accusations and injustice, I never realized the depth to which that was true. Actually I did realize it on a number of occasions but I refused to acknowledge that year after year the accusations were coming from my Church, from the very people and the system I had given my life to support. Now, though it is one of the most unconfrontable truths I have even encountered, I am beginning to face it. Also I am beginning to discover how much control of my life and freedom I gave up to othrs. How much of my own self worth I allowed to be determined by the Church rather than by myself and how much I worked to try and change people who did not want to change in this respect. In my first decade in Scientology I audited and C/Sed thousands of hours, supervised the Briefing and Solo Courses, served as PES and following my Class-VIII course, served as a key trouble shooting auditor. The wins in these 9 areas were spectacular and I was often called on to solve cases that had been seemingly unsolvable. Using the methods that Ron describes in detail in the chapter called Descriptive Processing in the book the Phoenix lectures, I ~as seemingly able to solve tt~e "impossible" with ease. Yet despite all these marvelous wins it continued to be my seminars and events that were apparently the greatest contributioD to the greatest number. To a great degree the seminars and events were spontaneous and created on the spot using the same methods Ron described in the chapter in the Phoenix lectures. I could write pages on the precision and depth of training I received in the old days and with the old timers, but suffice to say we learned to think on our feet with all of the basics at our fingertips. In previous years thousands would attend my seminars, events and services. By word of mouth alone they would flood to the events. It was both surprising to me and a point of pride. Scientolo9ists would bring their non-Scientology parents and friends, people wtlo were afraid of what their son, daughter or friend had gotten into, and after the event they would 3o away delighted. It was such a joy to be able to do that for them. Other Scientologists would convince antagonistic and hostile people to come to my event trusting that after they finished the seminar, they would no longer be hostile to the Church and the subject. I remember how grateful I was that they trusted me so and how I worked not to disappoint them which it seemed I never did. For away these new comers would walk after a few hours, now convinced that sometiling they thought was bad was in fact wonderful. 10 Old timers brought other old timers who would have nothing to do with the Church anymore, field people who were themselves previously ARC broken, apparently beyond repair, would bring others who felt the same, and in joy and in that wonderous spirit of play Ron spoke of we would all return to the creation of theta and friendship. Those were the best times of my life and it is hard to now have to apparently turn away from that. For always after the events and seminars reached a certain degree of popularity ethics and justice would descend. Always was I ordered to STOP, to cease and desist until I was fully investigated as a possible squirrel, a person trying to put himself ahead of Ron, someone ripping off the orgs, a possible or probable suppressire or at best a dangerous out-tech jerk that needed to be corrected for his own good. And always I would comply and stop what I was doing on the theory that there might truly be something wrong with me or what I was doing, something that even I was not aware of. Often the investigations and ordered handlings would go on for many months, sometimes for years. Often did I succumb to the idea that there was really something basically wrong with me, that deep down unknown to me, I really was a squirrel and a suppressire. In following that track of insisting that I do everything in my power to discover I really was bad, I nearly died, mentally and spiritually, and a couple of times physically. But the physical pain was nothing compared to the spiritual torture I created for myself on the apparent continuing invitations to do so. 11 As in the recent case in Washington DC, one report (or a few I knew nothing about), that alluded to possible outnesses, resulted in the immediate stopping of all the joy and magic that we were creating in the area. And those who dared to have glorious successes from the seminars were investigated themselves. People who previously considered that the seminars were wonderful, were invited to look carefully to see if there was not, in fact, something bad or wrong with what had occurred. I remember being terrified that several people reported in writing that they had gotten more gains from the seminar than they had from two intensives of auditing. At least one person even reported that they got moregains than they did from several intensives of NOTs. Such reports terrified me. I carefully removed them lest someone accuse me of diverting people from the bridge by claiming they got more gains from my seminars. Some after they were subjected to continuing invitations to find something wrong with what I was doing began to "discover" outnesses they had not seen before. These people were then ordered to KSW cycles so that they could increase their "awareness" as to the "dangers" of "Rafanelloism". Those who stuck to the belief that they had gotten wonderous gains found themselves under constant suspicion and scrutiny by fellow staff and Church members. On October the 5th the Qual Sec at DC wrote a report on his observations of my seminars. This was done at the request of the KOT. (A copy of that report is attached to the back of this one.) 12 The report stated my seminars were standard from his viewpoint and he gave me a "clean bill of health" I don't know if he has received any flack because of his viewpoint or not, but I do know from letters and comm I received that at least one staff member and one public person were "closely watched" with suspicion because they continued to think so well of what I had done. Also the Dessem Sec in his KR "cognited" on out points after I came under investigation by higher officials. I do not mean to imply this was done unethically. It may have been and it may have been real clean. Each of us does what we consider best at any given moment and I am no exception. I only wish to report that time and time again I stopped the flow because ~ complied with a justice or ethics order to do so pending a full investigation. When those who loved me found out about these investigations they came forth to help. In times past I accepted testimonies of success and support, thousands of them. I sent out surveys approved by ethics to see if, in their viewpoint, I was out-tech, or in someway setting myself as source. The responses were wonderful, but some were frightening to me. The ones that were frightening were the ones that said they would support me no matter what, that they would always remain my friend and would stay in comm with me even if I was declared suppressire. This frightened me for I did not want these people to lose or endanger their bridge to support me. So I asked that they simply continue to do their bridge and win and that their love and support would always be with 13 me as I went forth to clear up any mess that I had created myself into. I had, by this time, already seen too many loved ones put into confusion and terror themselves based on the conflict as to whether to support me and thus endanger their bridge. Part of my decision to remove myself from doing any more of the Scientology I love, is based partly on my desire to never again be even a possible source of pain to any of my friends. This of course is one of the things Ron says a suppressire eventually does, he removes himself so he will no longer do harm. Thus some may choose to consider this as evidence that I am in fact suppressire. I however have traveled that road and no longer choose to consider myself suppresslye even if others insist that I am. Over the years I have seen words like, Out-Tech, Squirrel, SP, Out-ethids, and the like literally turn into stimulus response words for some. Say them, or imply I might be one of these things, and looking and evidence to the contrary went out the window. But then there are also those who continue to love and continue to work to better conditions no matter what. And those people will always be my friends even if it becomes necessary for us to not see each other. In a way this latest Comm Ev has already been a great service to me for it has forced me to confront things and make a stand I had not been willing to make before. For years I thought that somehow I could remain in communication with all the people I loved whether they were in or out of the Church. Many on both sides of the fence told me that was a pipe dream and impossible. Maybe they 14 were right on that point. But regardless of any mechanics I can still continue to love no matter what. Already my reach is expanding into new areas. Comm lines that may well enable me to share my inspirations with millions may yet be possible. In truth I am no longer sure that membership in the Church is the ONLY path to total freedom. Certainly the tech, where it is standardly and freely used as Ron intended, does and will enable a being to create wonderous levels of freedom for himself and others. And surely I will miss not getting to do those upper levels as I had intended. But at least in my opinion, the enforced agreements that he cannot reach into certain areas or talkto certain people will cause him to lose the freedom he gained. Or at least it did for me. For years I have been accused of what a GO official called Rafanelloism. Well maybe it was true and now I can at last relax and go forth and share Rafanelloism with anyone who might think it of some value. Maybe one day millions will choose to win and be entertained by Rafanelloism and maybe not, but I will at least be freely who I am if anybody -- It's all coming down! It's all coming down! IT'S ALL COMING DOWN! - Texas Chainsaw Massacre II Cheerful Charlie