1978 was one hell of a year for Scientology from a technical standpoint. L. Ron Hubbard had just returned to his home in La Quinta after about six months off the base, following the FBI raid of the Complex in Los Angeles in July 1977.

When Hubbard returned and settled in he began in earnest a project started the previous year – the shooting of his Technical Training Films. He figured that since we were in an age where visual media were king, that visual demonstrations of TRs, metering and sessions would be valuable for students to have as standards to emulate in their training. But that’s the subject for another time, except for the fact that the trials and tribulations of getting the first several of these films shot led to his development of the rundowns that became known as Super Power.

The only person who knew anything about shooting motion pictures in the entire crew was LRH himself. No one else knew a thing about this very highly technical field. Being the world’s all-time do it yourselfer, LRH never considered this a hindrance even for a moment. He jumped right in and we all jumped in behind him. Somehow things eventually got “in the can,” but it wasn’t smooth. The technical or other reasons why things weren’t smooth occupied his hours off the set.

The first idea was that there must be List One Rock Slammers on the shoot crew intentionally messing things up in order to cut dissemination lines. A project launched to ferret them out and was horribly botched, with many well-intentioned people both at the base and other SO units in Clearwater and LA being falsely labeled L1ers. When LRH became aware of the glaring outpoint that the percentages were ridiculously high, he straightened things out and people were put back on their posts. Technical issues came out that clarified the different characteristics between a dirty needle and a true rock slam. Also, during this period LRH clarified the definitions of an instant read and a floating needle as (per HCOB 5 July 1978) “a rhythmic sweep of the dial at a slow, even pace of the needle.” [I understand from the rumor line that this is now being forcibly mandated as three swings of the needle, which might be what Miscavige says, but isn’t what LRH wrote.]

At any rate, by August 1978, LRH had formed the original RTC, which stood for LRH Technical Compilations before it was preempted in 1982 by the current RTC, at which point it was re-initialed RTRC (LRH Technical Research and Compilations). One of the early orders LRH sent to the unit was to assemble and pilot a correction list called the Ethics Repair List. On it were questions aimed at straightening out a person’s considerations in the areas of ethics and justice by getting off charge on the different flows of the subject.  The first pcs audited on the list were the same crew who had been labeled List One R/Sers just weeks or months before.  Needless to say, the list was very hot and pcs had a lot to say. Results were sent to LRH and he modified the list, adding more questions and deleting others that never seemed to read. By the end of the year, the list was in some kind of final form and was even released generally for a short period, probably by mistake, because meanwhile an overall scope of a series of rundowns was beginning to take shape.

LRH often encountered the phenomenon of people around him who seemed, to him anyway, lacking life or any real determinism. He had remarked on this often and gave a handling in the HCOB on Robotism in 1972. Six years later, he gave another take on it and developed what was initially called the Dead Man Pilot because the process dove at the root cause of any deadness that a person might be exhibiting.

Another rundown theorized that if a person was stuck in some past engrammic incident that this could be sprung from the case by asking the pc for different places where the pc considered himself to be safe. The process caused a revivification in the pc and released him from wherever he had been stuck.

You see where this is heading: let the person get off his charge about what’s been done to him, handle the cause of any deadness and spring him from a place on the track holding him down—you’re restoring life to a person. You’re waking him up.

After this you can get him to spot things about the consequences of his actions and restore his ability to predict into the future and this became another rundown.

Then, because he is more aware and alive he can better think with the information he has, his education, his training, etc. LRH, even in his earliest writings from the early 50s was aware of the harm that false data has on a person. If the computer is working fine but the data fed into it is crap, crap thinking and solutions is what you’ll get out of the computer. That is the basic thing that was gong on, though LRH expressed it more eloquently. The rundown he developed was called the False Data and Loss Rundown and he based it on the observation that when a person is stuck in a loss of some sort (job, loved one, broken relationship, competition, any type of loss) he or she becomes prone to latching onto false data in an effort to become reoriented. The rundown located these episodes and stripped them out of the person’s bank.  

Now that you had the individual alive and with it, you could get him back into communication with his environment and the world and this became the subject of the now somewhat mythical Perception Rundown. The simplicity, and brilliance, of this rundown is to handle any engrams blocking a person’s sense perceptions (any of the 57 perceptics as laid out in Science of Survival or Scientology 0-8: The Book of Basics) and then drill the person in his ability to use those sense channels, which had been formerly closed off. The basic way this is done is by putting one’s attention on a particular sense and taking one’s attention off of that sense channel. For example, you can put your attention on a ticking clock in the room where you are now and listen to the sound and you can not listen to it by putting your attention somewhere else, say, on the cars outside. That’s the long and short of it, regardless of what machines are developed to help the person increase his or her ability along any sense channel.

Once the person was fully back into communication with the world around him, you could drill him on the actions of his job or post and at the end you’d have a person who was cleaned up, alive, able to see where he was going and fully in control of what he was doing in his life.

It’s a pretty awesome state. That was the theory, anyway, of what LRH was calling the Humongous Rundown. And it was going to be a humongous rundown. He developed it as a way to make staff members more capable on their posts so orgs would be more productive and Scientology would expand faster.

But before LRH could get all the rundowns written up (there are 12 rundowns in total and LRH hyped them in Ron’s Journal 30, “1978—The Year of Lightning Fast Tech”) a couple of technical tsunamis hit the fan. One was his release of the bulletins on Dianetic Clear and the second was the development of NOTs. Frankly, the tiny unit he had established to help with his technical work was running flat out just to try and keep up and was falling behind. That RJ lists a ton of stuff that LRH worked on and released during the year: NED, Int Rundowns, Super Power, Confessional Procedure, clarification of processes on Service Facs, NOTs, straightening out the definitions of an instant read and F/Ns, Academy training, Quad Grades, the Fixated Person Rundown and Suppressed Person Rundown, revisions of a bunch of correction lists, the 9 Tech Films he shot and that was just the tech stuff.  

The I/C of the unit, Phoebe Mauerer, bless her, kept every pilot issue, dispatch and note on Super Power all in one location, in boxes right above her desk until the day she died. What happened is that late in 1978 while the rundowns were still in development, LRH brought in trainees from the Saint Hills to train up as Super Power auditors and when their TRs were judged not to be up to par LRH went off into thorough handlings of TR training and that led off into even more basic handlings that became the Key to Life Course. And on and on it went.

Phoebe never got back to finishing up Super Power and neither did her successors in RTRC until 1991, when the pilot issues were completed and the first pcs put through the entire rundown. The results were pretty much exactly as LRH predicted. The pcs did fabulously on the rundowns and came alive in life and on their posts. No PR. They really did well.

Unfortunately, something else that LRH predicted also happened. He said that if some people in an org were put through the rundowns but others weren’t, then eventually those who hadn’t had the gains would pull down the others who had. And that’s what occurred. It might have taken a few years, but eventually nearly everybody, as I can recall, got into some kind of serious post difficulties. But in this regard, they were no different from everybody else at the Int Base, however, so the fact that LRH’s prediction came true in this regard cannot be taken as a denigration of their initial gains or an invalidation of the potentials of Super Power.

LRH intended it mainly for staff, though he also planned that Dianetic Clears who could no longer receive Power Processing would also be able to receive it.  From various posts one sees on the message boards, it appears that all that is being tossed overboard and the rundown is becoming the next cash cow for a Flag whose udders by this time are surely drying up from lack of real planetary dissemination efforts at the lower echelons.
 
Additionally, someone with no knowledge or authority has made up some processes and given them the name Super Power and these are floating around somewhere. I can assure you that processes with commands like: “1. Assume the viewpoint of the 8th Dynamic, 2. Get the idea of another assuming the viewpoint of the 8th Dynamic, 3. Get the idea of others assuming the viewpoint of the 8th Dynamic, “etc, etc, etc, ad nauseum, down to “1. Get the idea that you have infinite power, “blah, blah, blah, all have nothing whatever to do with what LRH was researching or piloting or what he intended.
 
So, now you know the background of Super Power and LRH’s intention that it be used to help hard-working staff members do better on their crusade to hold the Bridge there more stably so greater numbers could walk across it. 

Written by Joe Howard