The Great Spirit of Play

5^th Chapter of

The Johnny Raff Chronicles - The Scientology Years

As the story goes, this hell fire and brimstone Baptist minister was in Farmington Connected looking for the post office. Getting a bit frustrated about not finding where it was, he stopped this rather bright looking kid, and in a toned down version of his preacher’s voice he says, “Sonny, can you tell me where the post office is?”

 “Sure mister”, the kid replied without a moment’s hesitation as he pointed to the correct direction. “Just follow this street down to the red building. Take a left and you will run right into it.

Sharp kid, the preacher thought to himself. Maybe I should try for a convert. So with that intention firmly in his mind, he mustered up his best preacher’s voice, and he fixed his attention on the boy with an “It would be wise to accept me as your leader” beingness, and then he addressed the youngster.

 “Sonny!”, he said in a powerful congregation addressing tone, “How would you like me to tell you how to get to heaven?”

 Just as before, the kid never paused an instant.

 “I don’t think so mister. You don’t even know where the post office is.”

 That was the kind of humor and wisdom that poured out in a constant never-ending stream from Doctor Harold Thibodeaux, or just Doc as he was affectionately known to us.

 Doc was another one of the grand Old Timer’s that became one of my teachers and guides, although, at the time, I didn’t think of myself as being under his tutelage. He was just our dear friend, one of the best we ever had.

 He had read Ron’s original thesis in an Astounding Science Friction magazine back around nineteen forty eight, and it, and the subsequent articles on Dianetics that also appeared in the popular pulp fiction magazine, had motivated him to attend a number of Ron’s earliest courses.

 In those early days, he knew Ron personally, and he told stories of discussing things with him in the hotel elevator, and in the coffee shops and restaurants that the course students would hang out in. “Ron was very approachable in those days”, Old Doc told me. “He was quite willing to answer your questions and discuss nearly anything.”

 I always felt that Doc was close cousin, if not an identical twin to the central character in Ron’s Old Doc Methuselah stories. One of my favorite parts of that series was a time when nearly every powerful leader and big shot in the galaxy was attending some top secret meeting. The security at the place was tighter than sumo wrestler’s death hold. In an intense state of irritation over the latest demonstration of political stupidity, Old Doc Methuselah lands his one of a kind space ship and strides intently toward to the meeting place of this conclave of idiots. As he does, a security guard steps out to stop him, and then the guard is instantly held back by his security chief. “But he isn’t on the guest list”, the young security officer exclaims. “Neither is God”, his chief replies.

 Well I doubt if anyone would have ever thought of old Doc Thibodeaux as any kind of God, but he might well have been easily appointed as the chief humorist of the Gods.

 I remember a time when my wife Carolyn and I spent an entire day with him from about nine in the morning until nearly midnight, and during all that time, Doc told one joke after joke, and shaggy dog story after shaggy dog story. At one point Carolyn stopped him. “Doc”, she said in utter amazement. “Where do you get all of these jokes?, and without a pause Doc replied, “I channel them from the Akashic Joke Book”.

 (The akashic records is a term used in theosophy to describe a compendium of mystical knowledge encoded in a non-physical plane of existence. These records are described as containing all knowledge of human experience and the history of the cosmos.)

 Doc was a living example of The Great Spirit of Play. Hell he may well have been The Great Spirit of Play himself, and a lot of that spirit of wisdom rubbed off on me.

 In my opinion Ron was spot on when he pointed out that without a genuine spirit of play, just about everything we do in life would come to a dead stop. Even when it seems the every spirit in the MultiVerse has left us behind, there still must be at least a modicum of play left in us, for if there was not, we would dry up and blow away.

 Fortunately I was blessed with people in my life who were to one degree or another a descended of the original Gods of play.

 My grandfather on my mother’s side was the spitting image of Will Rogers, and he possessed the same dry wit of the man who keep our presidents and country laughing from the 1^st day that he started twirling his mouth, instead of the twirling the rope that had first made him a star in the early days of Vaudeville. From the 1915 version of the Ziegfeld Follies, to his roasting of President Woodrow Wilson in the Whitehouse, he kept the people laughing, and he kept the spirit of play alive. He claimed that he never met a man he didn’t like, and if that doesn’t prove that you have an enduring spirit of play, I don’t know what does.

 I suspect that my Grandpa Plenny Pratt also never met a man he didn’t like. I never heard him say that, but he kind of was that, if you know what I mean.

 Every Sunday we would go up to his home in Wigville Connecticut, and it always seemed to me that the vibes of the word Wigville matched the vibes of my granddad.

 On this one particular Sunday, grandma Nellie Pratt was in cooking bread and Grandpa Plenny Pratt was sitting on the porch smoking a pipe and petting the dog. As for me, I was out in the yard having a ball.

 It was fall and the yard was covered with leaves.

 I don’t know exactly what it is, but there is something inherently special regarding one’s ability to propel a pile of leaves into the air with your foot. It’s something palatable, something you can feel in the core of your being. It’s as if the spirit of play himself were inside your legs laughing with a feeling of pure joy every time one of your muscles twitched.

 All of a sudden I kicked this one pile of leaves and underneath it was the biggest red lollipop I had ever seen in my life, one of those carnival ones with all the swirls that twist out in a perfect spiral from its center to its edge.

 I picked it up, brushed it off, and discovered that it was hardly used at all.

Now if my grandma Nellie Pratt had seen this, all hell would have broken loose. She would not have subscribed to the hardly used philosophy. She would have felt that I was going to die from germs, and a trauma of some magnitude would have ensued as she tried to take my prized possession away from me.

 Unbeknownst to me my grandfather had a similar philosophy. He also did not think it was a good idea for kids to pick up lollipops off the ground, even if they were hardly used, but he had a very different way of handling things.

 He looked at me, saw me with the lollipop, and then he looked away and went back to petting his dog and smoking his pipe. With that I relaxed the flood of fear that had cursed through my stomach when I thought he might be planning to take my lollipop away.

 So after a bit, I wondered over and sat next to him on the porch as I enjoyed my new found treasure.

 He waited a few minutes, and then he slowly cocked his head in my direction and in his slow country style, Will Rogers’s tone of voice he said, “Ya know”, if I had known that you had wanted to eat that lollipop, I would have told that dog not to pee on it.

 It was the last lollipop I ever picked up in my life.

 Years later I reflected back on the utter brilliance of his communication. With one line, he had accomplished his objective at The Speed of Thought.

 He had cleverly enticed me into a realm where a good tasting lollipop got married to a horrible taste of urine. The mental image mixture was a living testimony to instantaneous nature of Hubbard’s reactive mind, for faster than the speed of light, it instantly got my taste buds, my mind and my very soul, to wrench in disgust.

 Grandpa Plenny Pratt wasn’t the only one around who could enlist the powers of The Great Spirit of Play to make you smile, chuckle and laugh. Johnny Raff senior, my small town, greatly beloved, bookie father, could dance with the best of them. His Jackie Gleason strut was just as great as The Great One‘s, and his wit was just as grand. (“The Great One” was a term of endearment for Jackie Gleason, just in case you didn’t know. He was a favorite of our family.)

 My Pop’s flavor of humor was a lot sharper and a lot more gregarious than my grandfather’s dry wit, but it was no less wonderful.

 If it wasn’t nearly time for me to get back to where I left off in The Johnny Raff Chronicles, I could go on for a hundred pages delighting you with tales of Pop. However, although I will sprinkle some of the delightful tales here and there as we go along, you will have to wait until I finish writing The Johnny Raff Chronicles - The Early Years, before you get to bask in the glory of Big Johnny Raff’s amazing beingness.

 “Ok, Ok, Ok, I can’t wait”. Let me just share one little sample of what Pop was like before we get back on track.

 When he was eighty five years old, he used to sit on the porch watching the girls go by. Often ladies would stop to chat with him, for his spirit of play literally permeated into the surrounding area.

One day a woman was really surprised to discover how old he was, “Your eight five”, she said incredulously, “You look increasable for eighty five”.

 “I’d rather be sixty and look like shit“, my father replied.

 Along the way I have been blessed with numerous guides both human and not, but not one of them was devoid of a spirit of play. Some of them kept it under wraps on the theory that it was better to seam wise that humorous, but the truly great ones, like Zatoichi, always played the fool in one way or another. Who be Zatoichi, you ask? He was a blind Samurai who played a key part in my guiding a PC of mine to the ability to appear and disappear from any location on command. I’ll tell you all about her, and the old Samurai master, a bit later in the story. For that adventure is still many years away and I need to stay on the subject least I fall once again into an aberration and wondering away.

 Ok, it’s time to get back to where I left off in the last chronicle. That was the one that spoke of my wondrous car, and the spirit who had taken on the body of my Studebaker. She was a spirit, by the way, who was a true spirit of play. For she led us to all sorts of wondrous adventures, and she was about to lead us to a whole bunch more. As Yoda, another favorite master of mine would put it, “Miracles under your belt you already have. But many more have you yet in store“.

 As the chronicles of my life sailed through the seas of the cosmos, one thing was certain. Every amazing, life transforming, reality bending OT experience I had was proceeded by, bathed in and permeated with The Great Spirit of Play.

Back on Track

It was nineteen sixty six when Betsy, my wondrous 1951 blue bullet Studebaker, astounded that gas station mechanic with her rapid acceleration up a freeway ramp, when everything he knew about the mechanics of a car engine, screamed at him that the car I had named Betsy wouldn’t run, for it had no compression.

 Every day I continued to dart down the highway at speeds often exceeded ninety miles an hour. I would do this in the high speed lane of the freeway, Day after day I discovered that it was the only lane that was not packed with cars. (And no, it was not a carpool lane. They hadn’t been invented yet.)

 A hundred and twenty miles or more I traveled every day in a round trip path that traversed the distance between my apartment in Inglewood, my job at the Space Systems Division of Douglas Aircraft in Huntington Beach, and Church of Scientology’s LA org, that was close to the downtown section of this City of the Angles, most of which had left in disgust.

 I was well on my way to become a Class IV all style auditor who could pick and choose the auditing style that was best suited to the peculiar who had the fortune, or misfortune, to sit across from me as he or she was assisted to bind up The Bridge to Total Freedom.

The Grades 

After a few months of being an org student, The Old Timers, namely Louie and Jerry, decided that it was time for me to go up to San Francisco where Jerry Hedine, “Liza’s Boyfriend“ lived, and there I would be given “The Grades” by this master field auditor.

 However, even though I had been unknowingly appointed as The Golden Child, of these Old Timers, I still had to pay for the grade processes that they felt I needed. In response to the insistence that I needed to go up north to get my grades, my brash “I’ll surpass Ron in a few months” egotistically created artificial beingness responded with the pronouncement that I wasn’t sure if I needed these grades that they were encouraging me to do. However, both secretly, and not so secretly, I was really excited about the idea of getting my grades, for my artificially created egotistical beingness was not strong enough to occlude the fact that I really did need to get these basic processes under my belt. So off I went to see what “Liza’s Boyfriend” had to offer.

 The session with Jerry took less than two and a half hours and during that time, I was taken up through the grade processes from the magic of Grade Zero that freed me to communicate to anyone on any subject or not with complete comfort, to Grade Four, that freed my from the compulsive “I’m right and your wrong” Service Facsimiles (aberrated mental computations), that prevent us from doing new things.

 As a reward for my having come through the grades faster than anyone had before, I was introduced by Jerry to Sandy, a really neat gal who was willing to go on a date with me. So off we went for a night on the town.

 I have never been much of a drinker. In Las Vegas I order a mild mixture of Kahlua and cream, as pull continually on the handle of a one arm bandit, so that I can dutifully contribute to the cost of the magnificent chandelier that hangs above my head.

 When my favorite, and only, brother Mike comes to visit me, I assist him in paying homage to wine growers all over the world, but other than that, I really don’t partake of the spirits, at least not the ones that hang out in a bottle.

 However, on this occasion, as I delighted in the charms my new date Sandy, I did ingest quite a lot of the spirits that reside in a bottle. For I was celebrating the fact that I had just become “A Grade IV Release“, the name given to one who had done Ron’s grade process from the lowly Grade zero to the lofty Grade Four.

 Before I knew it I had consumed twelve, count them twelve, white Russians, the not so mild mixture of Kahlua and Vodka.

 I had consumed enough alcohol to kill an elephant, but suddenly I realized with a shock, that I was stone cold sober.

 As I sat there dumbfounded, the mental programmers that were designed to keep me in harmony with the agreed upon realities of the rest of the culture, were screaming at me that this was impossible. You can’t consume that much alcohol and be sober. That’s a violation of every law of organic and non-organic chemistry. Not only that, it’s a travesty of justice. I had just paid a lot of money for those bloody white Russians, and I was dammed if I was going to put up with being sober.

 I wanted to get up right there and then and go find this Jerry Hedine, Liza’s Boyfriend fellow so that and give in a piece of my mind, if there was any piece left to give.

What the hell had he done?

 How dare he remove my ability to get drunk?

 That wasn’t supposed to happen on The Grades.

 You were supposed to become more able yes, but you weren’t supposed to lose your ability to bask in the joys of stupefaction.

 I wanted to trample the son-of-a-bitch, but in addition to the misery of being sober after I had just spend a small fortune of my limited resources on drinks that didn’t work, I was with a gal who promised to expand my carnal knowledge, and I didn’t want to have to go straighten out a son-of-bitch sober-killing field auditor right now. I wanted to go with Sandy and enjoy the bed that she said had a marvelous view of the forest. After all, who would want to miss a chance to see a bunch of tress from the comfort of a cozy king sized bed?

 So despite my strong desire to get back at Jerry for apparently having destroyed my ability to get drunk, I went off with Sandy to pay homage to the trees and other glorious aspects of nature.

When we awoke the next morning, to a glorious view of nature in all her glory, I mean its glory; Sandy and I once again paid our respects to the God of canal knowledge.

 Then Sandy arose from the grand bed and off to cook us breakfast.

 As I sat with her enjoying the joy of culinary delights, the pleasures of being with a beautiful sensuous woman, and of course the happiness of getting to see the wondrous trees, I noticed something strange.

 I noticed that I was getting a bit tipsy. It puzzled me, for there was no alcohol in sight. I thought that maybe it might have been a residual effect from having consumed a good portion of Russia’s stock pile of Vodka, but that didn’t seem to make sense.

 The four liquids at the breakfast table were coffee, orange juice, milk and water.

I tried the water. Thinking the ridiculous thought that this might be contributing to my tipsiness, and as I took a sip, my tipsiness got tipsier.

 “Whoa!” I thought, that’s impossible, and instantly my tipsiness disappeared.

 “What’s going on?” I thought to myself as the beautiful Sandy stood up to clear the table. The sight of the morning sun streaming through negligee nearly aberrated me out of my investigation of what was going on, but fortunately she was gone in the next instant leaving me to continue my analysis of the appearing and disappearing tipsiness.

 I tried sipping the water again, but this time nothing happened.

 Then I tried sipping the coffee, the orange juice and the milk in turn, but no change occurred, and no tipsiness appeared. I was still cold stone sober, and with that realization, a wave of irritation appeared and traversed the distance from my stomach to my brain, or the other way around. For the thought once again reminded me of the previous night where I had paid a small fortune for drinks that had somehow been neutralized of their power to affect me.

 “One should be able to get drunk if one wants to.” I thought with a touch of anger, and instantly I was tipsy again.

 “Whoa!” I responded. “Wait just a darn minute“. Could it be?, and along with that mental inquiry an “impossible” idea jumped into my consciousness.

 Maybe you are now able to be drunk or not at will.

 It was a thought that my ego didn’t want to have anything to do with, for it directly contracted the belief systems that I and most of the people on Earth had subscribed to for most of our lives.

However the spiritual part of me was singing in delicious anticipation of the possibility that it might really be possible to have these kinds of abilities.

So gave it a try.

 I took a sip of milk with the idea and the postulate that it would make me drunk, and suddenly, I was not longer bothered by the idea that I had wasted my money on the cost of a dozen impotent White Russians, for instantly, I was as drunk as skunk.

 Talk about the ability to do new things. If that was the kind of things you got when you became a Grade - IV release, I couldn’t wait to see what came next.

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As always, I wish you all that you wish for yourself, and if your life is not everything you want it to be, may you have the wisdom to pretend it is.

Love to you and yours.

John M Rafanello,
The Magic Thetan