Dick Coanda Word Clearer

November 14, 2024 Weekly Opinion Poll

This post is in response to the November 14, 2024 Weekly Opinion Poll. If you haven’t done so already, be sure to get your votes in for this weeks’ poll.

Dick Coanda was not your run of the mill Scientology devotee. He was 37 years old when he joined. Usually in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the people who were flocking in were more the younger generation. Dick also had a PhD in English Literature and a job at a University when he joined. He gave all that up for Scientology. Willingly. And, as far as I know, he did not regret it.

I will not go into his life story here, I’m not qualified to tell it. You can read the freezone’s version of his life here. Dick was offloaded by the Sea Org in 2000 at age 63. The explanation for his offload is so laden in Scientology jargon as to be incomprehensible. Basically, he wasn’t doing well, so they got rid of him after his third stint in the Rehabilitation Project Force (RPF.)

That’s twenty years of basically unpaid service then kicked to the curb. Even after that, he remained steadfast. When he died in January 2014, he still considered himself a practicing Scientologist.

Dick Coanda was fixture in the Briefing Course. He had been a Supervisor before his first RPF. Then he came back as a Word Clearer. Like every other staff member in Scientology, it is one of dozens of posts he held. Unlike the corporate world where you work yourself up the ladder, his jobs varied widely.

On one day he would be demoted to taking auditing folders from one location to another. Them suddenly, he would be in charge of the entire training division, then in charge of an entirely new division. Or anything in between. He even held a post where he issued LRH press releases.

Dick should have been a word clearer his entire career. That is where he truly shone. If you haven’t read my study tech post, it explains about word clearing in detail. In Hubbard’s eye, a misunderstood word was the root of all evils. Dick loved dictionaries. He owned more dictionaries than anyone I knew. They were his treasures.

Words were his happy place. He could sit patiently for hours helping people figure out something they didn’t understand. This round, soft spoken man was the kindest person I knew.

But he did have a fault-or what Scientology perceived to be a fault. He was not very good at reading an e-meter. There is part of word clearing in Scientology that requires the e-meter. If you check my glossary, Hubbard had 9 different ways to clear words. (See M1-M9 in the glossary.)

When Dick used the Scientology e-meter, there was a tentative quality about his movements. He was intimidated by it. It got in the way of his one on one contact with the person. But he did it, because that is what was required by his job description. Most days I was walking the floor. If he was doing metered word clearing, I would make it a point to keep an eye on him. If he looked a bit uncomfortable, I would stand near him.

He could not recognize a floating needle. Hubbard had very precise definitions of how a floating needle worked on the e-meter. It was simple to see it when it happened when you were comfortable with it. Dick was not comfortable enough with the meter to look at the person and meter too. I got in the habit of tapping him gently on the back when someone’s needle floated. He soon learned to recognize what it looked like.

This did not make Dick a bad person. He was a kind, caring, forgiving person. He cared about the person in front of him. He wanted with all his heart for the person to progress and be happy.

For all his love of words and the English language, it was words that eventually led to his undoing. Dick’s story says:

He had not been doing well, getting into long word chains.  He caved in and was sent to his third RPF, which he was in for over a year. In 2000, after a twenty-seven year career with the Church, Dick was offloaded. He lived across from Celebrity Centre LA the remainder of his life.

What this means is that he started looking up words. Each word led to another one. He dug himself into a hole try to figure out what words meant. He ended up in a deep depression. He was sent for retraining. He was then unceremoniously booted from the only home he had known for 20 years.

Dick had many of the same mannerisms as my father. Unlike my father, he chose Scientology over the lucrative career he had trained for. He did not speak badly about Scientology in public ever. To the best of my knowledge, his 93 year old widow still lives in their apartment across from the Celebrity Centre.

Dick is an example of a real person who spent their life in Scientology. He was treated poorly, yet didn’t complain. Another wasted soul.