Category Archives: acknowledgments

Reference: Awakening from scientology

Using scientology parlance, we begin by attempting to help people move above ‘know about’ on the ‘know to mystery scale.’    I have found plenty outside of scientology that explains and validates the sequence of Hubbard’s scale; illuminating the reason for the relatively high position for ‘not know.’  Thus, the Tao Te Ching – a book Hubbard once credited as offering in application all that scientology could hope to attain through its psychotherapeutic methodologies and training – teaches:

The Master leads; by emptying people’s minds

and filling their cores, by weakening their ambition

and toughening their resolve.

He helps people lose everything they know,

everything they desire, and creates confusion

in those who think that they know…

…The ancient Masters

didn’t try to educate the people,

but kindly taught them to not-know.

When they think that they know the answers,

people are difficult to guide.

When they know that they don’t know,

people can find their own way…

…Not-knowing is true knowledge.

Presuming to know is a disease.

First realize that you are sick;

then you can move toward health…

Notwithstanding their seeming alignment with such concepts as the know-to-mystery scale, scientologists are taught to eschew such ideas in pursuing  and exuding certainty.  And yet it was application of them that led to their own indoctrination or ‘enlightenment’ in and with scientology.  Scientologists are plied with a continual diet of tearing down all schools of thought that preceded  scientology – even those that led to its creation.  These facts necessitate that our first several chapters focus on pointing out the inconsistency, illogic, and even absurdity of some of your core scientology conditionings.  Perhaps I haven’t done it as ‘kindly’ as the Tao would prescribe.   Nonetheless, I want to make clear the purpose for doing so.  I am not doing it in order to replace your faulty stable data in order to become a new director of your destiny, but instead I hope to assist toward ‘when they know that they don’t know, people can find their own way.’   In that regard, the second reading recommendation that I make (the first being The Tao Te Ching – An English Translation by Stephen Mitchell) is a classic novel called Siddhartha by Herman Hesse.

Siddhartha is the quintessential lesson on the virtue – even necessity – of blazing one’s own path.  Even if you read it many years ago, I suggest that if you are seriously exploring the idea of moving  beyond and above scientology that you read it again.  Evaluate your scientology experience against Siddhartha’s experience.  Siddhartha sublimely demonstrates that the very act of becoming a follower or belonging  is anathema to enlightenment.   If in being introduced to new ideas and horizons one in particular seems to be the golden goose that will continue to forever lay you golden eggs, hark back to Siddhartha.  Clinging to one-stop enlightenment sources can defeat the entire purpose of the quest. Siddhartha also reminds us that when in doubt or despair it is rejuvenating to turn to and fully enjoy the  wonderment of the simple present; the Zen transcendence of doing what one is doing while doing it.

A system of thought purporting to be the ‘science of certainty’, that overtly asserts the goal and product of boiling all of creation down to simplistic blacks and whites, can be seen in the light of the wisdom from the Tao (and even scientology’s know-to-mystery scale) to potentially be the conveyor of a sort of sickness.  The resultant awareness myopia  – the death of life-promoting curiosity – is held firmly in place by ego and pride.  It requires an adopted air of superiority to automatically dismiss any ideas or information beyond one’s own ism or ology.  The certainty that one need not continue to look and to search and to find is protected and bolstered by pride in having arrived, having achieved all there is to know.

The disability (or as the Tao puts it, sickness) concomitant with such pride is described in Power vs. Force:

In our discussion of the levels of consciousness, we noted that one of the downsides of Pride is denial.  Every mind engages in denial in order to protect its “correctness” – this begets the fixity and resistance to change that prevents the average consciousness from advancing much more than five points in a lifetime.  Great leaps in levels of consciousness are always preceded by surrender of the illusion that ‘I know.’  Frequently, the only way one can reach this willingness to change is when one ‘hits bottom’, that is, by running out a course of action to its end in the defeat of a futile belief system.  Light can’t enter a closed box; the upside of catastrophe can be an opening to a higher level of awareness.  If life is viewed as a teacher, then it becomes just that.  But unless we become humble and transform them into gateways of growth and development, the painful life lessons we deal ourselves are wasted.