I am introducing my recommended reading list to anyone who has attained the Scientology state of Clear. By doing so, I am not promoting or trying to win over anybody to a particular line of thought. Nor am I attempting to dissuade people from continuing to worship their firmly held religious constructs. I respect their First Amendment rights to continue to do so. Instead, I am responding to the relative few who have expressed genuine curiosity about from whence I have come and to where I am going. Folks can take it or leave it, or pick and choose to satisfy their own curiosities. And, as is their wont, Scientologists can of course nitpick and snipe so as to kill the agent who brings news they will likely find is anathema to their Scientology religious beliefs.
I recommend that these materials, minimally, be studied before embarking on Scientology OT Levels 2 through 8. Actually, I think anyone would gain a tremendous amount of insight by reading these books. But, I believe this (or a comparable) recommended study is essential to understanding from a scientific and spiritual view what it most likely is that makes a meter read on a Clear. It also gives a much deeper understanding of what it is that Ron Hubbard was grappling with on the upper levels. To pursue a subject calling itself a ‘science of the mind’, while subjecting oneself to religious mythological belief constructs (as one inevitably does by running headlong into the OT Levels of Scientology) sets up a vicious form of cognitive dissonance: religious belief masquerading as scientific certainty. The result is the inability to perceive as-is; defeating the entire stated purpose of Scientology. More debilitating, Scientology at the upper levels continues a process of self-affirmation and self-fixation that firmly shackles an individual from rising to greater heights; locked into a solidified ego as he or she becomes. I think this recommended study can alleviate that dissonance, freeing an individual to continue to move on up a little higher.
I am not creating some new study by this recommendation. I am sure there is an infinity of gradients and steps one could, and some certainly have, take to navigate the mire that is implanted at the Scientology upper levels. I did not follow this recommendation. I went through numerous other valleys and peaks along my own way. For example, as part of my own study, I studied and evaluated what Hubbard studied and drew from in developing Scientology; and I haven’t included that byway on this list. I reviewed my path and noted those studies I feel were integral in understanding Scientology in the only way Hubbard himself recommended anything could be fully understood. That is, studied against data of comparable magnitude. When one does, I believe one cannot help but recognize that Ron was definitely onto something in his upper level research, but that developments in science and consciousness far more rationally and accurately revealed what it was. One may or may not also see in the light of this understanding, that continued, blind adherence to mythological constructs supplied in Scientology might be crippling of spiritual evolution.
If sufficient interest is communicated, I may follow up with a series of posts on each of these references, explaining why I consider them important, connecting dots demonstrating relevance to the Scientology experience, and making sense of the sequence, etc. In either event, I hope some people find this of some assistance in their graduation and transcendence process.
1) Tao Te Ching – Stephen Mitchell translation
2) Siddhartha – Herman Hesse
3) The Prophet – Kahlil Gibran
4) The Four Agreements – Don Migel Ruiz
5) The End of Suffering – Russell Targ and J.J. Hurtak
6) Buddha’s Brain – Rick Hanson
7) A Brief History of Everything – Ken Wilber
8) Kosmic Consciousness – ten part interview with Ken Wilber, Sounds True Productions.
9) A Short History of Nearly Everything – Bill Bryson
10) The Biology of Belief – Bruce Lipton
11) The Unobservable Universe – Scott Tyson
12) The Secret – Rhonda Byrne (book and video)
13) The Intention Experiment – Lynne McTaggart
14) The Field – Lynne McTaggart
15) Entangled Minds – Dean Radin
16) The Tao of Physics, Fritjof Capra
17) Quantum Enigma – Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner
18) Biocentrism – Robert Lanza
19) A Gradual Awakening.- Stephen Levine
Some folks have already expressed dismay at such a recommendation in that it is a hefty amount of reading. One person implied that I am asserting that one must become proficient in Quantum Mechanics in order to achieve enlightenment. I am not suggesting that.
I am suggesting that if one devotes the better part of one’s life to following someone who implants in one’s mind a certainty that what he is following is proven scientifically to be the only road to spiritual freedom, one is demonstrating a large degree of gullibility in accepting and dramatizing that implant with no context explored against which to evaluate the truth of that implant. Understanding is an universal solvent, in my opinion.
Moving On Up a Little Higher 