Category Archives: Tao Te Ching

Walking the Walk

Posted on April 9, 2013 by | 18 comments

If you have not already seen the Oscar-winning documentary on this extraordinary fellow, Searching for Sugarman, I highly recommend it.  You might learn a little something about walking the walk and the Tao.

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Posted in acknowledgments, Tao Te Ching, the world, Uncategorized

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Elephant In The Room

Posted on April 6, 2013 by | 309 comments

If folks want to know why there was so much noise in the independent field about my scary, heretical views all the sudden recently, it would behoove you to do as Ron advises in auditing technology and look a little bit earlier.

‘Elephant in the room:  An English metaphorical idiom for an obvious truth that is either being ignored or going unaddressed. The idiomatic expression also applies to an obvious problem or risk no one wants to discuss.’- Wikipedia

The book What Is Wrong With Scientology? Healing Through Understanding  marched a veritable herd of elephants into the independent Scientology house.  I am going to identify one of those elephants today.

That is Chapter Thirteen Reversal.  A copy of the entire chapter is appended below for easy reference, refreshing of recollections, or for the convenience of those who have not read the book.  In that chapter I spelled out where and how a critical reversal is entered into the Scientology line up that enables it to be converted from a technology to free the mind and spirit to one that incarcerates beings into a cult mindset.

In the near year since the publication of the book, not a single independent Scientologist practitioner has originated a single word to me about the rather far-reaching implications of what is covered in this chapter.  Some have disconnected from me, some have assigned me lower ethics conditions – including ‘Treason’ for having stated facts that allegedly conflict with L. Ron Hubbard opinions.  To me, such actions speak to the truth of what is contained in the chapter below.  The reversal is apparently effective inside and outside the corporate church.  I am more convinced than ever that the way out is not through compliance, conformity, zealotry, and self-induced blindness.  Such self-imposed ignorance will relegate ‘Independent Scientology’ to the role it has played for thirty years, a mere parasite appended to the church of Scientology.  It will continue to walk lock step (with a shallow, self-serving protested distinction between it and the corporation) toward the demise of the subject when the corporate disaffecteds it sustains itself on run dry.  No integration, so no appeal to new students.  No evolution, so continued inevitable conflicts over who is ‘more standard’ in a subject that lends itself to infinite arguments on that score.  No transcendence, and so no ultimate moving on up a little higher.  Dianetics and Scientology would never have been developed at all had L. Ron Hubbard been such a conformist.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

REVERSAL

Miscavige’s elevation of L. Ron Hubbard to God-like status, and himself to demigod status, has provided Miscavige with carte-blanche to reverse the entire vector of Scientology’s aims and activities.

He began by perpetrating a fraud upon the highest-level Scientologists, Clears and OTs, with his promise of upper OT Levels allegedly in his possession.  While the seed was planted at the January 1986 funeral event, it has been a cleverly-played mind game on Scientologists ever since.  Miscavige has devoted most of his attention to keeping these highest-level Scientologists on the farm for a reason.  He knows that they are the opinion leaders among the general membership.  With the opinion leaders doing his bidding, he is able to keep the majority of his followers in the dark.  At this he has done a masterful job.  But to ascribe any great virtue or power to him for having done so would be a mistake.  Without L. Ron Hubbard, David Miscavige would be little more than a clever, overly-aggressive con man.  To pretend that Miscavige perfected his consolidation of power without the help of Hubbard’s own decisions and policy would be naïve and untrue.  In fact, to so pretend would require quite an invalidation of Hubbard’s abilities, and the power of the technology he discovered.

Without the backing of Hubbard-authored Scientology policy, David Miscavige could never have created the Black Dianetics monopoly Hubbard had warned against many years before.  How could such a contradiction be possible?  That is a complicated story. For purposes of our discussion here, I will provide a brief summation of what will be more fully treated in a later volume.

In short, human beings are full of contradictions, and L. Ron Hubbard was not immune from that imperfection.  For better or for worse, during the ’60s, when Hubbard and Scientology were continually facing attacks intended to bring about their demise, Hubbard issued quite a bit of policy in response which changed the character of the movement.  This “wartime” left an indelible imprint on Scientology.  It was a dark ages of sorts for the movement.  It was a time when the group, as a matter of survival, needed to circle the wagons and know who was with it and who was against it.  This was the era when security checks became routine.  This was the period when ‘disconnection’ from suppressive persons was dictated and enforced by the organizations.  This was when policy called for the overt and covert destruction of alleged forces of evil.  This was the period when Hubbard created a monster to achieve that end – an ogre that would later play an important role in his own demise.  That was the Guardian’s Office – a legal and public relations organization with its own intelligence network.

The Guardian’s Office’s intelligence system was once described by a government official in the know as rivaling that of Israel’s state intelligence service (the storied Mossad).  Hubbard wrote volumes of material for the Guardian’s Office on how to smash and obliterate the “enemy.”  David Miscavige seized on this material during the early ’80s, when the collective crimes of a decade and a half of unfettered Guardian’s Office operations had come back to haunt Hubbard. Miscavige would rise, live and die by that wartime policy.

Miscavige became sort of a reactive mind of the Scientology machine.  Just as the reactive mind drives all of the past into the present to haunt and torture the individual, Miscavige drove all of Hubbard’s “war” era policy to the present, to haunt and torture Scientologists – and Scientology’s detractors – from the ’80s forward.

The way in which Miscavige corralled Clears and OTs, however, begins with a seemingly benign policy.  That is a Hubbard policy letter of 1967, entitled An Open Letter to All Clears. It is the first thing a newly-arrived Clear is required to read.

Hubbard represented consistently and repeatedly, from 1950 to the mid-’60s, that the quest for Clear is the pursuit of personal freedom and personal confidence, to the point of self-trust and being worthy of trust by one’s peers.  In the face of that continual statement of purpose and goal, the Open Letter begins hedging on those representations.  It begins indoctrinating the Clear into the idea that whatever sacrifices the individual might have made to achieve the state of Clear, the ledger of responsibility is not balanced.  The Clear has obligations to Hubbard and Scientology, and is expected to comply with group directives in order to pay off the debt, particularly if one should wish to rise to greater heights than Clear.  The Clear is told, in Open Letter:

An ethical code already exists for OTs so at the state of Clear one should not assume that one has a license to do just whatever one will…

…So, the policies of Scientology which have enabled you to reach the state of Clear still apply to all Clears. In fact, they apply more because you have the reality of their value and the necessity of seeing that they are followed…

…As a result, bigger responsibilities will be given and expected of you so you must be prepared to responsibly educate yourself where necessary so that you can do whatever is assigned to you in a proper manner, in keeping with the main goals and aims of Scientology.…

…It is a crime to invalidate the state of Clear – see to it that you don’t do this in your conduct as a Clear, particularly as regards yourself.…

…You have now become more than ever a part of a team. Obsessive individualism and a failure to organize were responsible for our getting into the state we got into.…

…As soon as you have gone the rest of the way this will become abundantly plain.…

…I expect and need your help to carry out the broad mission of decontaminating this area of the universe.…

And so, the promise of a Golden Age of reason among free-thinking, un-policed Clears was replaced with the news that the organizations would be enforcing your duty to follow an “ethical code” and the “policies of Scientology.”  It announces that you will comply with “whatever is assigned to you” by the organization.  Should any Clear bristle at this news, it is quickly pointed out that he is simply dramatizing the “obsessive individualism” that was “responsible for our getting into the state we got into.”  For my part, the most empowering cognition I came to in my own travels along the Bridge was that I no longer had to agree with anyone.  I no longer felt compelled to go along with group-think.  This was the key to breaking the controlling, conforming conditioning that society tends to coerce us into accepting, including all the group thought patterns that justify greed, cheating, conflict and war.  Upon indoctrination to An Open Letter to All Clears, I had to begin rationalizing, and thus invalidating, that new-found ability to chart my own course in life.

Thus, with Open Letter, and the volumes of policy it mandates now must be followed even more vigilantly, the vector became reversed.  The door was opened to the evolution of an obsessive group devotion that graduated into the Big Brother corporation which went on to ruin the lives of thousands, and to lose whatever magic Dianetics and Scientology were capable of producing in the first place.  It was bolstered by encyclopedic volumes of Scientology organizational policy.  Most of that policy is very heady and workable material.  It cannot be denied, however, that it is liberally spiked with a number of policies grooving in the idea that the group, the Scientology organization, is all important, and that its hierarchical structure must be respected and complied to, irrespective of who runs it.

Here is where the perversion we covered in Chapter 8, Ethics, receives its most potent authority.  The over-weighted third dynamic (group) would forever after skew the contemplation of the ‘greatest good for the greatest number of dynamics’ formula.

To gainsay this reality would be an exercise in denialism.  For example, any Scientologist reading this book is automatically guilty of a variety of Scientology crimes and high crimes, by the mere act of reading.  Per long-standing and currently-extant Hubbard Scientology policy, anyone who has read this far ought to be declared a suppressive person (a sociopath that both Hubbard and mental health authorities agree should be quarantined from society, without civil or constitutional rights).  This is how Scientology organizational policy protects and perpetuates the vicious cult Miscavige has created.

Exacerbating matters is the fact that the first thing a Scientology Inc. Clear will encounter upon reaching that state is unrelenting pressure to get onto the Operating Thetan, or OT, levels.  If a Clear wants to get on with life, exercise his new-found abilities and awareness so as to “practice to increase general reality” (as it was earlier noted that Hubbard had recommended) and resists compliance, Scientology Inc. resorts to scare tactics.  An Open Letter to All Clears is the first weapon in the organization’s arsenal on that score.  That is then compounded with the ultimate weapon, Hubbard’s pronouncement that a Clear is at grave risk as a being if he or she does not get through the OT Levels as soon as possible.  Ironically, that warning perhaps serves as the greatest invalidation of the state of Clear, which the Open Letter policy announces shall be considered a crime in itself.

As shall be made clear in the next chapter on the OT Levels, I am a huge proponent of the idea that the OT Levels are indeed capable of taking people to spiritual heights they never imagined possible.  However, to ignore the shift of focus and the reversal-of-motivation tactic employed – even by Hubbard himself – would be to check my logic and personal integrity at the door.  Just why Hubbard deviated from a 15-year devotion to creating a path that would only work where the practitioner’s motivations were solely the pursuit of truth toward the empowerment of each individual addressed, into scare tactics aimed at having each individual surrender his or her self-determinism to the will of the group, is a complex matter.  Warranted or not, much of what Hubbard and Scientology were facing in terms of opposition by vested interests by the mid-’60s wove its way into Hubbard’s outlook, his thinking, and his overriding, strong intention that Scientology survive and be made available to humanity.

At bottom, it was Hubbard’s reaction to what I consider ill-motivated, unethical, and vicious efforts by certain vested interests to keep him from achieving what he aimed for.  Whether the response was an over-reaction or was necessary at that time is a question requiring a more in-depth history.  For our purposes here – outlining what is wrong with Scientology – it is only necessary to highlight the contradictions that are obvious.  Recognition of those contradictions makes patent the simple fact that to take every word Hubbard wrote literally, and treat it as commandment, puts one on a slippery, untenable slope.  To do so would be just as irrational as criticizing and rejecting all of Hubbard’s work and discoveries just because it is recognized he was not infallible.  Exercising either extreme would be to employ the type of associative-reactive thought patterns his discoveries help people to overcome.

The problem with Hubbard’s reaction to the attacks, and the ultimate product of that reaction, is that it puts an individual or group right back into that which they had sought to transcend through Scientology in the first place.  Technically, it is a violation of one of his own fundamental maxims, “that which you resist, you become.”  It is perhaps best explained in Hubbard’s own words, in the very lecture series, the 1958 Clearing Congress, where he finally settled on the parameters and qualities of Clear:

We get this sort of a situation where everybody’s idea of everybody else becomes himself. Well, let’s look at that. Here’s Mr. A. Mr. A is certain that everybody around him is very evil and that they are “gonna get him” one way or the other. Now, Mr. A. has no choice – if he is also saddled with super-agreements, obsessive agreement, making equality a necessity – but to be this way himself.

Now, we ask this question: Does this evil character actually exist? And that’s one of the first things we have to ask in clearing. Does this evil character exist?

It seems like we have a synthetic personality in existence which isn’t really anybody, but is simply everybody’s idea of how bad the other fellow is. This is pretty complicated, see. See, he’s got the idea that this other fellow is so bad that he cannot help but criticize him violently. But because he is equal to this fellow over here, then, of course, he himself has to assume these characteristics of superlative evil. You see that? We get generals, admirals, politicians, all sorts of people, who have an idea that the enemy is so bad, or that the fellow man is so bad, or something else is so bad, they can’t possibly live with it, and have therefore got to cut it to pieces. It’s a very tricky thing. This has a vast bearing on clearing.

They’ve got to cut this evil being to pieces. Yes, but at the same time, they have an equality complex. By communicating with him, they therefore go into agreement with his evil characteristics, and the only thing they have left is an evil, synthetic personality which they themselves have to wear to be like everybody else and to be normal. This is one of the simplest and easiest tricks that is played in a culture.

So, what are you trying to do when you’re clearing people? You’ve got to find the fellow himself and you also, as you go up the line – not an attribute of Clear, but an attribute of OT – have to give him a certainty on the other fellow.

Therein Hubbard echoed the ancient book of wisdom he once noted that much of Scientology had grown out of, Tao Te Ching, by Lao Tzu:

There is no greater misfortune than underestimating your enemy. Underestimating your enemy means thinking that he is evil. Thus you destroy your three treasures (simplicity, patience, compassion) and become an enemy yourself.

In the same 1958 lecture, Hubbard continued by warning against the temptation to create policing agencies:

…Well, all you’d have to do is have a police force and a society would start caving in. Why? The police force constitutes a constant reminder that men are evil, which is a constant reminder that we must agree with these evil men. Do you see how this would work? Neat little trick.

Now, that doesn’t say that we are so starry-eyed as to believe that at this time we could dispense with all police. Or could we?

Now, you have to make up your mind which way you’re going to go with a society, if you’re thinking about a new society of one kind or another. And if you say, “Well, this society would be totally unregulated,” then we would be proposing an anarchy. And all the anarchists tell us that the only way a society would work as a total freedom without government would be if everyone in it were perfect.

Well, I don’t know whether we propose – when we talk about a cleared society – whether we propose or not to have an anarchy. That’s beside the point. That’s up to the people who get cleared. But I don’t think you’d wind up with an anarchy. I think you’d wind up with a much finer level of agreement and cooperation, because I think you’d then be able to realize the rest of the dynamics.

Again, Hubbard was in perfect alignment with the Tao:

Throw away morality and justice, and people will do the right thing… The more prohibitions you have, the less virtuous the people will be… I let go of the law, and people become honest.

However, with the advent of tomes of policy, creating layers of hierarchical restriction upon the group and aggressive policing of its individuals’ morals, the promise of the sanity and happiness of a cleared group and society was replaced.  The new doctrinal paradigm held, in essence, that the only way to achieve a ‘cleared society’ was through a tightly-controlled, disciplined group whose survival trumped all other possible considerations.  While volumes were written on how to run a Scientology organization in keeping with the goals of Clearing and the promise of OT, no matter how one dressed it up, Scientology policy created and required a force that one would have to be in utter denial to characterize as anything other than the police enforcing prohibitions, so as to protect good people from other people presumably dedicated to evil.

I am quite aware that these views will be condemned by many Scientologists, corporate and independent alike.  But I believe that if one dispassionately examines the facts of how Clears and OTs have come to be treated, how they have docilely accepted such treatment, and how they have come to behave within Scientology Inc., to ignore or deny Hubbard’s empowerment of such treatment and behavior is tantamount to condemning Scientologists to repeating a history they are systemically required to remain ignorant of and yet perpetuate.

I am not contending that Hubbard was wrong to react to opposition in the way he did.  Nor am I contending that he should not have memorialized his reaction under the heading of ‘policy.’  I do contend that to take Hubbard’s policy literally, out of the time and the context in which it was born, is to become an extremist.  With extremism comes the loss of the potential benefits that would otherwise accrue from application of the discoveries Hubbard made.  In my opinion, nowhere is literalism and extremism more destructive than at the highest reaches of the Bridge, the OT levels.

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Posted in black dianetics, David Miscavige, ethics, healing, independents, Integral Theory, l. ron hubbard, policy, politics, Scientology, Tao Te Ching, the future, the Reformation

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The Tao of Physics

Posted on March 31, 2013 by | 251 comments

Scientology technology is powerful  in lifting an individual from being effect up to being more at cause.

In accomplishing that Scientology focuses heavily on, and makes great use of,  Newtonian classic physics  principles.  Unfortunately, ultimately that world view tends to lock a Scientologist under a glass ceiling of sorts to further transcendence of awareness and qualities of equanimity.

Evaluated against the very axioms (including The Factors and Logics) Scientology is predicated upon one could easily reckon that to be the case.  Paradoxically, Scientology contains laws of interpretation that make one of its own Logics, critical to growth and transcendence, forbidden practice:

Logic 8:  A Datum can be evaluated only by a datum of comparable magnitude.

Thus, the first comprehensive fusion of Eastern thought with Western science ultimately disallowed study of either in the continuing search for truth and higher levels of consciousness.

A very good primer for a) evaluating what is valuable about one’s Scientology experience and what about Scientology makes it so effective, and b) beginning the process of transcending  from where Scientology might leave one in terms of consciousness, is the book The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra (recommended to me by the irrepressible Scott Campbell).

Even though the book was first published in 1975, and it has been followed by dozens of authors treading similar ground of analyzing breakthroughs in sub atomic physics to Eastern wisdom and consciousness, I have found it to be the most thorough, layman-friendly piece on the subject to date.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who has experienced Scientology.   Most particularly to those who have completed the Scientology OT Levels, started the Scientology OT Levels, or who have any intention of pursuing them in the future.  It will provide vital context for your experience.   It might help prevent you from becoming fixated, and set up for a big lose, on the quest for total causation.  And it might help to take you to higher levels of consciousness not contemplated or permitted in Scientology (even through consequent practice of Scientology techniques).

As I have noted before, I believe that it is essential to the transcendence of Scientology to rise above the fixation on attaining to the permanent state of causation.  The fixation can ultimately result in a painful state of effect or an arrogant state of hallucinatory cause.  In either event, it parks one in any quest for continuing transcendence to higher states of being.

Here is an excerpt from the Tao of Physics that gives a brief description how the confluence of Eastern wisdom and Western science supports that view:

Many of the Eastern teachers emphasize that thought must take place in time, but that vision can transcend it.  ‘Vision’, says Govinda, ‘is bound up with a space of a higher dimension, and therefore timeless.’  The space-time of relativistic physics is a similar timeless space of a higher dimension.  All events in it are interconnected, but the connections are not causal.  Particle interactions can be interpreted in terms of cause and effect only when the space-time diagrams are read in a definite direction, e.g. from the bottom to the top (note: space-time diagrams are explained earlier in the book). When they are taken as four-dimensional patterns without any definite direction of time attached to them, there is no ‘before’ and no ‘after’, and thus no causation.

Similarly, the Eastern mystics assert that in transcending time, they also transcend the world of cause and effect.  Like our ordinary notions of space and time, causation is an idea which is limited to a certain experience of the world and has to be abandoned when this experience is extended.  In the words of Swami Vivekananda,

 Time, space and causation are like the glass through which the Absolute is seen…In the Absolute there is neither time, space nor causation.

The Eastern spiritual traditions show their followers various ways of going beyond the ordinary experience of time and of freeing themselves from the chain of cause and effect – from the bondage of karma, as the Hindus and Buddhists say.  It has therefore been said that Eastern mysticism is a liberation from time.  In a way the same may be said of relativistic physics.

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Posted in acknowledgments, healing, Integral Theory, l. ron hubbard, ot 8, Scientology, Tao Te Ching, the future

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Is Spirit of Quality or Quantity?

Posted on March 27, 2013 by | 364 comments

For the first several years of L. Ron Hubbard’s research into a path to enlightenment, his focus was on simplicity. In that wise, his quest aligned perfectly with the ancient universal truths he sought to make more easily and uniformly attainable.  Those truths, per Hubbard, were particularly well articulated by Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha), and Lao Tzu in the Tao Te Ching.   Hubbard seemed to understand, and could communicate in modern language, the Buddhist and Taoist descriptions of the spiritual, the difficult to conceptualize ideas of ‘emptiness’ or  ‘nothingness.’  Hubbard lectured as follows on 1 December 1954:

You can have a quality in complete absence of a quantity.  You don’t have to be “a quart of good boy.”  And this was what he (the scientist) was assuming, see.  The next time you see a pound of lust, send it around and we’ll put it in a museum.  These things are not quantitative.

So we had to get out of quantitative thinking, thinking in terms of objects and masses, before we had any real comprehension of existence.  And this was very easy to do. Very easy to do.  You merely had to define what zero was .  And we find that life, basically the awareness of awareness unit in life, is not a thing of quantity – not even vaguely of quantity. It is a thing of quality, of ability. 

Where you have ability, you have life. Where you have space, energy, mass…I don’t care what kinds of energy.  The energy contained in your engrams.  The energy contained in mental pictures.  The space contained in your visios or lack of them.  Anytime you have any quantity of any kind, you have walked downhill from life.  Just like that.  And this works out.  This works out in processing, works out gorgeously.

Scientology counseling (processing or auditing) does work out quite gorgeously when a thetan (the awareness of awareness unit, or individual spiritual being) is considered in this wise.   When this framework is kept in mind, Scientology procedures are rather simple.  That is because all of them are used toward the result of removing additives, or complexities, and returning the quality of the awareness of awareness unit to itself.   That quality is uniformly found to be good by universally recognized human standards.

Hubbard clearly mapped philosophy and procedures that brought about abilities (qualities) in a being that culminate in the state of Clear.  Hubbard defined a Clear as “an unrepressed and self-determined being” who is no longer subject to stimulus-response reactive thought processes.

Unfortunately, the issue becomes muddled as one assays to move higher on the Scientology path, called the Bridge.   Above Clear, the reached for states are no longer expressed in terms of freedoms from the additives that hamper a being.  Instead, Scientologists shoot for the vaunted state of ‘cause.’   Cause over matter, energy, space, time, and life is the state that is promised.   Powers become the target.   Rather than the removal of additives the goal becomes the inclusion of an additive, expressed in a term that infers physical properties or force, power.

In formal, organizational Scientology the relentless promotion and cultural propaganda and pressure hammer that theme home.  They seize upon some later seemingly contradictory words of Ron mentioned in policy letters and bulletins because of later turns Hubbard himself took.  By the mid sixties he began to contradict the maxim regarding quality versus quantity.  Beings were increasingly considered to vary in size, or to be recognizable by something other than quality, the new measure being quantity.

For example, in a policy letter issued on 22 March 1967 Hubbard introduced the idea of size with respect to thetans. He wrote,  ‘Some  thetans are bigger than others.  None are truly equal. ‘  He went on to instruct that smaller beings, whom he designated as degraded beings, occur ‘about eighteen to one over Big Beings in the human race (minimum ratio). ‘

Along with that shift of focus onto size came the introduction of different goals for processing.   Rather than the original goal of returning a being to the simple, uniformly good, freedom from the additives tainting the being’s quality, the focus went toward achieving powers.  Conditions of existence were issued along with formulas one could apply in life to improve one’s condition.  Those conditions were determined primarily by the quantity produced as measured by statistics. The most senior of those conditions to which all of them were designed to lead toward was called ‘Power.’  While those condition formulas were, and are, very workable, the schema contributed to a culture of lust toward attainment of power.

The very definition of power in Scientology radically changed as follows:

a)      The ability to maintain a position in space.  – 1 March 1958

b)      The amount of work which can be accomplished in a unit of time, or the amount of force which can be applied in a unit of time.  – 6 December 1966

Over time the adjective “powerful’ became regularly associated with ‘thetan’ in Scientology think and speak.   Scientologists began to promote and covet the idea of becoming a big, powerful  thetan.   Scientology promotion became more geared toward such ideas as ‘unleashing the power of the thetan’, and  bestowing ‘super power’.   Achievements in the Scientology world were ascribed as attributes of ‘powerful thetans’ and ‘big beings.’   Conversely, bad conduct was routinely condemned as that of smaller beings.

Exacerbating matters were more Hubbard policies that excused otherwise destructive behavior of beings based upon the size or power of the individual, particularly when that alleged size or power was abused in the forwarding of the power of Scientology as a movement.  Thus, in the policy The Responsibilities of Leaders, Hubbard’s ‘seven points of power’ suggested the ends justify the means when protecting the ‘power’ one relies upon for his own power.   Hubbard suggests the physical beating of the critic of the power one relies upon and serves is commendable behavior.  He even suggests that a real power would accept those who rely upon his power murdering enemies of the power.   And that a true power would encourage his underlings to keep him ignorant of the crimes they commit in increasing his power.  In fact another  Hubbard ethics policy letter stated that an individual who produced a lot toward expansion of Scientology could ‘get away with murder.’

In the years that Scientology evolved in this fashion, most particularly after the death of Hubbard, its very aims were demonstrably altered in significant ways.  Gradually, alleviating the world of ‘insanity’, ‘war’, and ‘criminality’ was replaced by a drive to wreak ‘planetary obliteration’ or exact ‘global vengeance’ against the Scientology-designated evil-doers of earth.

It fairly makes one wonder whether somewhere along the line Scientology lost sight of its own purpose and the quality of life it was created to restore.

Does Scientology address beings as ‘qualities’ that lost sight of their own very nature by introduction of the confusion of ‘quantity’ into the equation?

Or does Scientology address beings as ‘quantities’ that need to have some quantity added to them to become sufficiently big and powerful?

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Posted in ethics, healing, ias, independents, Integral Theory, l. ron hubbard, Scientology, Tao Te Ching, tech, Uncategorized

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The Enemy

Posted on March 21, 2013 by | 463 comments

I commented twice in the discussion on the post Scientology Regression that there is no enemy; the malady is having to have one.  Apparently, Scientology instills the firm belief that there are people worthy of the label ‘enemy’, and that such people must be depowered and dispensed with, or in some cases made to be and act in an acceptable way.  I’m sure someone will cite to What Is Greatness?, originally published as a magazine article in March 1966, to stop this train of thought.  In that case, someone else can just as easily cite HCO PL The Responsibilities of Leaders, issued as policy less than a year later, which justifies murder provided it is carried out stealthily against the enemy of a worthy enough power.

You even have a self-auditing process in Scientology designed for people deemed by authorities in the group to have acted in a way that warrants the label ‘enemy.’  That formula requires the individual to change the very essence of his being – his very concept of his own identity – to conform to the liking of the powers that be in the group.  That can be a rather dysfunctional, destructive process given the fact that finding out who one really is is the end product of the Scientology bridge itself.  In order to be accepted back into the group he must, in addition to other steps, ‘deliver an effective blow to the enemies of the group one has been pretending to be part of despite personal danger.’

I think it is worthwhile for someone who has adopted Scientology beliefs to think about what notions have been inculcated into oneself about labeling people as ‘enemy’ and treating them as such.  Think about the effect it might have on your relations and your own peace of mind.  For contemplation about how to deal with anyone who might declare you an enemy of him or her, an apt passage from the Tao Te Ching describing what is a ‘great man’ might assist:

      He thinks of his enemy as the shadow that he himself casts.

463 Comments

Posted in ethics, healing, independents, Integral Theory, justice, l. ron hubbard, policy, Scientology, Tao Te Ching

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The Tao of Scientology

Posted on March 13, 2013 by | 377 comments

 

377 Comments

Posted in acknowledgments, ethics, healing, independents, Integral Theory, l. ron hubbard, policy, Tao Te Ching, texas, the future, the Reformation, the world

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The Blame Game

Posted on March 1, 2013 by | 522 comments

I just received another volley from an irate, prominent self-anointed  ‘with Ron’  type of ‘Independent Scientologist’.  It was actually an attempt to control through command, assigning me a Treason condition with instructions – after lengthy evaluations – to first apply the Confusion formula.

I only raise the matter here because it is live evidence of two of the most insidious elements of Scientology that in my estimation are at the root of its demise.  It is a great learning opportunity.

The first I will address here, blame.  The propensity to find and assign blame is woven into the woof and warp of Scientology, making it perhaps one of the most difficult character deficiencies to remedy in a veteran member.

The rather lengthy screed I received pronounced me guilty of the current horrid state of Scientology on the planet today.  One central allegation was that I allegedly totally mishandled the corporate Scientology attacks upon me and my family, by …’  Your response to the attack of Miscavige is quite predictably stimulus and response…rather than tangling with the cur dogs nipping at the wheels of the fire engine, you have become one of them.’                            .’

Not more than a month ago two other prominent ‘Independent Scientologists’ as much as accused me of being a suppressive person for failing to automatically and continuously attack David Miscavige and blame him for virtually every shortcoming of Scientology – really on a stimulus-response basis.

The common denominator of these self-professed ‘with Ron’ Indies on both sides of the GPM (goals problem mass – the resultant mass from the collision of opposite intentions or flows colliding) is the seemingly stimulus-response tendency to blame.  In all of their authoritative, judgmental communications the overriding theme is to assign responsibility for whatever it is they are suffering upon another.  Ironically, anyone who witnessed much of Miscavige in action knows that his stimulus-response habit of blaming is perhaps his most destructive and prevelant tendancy.

Here is a central dichotomy with Scientology.  The technology, in pure, sane application can deliver a person to the state where he or she truly understands that he or she is responsible for his or her own condition.  In fact, a person only reaches the pinnacle of the state of Clear, by recognizing this fully and thus losing all inclination to engage in blame.  Yet, I ask you to examine the matter for yourself and see whether there are not other conditionings added to the mix along the route that make that realization in practice short-lived.

I was also accused of ‘You are not getting people to do, you are getting people to question and think about.’

Good point.  Here, I’ll ask people to do something.

Get yourself a copy of the Tao Te Ching, preferably ‘a new English version’ by Stephen Mitchell.

Read it more than once at your leisure, and particularly when you sense the onset of anxiety.

Learn to let go.  I assure you that if you work on it it will move you on up a little higher in disposition and character.

Since apparently the ‘with Ron’ guys won’t listen to Ron on the matter of blame, maybe they’ll listen to Lao Tzu:

Failure is an opportunity.

If you blame someone else,

There is no end to the blame.

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Posted in acknowledgments, David Miscavige, ethics, healing, independents, l. ron hubbard, policy, propaganda, Tao Te Ching, tech, the future, the Reformation, Uncategorized

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Faith Healing

Posted on February 22, 2013 by | 293 comments

In the book The Intention Experiment author Lynne Mctaggart details scientific studies conducted on the effectiveness of various forms of faith healing.  Faith healing encompasses all forms of spiritual assist utilizing intention to aid in the recovery of physically ill people.   The healers use various forms – from the direct laying on of hands, to prayer, to long-distance intention direction practice.

The results determined  by statistics that a certain type of healer had a higher rate of success than another type.  The distinction was that group “A” healed by supplicating to or conjuring a higher level of intention or spirit beyond their own, individual spirit potential – be it God, the Tao, or whatever word various intention practitioners used to describe a higher level, available pool of life force – to channel it into the healing process.  Healers in group “B” asserted they were directing solely their own life force to effectuate healing.   Extensive testing determined that group “A” had a significantly higher success rate than group “B.”

Knowing what you know about Thetans, theta, the 7th Dynamic, the 8th dynamic, spirituality and God – and assuming all other factors were equal, which they seldom are – what are your thoughts concerning the reason for the higher success rate of group “A?”

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Integration, Evolution, and Transcendence

Posted on February 18, 2013 by | 174 comments

Learning the art and honing the skills of differentiation, identification and association increases accuracy of observation. It increases intelligence. It increases ability.  L. Ron Hubbard aptly defined the application of those skills as sanity.

When one observes while exercising differentiation, identification and association one has assumed and assigned identity, differentiated himself from and made associations between himself and those phenomena and things that he observes.  By doing so, one is experiencing duality in the mode of causation.

Continued practice in these skills can reduce complexities and systems to simplicity and create a heightened sense and certainty of oneself and his place and role in the cosmos.  It can bring about an unrepressed, self-determined, well and happy state of being.  Scientology technology, sans cultish policy/group think indoctrination, is well equipped to bring about that state (the means and reasons why are covered in some detail in the book What Is Wrong With Scientology? – along with vital data on how to steer clear of the policy/group think cult indoctrination).

Once attained, one can trade on those skills to bring about higher intelligence and power of observation in others and/or more profit and power to oneself.  Some, though they would be the last to admit it, obtain and exercise a feeling of superiority and a comfortable identity for having accomplished a high degree of competence in the skills of identification, association and differentiation.  If the exercise of one’s skills are of sufficient value by way of their scarcity, more penetrating observation beyond them might seem a threat to the value of those skills of differentiation, identification and association and all that they garner. One can very easily find a contentment level where further observation of higher truths and unexplored realms might be seen to upset the comfort of the help, profit and power zones one is experiencing or operating in.  Some have even bought into the idea that to transcend or move on from that which increased one’s ability to identify, associate and differentiate would be tantamount to eschewing those skills and constitute the most heinous form of treason.  The act of continued observation beyond the constructs provided apparently threatens the very identity the skilled one carved out and created for himself as a master of identification, association and differentiation.

On the other hand, one could also value curiosity, sense of adventure, and thirst for higher truths above comfort and power – and possess the courage to explore them – and one could thus seek to view larger and more complex systems and the interactions between them.  Over time, one might begin to observe entire universes and their interactions.  One might even transcend identity and the differentiation, identification and association that defines it and catch a glimpse of all of existence and the synchronicity with which all elements within it seem to interact.  Contrary to the fears announced by those profiting and comforting by expertise in the skills my personal experience is that further exploration only sharpens those skills.

When one observes the whole of existence with no differentiation, identification and association in mind – simply observes the whole of existence as it is – one does not differentiate, identify or associate himself.  One is not separate and apart from the whole of existence.  One is experiencing nonduality.

If one also studied advancements in science, he might find that the higher reality of nonduality is being validated in the laboratory.  And if he continued to observe, beyond differentiation-association-identification, he might find that the universe can be seen to behave as quantum mechanics is beginning to demonstrate. That is, the behavior of the universe is dependent upon the character of the observer; that there is a synchronicity and interconnectedness across the cosmos that is largely invisible and undetectable to the five traditional human senses which are all bound up in identity, and its dependence for survival upon differentiation and association.  Planet earth’s greatest scientific minds – historically, the most skilled at differentiation, identification and association – tend to say of quantum mechanics, ‘if you think you understand it, then I know that you don’t.’

They might more accurately have stated that ‘if you think you can explain it in words, then you haven’t witnessed it.’  As Lao Tzu noted: The tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.  The name that can be named is no the eternal Name.  The unnamable is the eternally real.  Naming is the origin of all particular things.  Free from desire, you realize the mystery.  Caught in desire you see only the manifestations. Einstein called it ‘spooky’ phenomena, as phenomena observed potentially could turn our entire concepts of all of existence, our very identities and the definition of God, upside down.  For decades hence science agreed to steer clear of examining how quantum phenomena might impact or shed light upon the nature of the soul, spirit and consciousness. For the past five decades, however, scientists have increasingly explored consciousness and contemplative philosophers have begun to explore science. And in this meeting of minds more clarity is arising.

The heightened abilities to differentiate, associate and identify are demonstrating with greater accuracy how we can better predict the manner in which the universe responds to stimuli.  The universe can be more causatively manipulated. It can be more thoroughly controlled.  It can be caused to bring about more comfort, profit, and power to the identities exercising identification, association and differentiation on a more causative level.

However, it seems that only when one transcends identity and the need for comfort, wealth, and power and the need to differentiate, identify and associate in order to collect and maintain them, that the higher truths of the universe can be directly experienced and perceived.  Not with the five traditional senses.  Instead, with the sixth sense and beyond – referred to in Scientology as theta perceptics, referred to in Eastern traditions as nondual consciousness or awareness.

It seems that if one can learn to let go of an avid craving and drive for the ultimate, everlasting state of ‘causation’ he or she might get a taste of it.  Ironically, contemplative teachers increasingly refer to such tastes as ‘causal consciousness.’ It might just be an activity that one cannot do, but instead a state one must actually be in order to realize.

In that experience, the universe does not respond to one’s causation. It is not something separate, apart, or even associated with you.  There is no association or differentiation between you and it. It is you and you are it.  It and you simply is.

Is one then a separate, distinct identity or a part of a single infinity?

It would appear that it all depends upon how one is viewing himself and the universe.

Can one have it both ways?

Inevitably.

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Introduction to Horizontal Growth

Posted on February 5, 2013 by | 200 comments

 

Scientology is perhaps the most powerful technology ever developed for vertical, cognitive individual growth.  Unfortunately it comes with an instilled mores that devalues and prohibits meaningful horizontal growth.   In my opinion, vertical growth, absent a horizontal foundation can cause spiritual vertigo.

The following 2,000-plus year old story is translated by Eva Wong in  Lieh-Tzu: A Taoist Guide to Practical Living (Shambala Publications, Inc.).  It gives a flavor of what I mean by horizontal growth.

What is Wisdom?

One day Tzu-hsia was chatting with Confucius.  When they came to discussing the merits of each student, Tzu-hsia asked his teacher, “What do you think of Yen-hui?”  Confucius replied, “Yen-hui is very kind and gentle.  His compassion far surpasses mine.”

“How about Tzu-kung?”

“Tzu-kung is much better than I am when it comes to debating and presenting arguments.”

“And what about Tzu-lu?”

“Tzu-lu is a brave man.  I cannot match him for courage.”

“And Tzu-chang?”

“Tzu-chang can hold his dignity better than I.”

Tzu-hsia was so surprised by his teacher’s answers that he stood up and exclaimed, “How come they all want to learn from you?”

Confucius motioned his student to sit down.  When he saw that Tzu-hsia had calmed down, he said, “Yen-hui is compassionate, but he is stubborn and inflexible.  Tzu-kung can be very persuasive, but he does not know when to stop talking.  Tzu-lu can be courageous but does not know tolerance.  Tzu-chang can be dignified but does not know how to be harmonious with others.  I would not exchange their merits for my own even if they offered. That’s why they all come to learn from me.”

Wisdom is not competence in one skill or many skills.  It is the ability to recognize strengths and weaknesses in ourselves and others.  Thus, a wise teacher knows that although he may not surpass certain students in specific skills, he can give them what they need to become better individuals.

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