On E-meter:
The E-meter reacts to both reactive and analytical thought. In the beginning it picks up the obvious reactive thoughts connected with an unwanted condition. But once the inconsistencies associated with these thoughts are resolved, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish reactive thoughts from analytical thoughts. This makes Scientology approach to case resolution uncertain.
One effect of this uncertainty is endless ‘auditing of entities’ that occurs on OT levels. The other effect is conditioning where one believes that one is getting better and powerful while unwanted conditions persist.
Thus, an E-meter may appear to be helpful in the beginning, but on a long term basis it creates dependency and leads to conditioning.
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On “Source” of life:
We observe that man has both physical and spiritual attributes that exist side by side. The claim that man is a physical organism, which is animated by an individual source called ‘thetan’, is highly speculative.
This speculation identifies self with ‘thetan’ and claims that self exists independent of the physical body. This speculation goes further to claim that the basis of thetan (self) is theta (spirit) which produces everything physical.
A life organism is evidently made up of physical and spiritual attributes. Both seems to have existed side by side since millennia. However, there is no evidence that the spiritual attributes came first and they produced the physical attributes.
From actual observations, body grows and so does self. The atoms and molecules, which make up the body, are changing continually. Similarly, the factors (consideration, desires and impulses), which make up the self, are also changing continually. There is nothing about the body or the self, which remains constant for ever.
Memories of past does not necessarily mean that the body and self of the past is also the body and self of the present. There is no permanent or unchanging body, self, or individual “source” of life.
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On Time Track:
When we talk about having a childhood, birth etc., we are talking about a sequence of memories attached to our present identity, individuality or self. Memories are impressions. These impressions may be collected together in some manner as a set. This set may be called a time track.
As the make-up of self is changing from moment to moment, self is also a part of the time track. There is no permanent ‘element’ of self owning the time track. So, any talk, such as a ‘thetan’ having a time track, is superfluous.
It is not necessary to have a moment to moment record stored somewhere. A recall could be a reconfiguration of memory from stored basic patterns, similar to visualization.
Any process to handle unwanted condition should address things that are in restimulation. These would be inconsistencies impinging on the person in present time. What needs to be sorted out is always there. There is no need to dig into the ‘memories’ or keep any notes. This makes the need for a time-track unnecessary.
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On Clearing:
What Hubbard called Clear in Scientology is a relative condition. There may be a major release. But clearing continues as new inconsistencie comes to view in present time. Thus, the “clearing” is never absolute.
Any erasure is relative to its context. It is the resolution of inconsistency. Only thing that disappears is the inconsistency. There is no absolute erasure of actual matter, energy, space or time.
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On Past Lives:
When a ‘memory’ does not seem to be consistent with ‘current life’, it is relegated to the category of ‘past life’. When a ‘past life’ incident presents itself in sufficient detail, accompanied by a release from some unwanted condition, it seems to lend credibility to the notion of past lives.
However, such incidents are isolated. They are reconfigured memories triggered by some inconsistency impinging on the person in present time. It may be called a reactive visualization that resolves the inconsistency. This is similar to analytical visualizations used consciously to solve problems of science and engineering. The contents of such visualizations are significant only to the degree that they resolve the problem. They are neither true nor false in some absolute sense.
One may then speculate past lives based on such isolated reactive visualizations, but such speculations do not lead to further resolution of unwanted conditions.
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On Death:
Death has been the most fascinating subject in human history. It has spawned religions. What is observed is a sudden cessation of body’s animation.
But this cessation is not so sudden. The circulatory system fails first, which is followed almost immediately by the failure of the respiratory system. The usual chemical operations in the body starts to get suspended. The physical organs start to shut down one by one. There is a chain reaction. This is not much different from powering down a computer.
The body is a much more complex system than a computer. There are more fundamental systems underlying its electrochemical system that are yet to be fully explored. It is true that the spirit has left the body, but this is a poetic expression only. We do not fully understand how the body begins to power down at death. In spite of it suddenness, it takes a finite amount of time.
There is a similar curiosity about how a body powers up at birth. But the process of fertilization to birth is not so sudden and fascinating. There are a whole lot of connections going on in the body during this period. We do not have a clear demarkation of the moment at which the spirit enters the body.
Of course there is a spiritual aspect to the process of birth and death, but it is not so simplistic as visualized in terms of a thetan entering or leaving the body.
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On Mental Image Pictures:
Scientology talks about a person’s having mental image pictures of the past. Such pictures are supposedly recordings of the physical universe as it goes by. All memory is supposed to be made up of such pictures. According to Dianetics the pictures of painful and unconscious moments are stored in a reactive bank in the mind. It is necessary to recall such pictures to handle one’s unwanted condition.
Is this premise of stored mental image pictures correct? Could it be possible that there is no such storage of pictures, and that the mind simply visualizes to handle inconsistencies as and when needed!
Mind processes incoming perceptions directly into action. As long as the mind is able to process data perfectly one continues to act without thinking. But the moment mind is unable to process the incoming data, an inconsistency is formed and the mind gets wound up.
Thus, winding up of the mind occurs due to stacking up of such inconsistencies. Later, when attention is put on inconsistencies, and the mind is allowed to unwind itself, it creates the visualization necessary to resolve those inconsistencies. This is very plausible because, normally, we use visualization to solve our problems.
To unwind itself, the mind may go through thousands of visualization rapidly to find the one that resolves an inconsistency. It is like Alan Turing’s machine that broke the code generated by German enigma machine through rapid iteration of computation based only on a few clues.
In short, there are no mental image pictures that are continually being recorded. There are only present time visualizations in the mind to resolve the inconsistencies impinging on a person. Resolution occurs to the degree mind is able to visualize correctly.
The chances of resolutions of inconsistencies increase as mindfulness is practiced.
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Comments
Doing solo auditing, one discovers this. Once I clearly observed that the meter was simply reacting to thoughts that I was having, it became a simple matter to notice my stray, random, or inconsistent thoughts as they occurred. This expands beyond the session and into everyday life as well as during rest and I believe even sleeping. I normally awake into a moment of clarity in the mornings after sleeping at night. I normally wake with resolution to issues which held my attention but were not resolved on the previous day.
That is the aspect of mindfulness where one let’s the mind unstack itself.
Which brings up the other piece of this which is to not continually “stack up” the mind.
I have added the following to the OP:
On Past Lives:
When a ‘memory’ does not seem to be consistent with ‘current life’, it is relegated to the category of ‘past life’. When a ‘past life’ incident presents itself in sufficient detail, accompanied by a release from some unwanted condition, it seems to lend credibility to the notion of past lives.
However, such incidents are isolated. They are reconfigured memories triggered by some inconsistency impinging on the person in present time. It may be called a reactive visualization that resolves the inconsistency. This is similar to analytical visualizations used consciously to solve problems of science and engineering. The contents of such visualizations are significant only to the degree that they resolve the problem. They are neither true nor false in some absolute sense.
One may then speculate past lives based on such isolated reactive visualizations, but such speculations do not lead to further resolution of unwanted conditions.
The above seems to suggest an interesting KHTK process.
(1) Isolate the inconsistency impinging on the person in present time.
(2) Let the mind visualize the details of that inconsistency freely with mindfulness without any logical restrictions until some resolution takes place.
I think that Mark might be a suitable person to experiment with this process.
This process is consistent with MSC where one makes examples of concepts and visualizes inconsistencies.
Thetan = individual source of life
Are there infinite sources of life?
HMMMMMM…….
Here are my comments on Death:
Death has been the most fascinating subject in human history. It has spawned religions. What is observed is a sudden cessation of body’s animation.
But this cessation is not so sudden. The circulatory system fails first, which is followed almost immediately by the failure of the respiratory system. The usual chemical operations in the body starts to get suspended. The physical organs start to shut down one by one. There is a chain reaction. This is not much different from powering down a computer.
The body is a much more complex system than a computer. There are more fundamental systems underlying its electrochemical system that are yet to be fully explored. It is true that the spirit has left the body, but this is a poetic expression only. We do not fully understand how the body begins to power down at death. In spite of it suddenness, it takes a finite amount of time.
There is a similar curiosity about how a body powers up at birth. But the process of fertilization to birth is not so sudden and fascinating. There are a whole lot of connections going on in the body during this period. We do not have a clear demarkation of the moment at which the spirit enters the body.
Of course there is a spiritual aspect to the process of birth and death, but it is not so simplistic as visualized in terms of a thetan entering or leaving the body.
What is the difference among the mechanisms that underlie
(1) Normal problem solving visualizations
(2) Normal recalls
(3) Normal dreams
(4) Strange dreams
(5) Past life recalls in auditing
(6) Normal hallucinations
(7) Hallucinations under drugs
(8) Psychotic breaks
(9) Feeling of being outside the body
(10) Perceptions under hypnotism or conditioning?
There seems to be a store of thought elements that may be combined in various ways to generate images. The obvious one is conscious imagination, One creates and manipulates images of what one has actually experienced.
This is done in daydreaming to obtain pleasure. This is also done in order to solve problems. This also seems to be done when recalling a memory.
Such creation and manipulation of images may be done for you unconsciously, as in dreams, in digging into the mind to find answers, in hallucinations, hypnotism, etc.
So, there are pixels or picture elements in the mind that may be combined and recombined in various ways to produce images in the mind. Recall of the past probably uses this same mechanism.
In a recall, one expects the image to be there in a certain way and so reconstructs it that way.
By controlling such expectations, one may control the memory or even reality (as in hypnotism).
One’s fears and other emotions may also control the reconstructions of the memory or one’s reality.
There is more to be mindful of here.
What one is experiencing may be manipulated easily by manipulating desires and expectations.
Hubbard puts lot of expectations there quite shamelessly without supplying any consistency rendered by proofs. The “proof” then are supplied through the images generated by those expectations.
It is the tail wagging the dog. You see what you expect and then you believe it because you see it.
The secret of mindfulness is to watch your own desires and expectations and what underlies them.
The key mental activity appears to be visualization.
Visualization seems to be driven by desire.
Desire seems to arise from a potential difference created by inconsistency.
Inconsistency seems to be part of oscillation about a state of consistency.
The oscillation seems to arise from inherent instability of existence.
I like how your make the metaphors of physicality resonate with the subject of physics.
I hope that these ideas will lead somewhere. Right now they are all over the place and require proof.
One thing I’m getting a reality on is that consistent modeling is an important step on the road to proof.
Death is the most mysterious subject. People are curious about who they are and have they lived before. These are the inconsistencies impinging on them when they come across incidents containing death and past life scenarios in their auditing.
Vinaire: Death is the most mysterious subject.
Chris: Mystery, like interest, is what we add to a subject. I see nothing inherently mysterious or interesting about anything. Interest, like you described with desire, seems to be a potential difference oscillating around a consistency. Curiosity seems to be a type of detection mechanism used to notice inconsistencies. I have been watching and learning from my cat.
I am still looking for a good explanation for “will” or “self-determinism”. How can one force thought or visualization? What is the self-motivating agent?
There seems to be a feedback system that fractals up very fast. But how does it start?
My own feeling about this is that we have to clear our minds of lingering old models and if we are going to play the game of “proofs” then use the best of what has been proven then work up models that can possibly be consistent with those proofs and never ever cling too tightly to any model nor seek to maintain any status quo. I doubt very much that extant models will survive in their present form very long into the future.
Visualizations are created out of mental pixels available to a person.
Memory is a type of visualization. The facsimiles and incidents that one comes across in one’s auditing are also visualizations. When one is thinking hard trying to find answers, one is continually going through a lot of visualizations rapidly. When one is letting the mind unstack itself, again there is a chain of visualizations.
What creates visualizations are analytical and reactive desires and expectations.
For a visualization to be created, there must be
(1) Thought pixels
(2) Desire or expectation
(3) Activating impulse
Inconsistency = something unresolved = a departure from consistency
A beingness has both spiritual and physical aspects.
Beingness comes about and then it disintegrates.
Physical aspects come about and then they disintegrate.
Spiritual aspects come about and then they disintegrate.
It is inconsistent to think of some beingness, such as, thetan, that continues for ever.
Awareness would not be aware of gaps in awareness. Awareness would see itself to be there all the time. It would think of itself as immortal. But this is just an appearance and not what is truly there.
Vinaire: Awareness would not be aware of gaps in awareness.
Chris: Earlier this year, I had a minor 5 minute outpatient surgery done using general anesthetization. Before doing this, I spent some time becoming mindful of what was planned considering all that I had been taught and all that I thought I knew about being conscious and “aware of being aware.” Despite any of my earlier considerations about this, when I went to sleep until I awoke 45 minutes later, I had no memory of the time elapsed from the time I “blinked” until I awoke. This was and remains a discontinuity in my memory. I do not experience this as a blank. I experience this as I closed and opened my eyes with no intervening time. My very first perception upon opening my eyes was of having changed positions. I was in a surgical room and when I opened my eyes, I was in a recovery room. Also, I felt quite alert and refreshed as one would experience after a very good and restful sleep. There is a pretty good summary of anesthesia at “How Stuff Works.”
Yes, I have experienced that twice during colonoscopies. This seems to connect spirituality with physicality. These aspects cannot be looked upon as two different “universes”.
I no longer find a model that separates spiritual from physical phenomena to be useful.
Vinaire: Awareness would see itself to be there all the time. It would think of itself as immortal.
Chris: Yes, awareness seems to be present when it is turned on and not present when it is turned off, a tautology again, nevertheless that is the way it seems to me.
What is not a tautology?
A straight line is a small segment of a circle with infinite radius! 😉
When I call out tautology, I am not criticizing. I am marveling and laughing at myself at the same time. I seem to be perfectly able to miss what is constantly right in front of me.
I wonder what a recall of past death is like? I once had a dream of being shot at a close range. There seemed to be a brief awareness that I am going to die. Then there was simply nothing. I woke up.
I think that actual death would be like that period of anesthesia. In this case, however, when one wakes up, one is a different person altogether. There is no awareness of the intervening period.
All this talk about “between lives existence” is simply a visualization to understand the phenomenon of death from a narrow point of awareness.
In actuality, there seems to be just the power down of a system, and then powering back up.
. . . And everything we are and everything we might ever be is preserved and passed along in the computer-like code of our DNA.
Hubbard belittled, joked and degraded this and said we were oh so much more than this without ever bothering to understand what this was. I no longer believe or trust Hubbard’s works and give it credit for being a barely interesting religious metaphor.
If DNA is the code, what is the operating system?
Mark
In my Dianetics auditing in 1969-70, within first 25 hours I experienced what seemed to be my birth and a couple of past deaths. There was an element of space opera in one of the deaths. There seemed to be a time sequence to all this in terms of “earlier similar”. I have recorded this in My Introduction to America.
As I see them now, These were visualizations that popped up on their own accord. They were totally unexpected. They popped up when I was trying to explore the physical condition of pain in my back.
I do not see them as recordings from the past that were played back. I see them now as reconstructions out of existing mental pixels to sort out some inconsistency.
What did get sorted out? I felt the pain in my back lessen. There was some tension that got relieved. I felt that I now knew the reason for it. There was a hope that something could be done about it.
Looking back at it now after 40+ years, I do see it as a turning point in my physical condition. I still have the vertebras at both ends of my spine fused. There is limited bending in my spine. There are times when I still feel pain in my back but it is neither continually there, nor so debilitating as it used to be. So, something did change for the better.
All I know is that my attention on my physical condition lessened and I could get on with my life. The experience was interesting. Scientology seemed to provide an explanation for it in terms of past lives (that concept was also there in my eastern upbringing) but that explanation was not consuming my attention. All I thought was that here was a phenomenon I would like to understand better. I did not swallow Scientology’s explanation as some holy writ, because there were still many questions unanswered.
Now that I have more time, I can go back and explore that experience in more detail and see if I can find answers to my questions.
The first answer seems to be that a visualization is a visualization. No further assumptions need to be added. That visualization is neither true nor false. It simply served to lessen an unwanted condition. It helped in sorting out an inconsistency.
The next answer is that these visualizations were unexpected. They occurred when I let go of all effort and simply let the mind do its thing. All I thought of was the inconsistency of my unwanted condition and an intense concentration in looking at it. That was the simplicity of it, which I understand today as mindfulness.
I did not need or require the theory of past lives or implants or whatever else.
“Visualization” seems to also describe that the mind creates abstractions for the processes going on around It using everything available to it. If a model using Angels or space opera is available, then it incorporates it.
If we try we may better understand the very real placebo effect.
I recalled laying on a table with a hard shelled body, and had different spacial viewpoints (exterior) while watching TV, long before I ever heard of Scn. or anything like it. Perhaps my dad read Sci-Fi stories to my mom when she was preg. ‘Course, DNA goes a long way back. Wait, genetic memories are impossible, right?
Sorry, started scanning some incidents in bed and couldn’t get to sleep. Getting a little light headed.
Mark
I have also experienced many instances of exteriorization. Most intense were those exteriorizations, which occurred during a dreamlike state outside the session. My mental state was to simply let go – a total acceptance of whatever was occurring. There was no resistance.
I have described some of these occurrences in My Introduction to America. They have continued to occur till present time. I think that mindfulness is the key to it (see the 12 aspects of mindfulness).
Again, I see exteriorizations as visualizations that are neither true nor false. They seem to accompany resolution of inconsistencies, such as, fixed attention on body as a reference point. I even had a resolution of fixed attention on the physical universe as a reference point. Every release from fixed attention seems to be the result of a resolution of some inconsistency, and it is accompanied by a sense of exteriorization.
In fact, exteriorization may better be defined as a release from fixed attention.
I have feeling of exteriorization in waking, conscious state as well. It was more like a feeling of expanded consciousness rather than a feeling of being outside the body in outer space as in my vivid dreamlike state.
In my opinion, ‘exteriorization’ is really a release from fixed ideas than being at a location outside the body. The latter feeling is subjective only and not objective.
I do not think that there is a unique thetan (self). There is only a perception point that can be free from all fetters, such as, fixed ideas.
The “uniqueness” lies in filters only. So, a thetan may be looked upon as the centroid of all filters.
In nirvana, there is only a pure perception point viewing everything mindfully; there is no unique thetan.
My current metaphor for perception point is as a focusing of mental vectors, a kind of lensing effect if you will.
. . . And also, that perception point is like the resolution or focal point of a camera. The point seems to be the mental vectors themselves and not something separate from the self.
The idea that there is thetan that leaves the body at death, and sometimes hangs around the body for some time, is visualization only. It is neither true nor false. It has value only to the degree that it resolves some inconsistency.
The idea of thetan, and other ideas associated with it, have no value as a conjecture, hypothesis, or theory unless they actually help resolve some inconsistency.
L. Kin writes in his book on Scientology:
“As they kept running into past deaths and past lifetimes in their sessions, auditors began to understand the thetan as a wanderer from one body to the next. It became undeniably apparent that some people would leave their body right at the moment of death whereas others would hang around the dead body for a while -sometimes for a long while even. It as well became apparent that people would take new bodies any time between conception and birth, sometimes months after birth. Cases have been known where a person would leave an adult body after an accident and give it up for dead, with another one picking up this very body to make it his home. All sorts of variations on this theme were obviously possible. Proof of the matter was: does running this incident resolve the problem? If so, it must be true. The sheer number of occurrences itself made it hard to doubt the matter.
“The phenomenon of being outside the body was observed even during sessions and given the term “going exterior”. A preclear would suddenly have perceptions from a point exterior to the body, see the body from above, be outside in the street and see what was happening, etc. This triggered a lot of research. Hubbard developed a number of processes to cultivate this ability. They were released 1954 in the book “Creation of Human Ability”. Someone who managed to stay and act stabily outside the body was deemed an Operating Thetan or OT. “Operate” means as much as “act”. An OT is someone who acts as a thetan, not as a body.
“The feat of going exterior is of course not restricted to scientology but has been experienced and observed in all spiritual disciplines of the past as well as of the present. Quite a number of people can do it naturally. The ability to do so varies considerably from person to person. Some just feel bigger than their body – as if they were the peach and the body the kernel. Depending on the emotional state of the person the volume of space the person takes in, will vary. It may be of remarkable size. Others actually manage to completely “get out” of the body and “walk around” – to be fair, one has to admit that this is a peak experience which not many have had. Usually it does not last longer than a few seconds or minutes. At this time there is no method in scientology whereby one could reliably turn this into a stable ability, although, regrettably, the promise of achieving such a state has been used as a powerful selling point within the movement.”
These ideas should not be peddled as truth.
Scientology talks about a person’s having his own pictures, and at times having borrowed pictures from others. This is similar to having one’s own ideas, or borrowing ideas from others.
But to a perception point that is looking mindfully, the idea of oneself or other self is not there. One simply looks at whatever is there without the filter of “it is mine” or “it is somebody else’s”. It simply looks at what is there without attaching the additional significance of “mine” or “other’s” to it.
Yes the ego is something else.