If the individual difficulties of billions of people on this planet are to be cleared, as Scientology aspires to do, then the only formula that would work is self-help. We can only create an environment in which self-help can occur. Ultimately, it is the person who really helps himself.
Nobody can really help another. Only the person can help himself.
Self-help is solo help. It is something that a person can do by himself or herself. It doesn’t require dependence on some psychoanalyst, auditor, or practitioner. If you want to help a person, then encourage him to use his own mind.
Nobody should monkey with the mind of another person with the idea of “helping” him.
Psychology built itself up on talk therapy. The psychoanalyst listens to a person’s problems and helps him to sort them out. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. With such spotty results talk therapy has not gained much ground.
The “science” of the talk therapy has not been fully worked out.
The good results in talk therapy have never come from the therapist giving advice to the person. The results have always come from the person realizing his problem while talking to the therapist. Therefore, the role of the therapist has been to guide the person to look at his problem more thoroughly.
The therapist listens to the person and guides him where to look.
It was not the therapist who was sorting the person’s problem out. It was the person who was sorting his problems by looking at them more closely. The therapist was there to help the person look at his condition.
It is looking that helps resolve the problem, and not talking.
Talking is there only for someone to listen and guide the person where to look. If there is a technology that guides the person to look for himself then talking becomes unnecessary. The person then becomes his own silent therapist.
The person can be a silent therapist to himself or herself.
Meditation has long been a form of self-help. But it is made ineffective to the degree it moves away from “looking” and get mixed with weird practices, like focusing on a burning candle. The key technology of meditation is looking and seeing things as they are. This is called mindfulness.
Mindfulness is the framework within which meditation works.
The recent advancement has been the training drill “TR0” of Scientology. In TR0, two people sit down and look at each other silently. It is an advancement only because it generates an interest in looking. But it works within the context of mindfulness. TR0 is also rendered ineffective when it moves away from looking and gets involved with mumbo-jumbo like “blink less TR0” and confrontation.
TR0 of Scientology works only within the framework of mindfulness.
If we have to create a self-help environment for billions of people on this planet, then any self-help technology must be made freely available, as was done by Buddha 2,600 years ago. Buddha made his technology of mindfulness freely available and then worked all his life to make sure that all people benefited from it. The social benefit greatly outweighs any personal benefit of making money.
Any self-help technology must be made freely available.
The self-help technology is the technology to create a healthy environment in which proper growth can occur. It is a cooperative effort like the effort in science. Science makes knowledge freely available so others can make advances upon it. It is only the narrow self-interest of some that discourages such advances in technology by calling them “squirreling.” Unfortunately, that is the case with Scientology.
Scientology discourages the advancement of self-help technology with its idea of “squirreling.”
All effective self-help technology is built upon mindfulness. Mindfulness is the technology that was freely provided by Buddha.
To look, contemplate, and come up with answers is the inherent right of any person. It is the application of this right, which improves the conditions in life. This right should never be suppressed, or discouraged through narrow-minded attempts to monopolize knowledge and technology.
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Comments
Very true, Vinaire. Clients of mental therapies often had an initial success when a therapist rescued us from the one special issue that had been ruining our lives. But after that it can be a downward spiral, getting more afraid of one’s own mind and more dependent on the therapist for help. Playing the game of patient and doctor, in fact. To become free of their mind they might need to take responsibility for it, and rediscover their ability to create and manage it.
May I suggest that a broad consensus could develop between self-help disciplines like mindfulness, TROM, rub-and-yawn etc? These have sometimng in common: enhancing awareness of the present time environment, while also being aware of any ‘past’ pictures that the mind brings up.
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David, initial success occurs because the client looked at a “low hanging fruit” in his case, Before that the client was not looking at all. So, the therapy, despite its many distractions was able to get the client to look. This is the positive aspect.
But as the “low hanging fruits” on the case are gone, and the client has learned to look, it is better for the client to look at the more complicated aspects of his case on his own. The therapist now becomes more of a distraction than help.
Sooner or later I shall get around to studying other self-help therapies, and compare them. I already know that Scientology processes work much better when e-meter is replaced by mindfulness approach of unstacking the mind.
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This is absolutely correct, and a very good summary of how things should be in the field of life improvement and self-help therapies. Thank you for your work and for sharing it.
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Scott, Thank you for letting your presence felt on my blog,
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Good post.
On a personal basis, I find it very easy to discharge any sort of charge or negative emotion because I can relate the type of charge (such as pain or emotion) to my knowledge gained as an auditor and then I can handle the charge with an appropriate approach. I would, for instance, handle a pain or injury differently from an anger emotion.
Without some sort of framework of understanding it can be very easy for a person to be quite stuck in a charge. The question I have is how to provide a person with the basic understanding of what is being dealt with in order to easily discharge it. I don’t think mindfulness, alone, can be fully effective.
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I think that mindfulness can replace the e-meter of Scientology with great success.
Dianetics needs to be rewritten with mindfulness as the framework.
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I agree with what you said about the therapist guiding not showing. When I started therapy, I expected to go in with my problems and be given a clear guide on how to solve them. Instead, my therapist gave me the tools and then let me figure out how to use them.
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