Reference: A History of Man
This paper presents CHAPTER FOUR A from the book SCIENTOLOGY: A HISTORY OF MAN by L. RON HUBBARD. The contents are from the original publication of this book in 1952.
The paragraphs of the original material (in black) are accompanied by brief comments (in color) based on the present understanding. Feedback on these comments is appreciated.
The heading below is linked to the original materials.
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The Theta Being
THE THETA BEING is the principal target of the auditor.
THE PRECLEAR is the theta being.
The main thing wrong with any preclear is that he cannot disentangle himself from entities and somatic entities, from demon circuits and MEST bodies. He wants to know WHO he is and WHERE he is.
A common complaint from a preclear is that somebody won’t let him be himself. The joke of this is that the preclear doesn’t know who HIMSELF is, much less why he can be allowed to be HIM.
Take any preclear and, using concept running, motivator, overt and DED and you will find him instantly in the midst of dozens of engrams if you ask him to run the concepts, “I am myself,” “You are yourself,” “What is my name?” “Who am I?” and similar concepts which attempt to single out his identity.
A person can disentangle himself from all anomalies, such as, the fixation on the body, the demon circuits, etc. He can know who he is and where he is once he understands The Definition of BEINGNESS, etc. Having a body is not an anomaly, but having a fixation on the body is definitely an anomaly. If a person can’t be himself then he is stuck with an anomaly.
The only reason why a person becomes aberrated about other people is that he cannot distinguish between himself and others. You find preclears—and auditors too—who go around thinking themselves burdened with facsimiles of others, who become restimulated and then try to run the engrams of others to cool the restimulation.
IDENTIFICATION OF THE REAL “I” IS THE SURE CURE FOR IDENTIFICATION OF SELF WITH OTHERS AND OTHERS WITH OTHERS.
WHO is the preclear? He is the theta being.
How does one really de-aberrate and clear a preclear? By clearing the theta being.
By running genetic entity incidents, by cleaning up present life, by running “past deaths,” the auditor can get rid of psychosomatics by the bale for the preclear. The auditor can practically rebuild the body.
He can clarify thought by taking away pains restimulated by thinking. He can do a thousand marvels never before possible here on Earth—or anywhere else for that matter.
An aberrated person is unable to see things as they are. He is unable to recognize similarities and differences among things. The first thing is to clear his misconceptions on the subject of beingness. Then help him resolve anomalies to do with his beingness. Subject Clearing is a powerful tool to accomplish this.
But when he has done all these things, often at great labour, what does he have? He has a composite being, good enough to be called Homo Novis—a theta-animated MEST body possessed of new and desirable attributes. That doesn’t mean he has the preclear cleared. That doesn’t mean that he has located the preclear for the preclear and restored an ultimate self-determinism. It means the auditor has done well. The auditor has made what we are calling a MEST clear, a good, sane, rational MEST being about a skyscraper higher than Homo Sapiens. But in that Homo Sapiens is a pretty horrible thing to be, this isn’t good enough, not nearly good enough.
This Homo Novis is limited in his self-determinism by all the economic and social restrictions of an aberrated society. He is not free of food, clothing or shelter. He dies when you get him too cold, he perishes when the oxygen content drops too low. He is living in a tolerance band which keeps him cramped to the face of one second-rate planet in a tenth-rate system, prey to all the ill will that blows. Is this being free or self-determined? Maybe he is good enough to overlord his fellows into a security for himself never before possible. But that is his only real route towards security. He must fight and command for his three squares, he must use police protection in order to keep himself free of bullet holes and bumper marks. Compared to a Homo Sapiens, Homo Novis is very high and godlike. Compared to a truly self-determined being, Homo Novis is an ant ready to die under anybody’s mis-step.
But resolving the anomalies in one’s beingness is just the beginning. He has certainly achieved a lot but he is still subject to the anomalies in others, and also to the anomalies in the society, in the mankind, and in the universe.
This universe is a rough universe. It is a terrible and deadly universe. Only the strong survive it, only the ruthless can own it. Given one weak spot a being cannot long endure it for this universe will search it out and enlarge it and fester and probe it until that weak spot is a festering wound so large that the being is engulfed by his own sores.
Fighting this battle for survival, and fight it he must, a being in the MEST universe cannot seem to afford decency or charity or ethics; he cannot afford any weakness, any mercy. The moment he does he is lost—for he is surrounded by chilled, coarse rock and molten energy which, no matter the state of aberration of his social surroundings, will engulf him instantly that he ceases to obey the very least laws of MEST.
This is a universe of force. It is not a universe of reason. Brutal, unthinking, without decency or mercy, MEST force awaits with punishment any being with any weakness.
The universe is not as bad as Hubbard makes it sound. Hubbard is focused on fighting the anomalies rather than resolving them. He does not see the resolution because he is fixated on the survival of the individuality, and, therefore, he cannot conceive of the cooperation resulting from the oneness of viewpoints.
The possession of a MEST body is a liability for through that body the being can be given pain, can be regimented by the routine demands of eating and care from harm until at the very, very highest he can be but a puppet dancing to the spin of some unthinking planet under the strong glare of a remote and careless sun. Under these conditions a being burdened with care and liability of a body, made uncertain by an unknowingness, bows to strange and non-existent gods, resorts to terrible make-shifts in lieu of justice,- cringes before the mightier bomb, the sharper blade.
You have examined an engram. A standard engram is simply the collision of the body with the MEST universe with sufficient impact to produce the confusion of attention known as “unconsciousness.’
Should you care to make a test, just run “care of the body” as a total therapy. You will discover that by running out the postulates of a preclear about his body and its care and his injunctions and insistences to others that they care for their bodies, you can produce soaring changes in tone. An entire book can be written concerning this therapy. An entire book has been written about it—the first in Dianetics. This therapy could be styled, “The efforts of a theta being to reconcile the frailty of a MEST body with the ethics of a theta being.” They do not reconcile, these two. Schopenhauer, Zeno and names without number in philosophy have been trying to make this reconciliation for aeons. One says, “Defeat it all and die, for only by dying can you defeat it.” Another says, “You can’t win; therefore, the only victory is in refusing to try to win.”
Hubbard is viewing body as a liability because his attention is fixated on the vulnerability of the body. The solution is simple. Take the attention off the body and operate as usual. If the body gets engrams, simply run them out.
Christianity and a million other -anities have struggled with this problem and the result is a pot-pourri of answers, none of which reconcile the problem. You have a soul—it goes off somewhere, you don’t know about it. You are a soul; you don’t know about it.
Today we live in a vast cult called “Worship the body”. Medical doctors, schoolteachers, parents, traffic officers, the whole society unites into this war-cry, “Care for the body.” This stems from the ignorance that the body is all that one has, that he will have just one body, that his total devotion is the care of that body.
A body is a vegetable. It is not even a sentient vegetable for it lacks perception in the whole theta range. Like any vegetable it grows from seed and has habit patterns which help it survive. And, like any vegetable, one way or another, it gets used by others.
Early theta beings saw MEST bodies acting and being as though they were self-motivated. This was a curiosity. The early theta being did not know that these MEST bodies depended wholly for their wits under the guidance of a decayed theta being. The bodies looked like entities of considerable force and skill. The theta beingness of them was hidden and unapparent. Thus, even theta beings have been fooled by MEST bodies.
It is true that there is fixation on bodies in the current societies and this is an anomaly on a social scale. But Hubbard has his own theory about it, which blames the body instead of correctly spotting the fixation.
A MEST body, whether it belongs to the race of Man or the race of ants is yet but an animated vegetable. Given a theta being to guide it, it becomes part of a composite such as Homo Sapiens: here we have a theta being, decayed into unknowingness, devoted to the care of a MEST body. The “I” of this body, the actual volition of it, all its wits and skills are theta things derived from the guidance of a theta being. By itself the body would live, walk around, react, sleep, kill, and direct an existence no better than that of a field mouse or a zombie. Put a theta being over it and it becomes possessed of ethics and morals and direction and goals and the ability to reason; it becomes this strange thing called Homo Sapiens, a being above animals and yet an animal.
Give this MEST body a psychotic theta being and you get a sort of Frankenstein’s monster. Give this MEST body a nearly unconscious theta being and you get a zombie.
The body is a carbon-oxygen engine which runs at 98.6° F. The theta being is the engineer running this engine in a Homo Sapiens. There is already an entity running this engine, the GE, but there is here only a total devotion to avoiding pain, seeking survival factors of the meanest sort, begetting new MEST bodies. Every cell in that body has its own theta, the GE is theta. A THETA BEING is something else entirely.
It is Hubbard’s assumption that a THETA BEING is something else entirely. This is not so. A theta being is to the mind what GE is to the body. Mind and body are extensions of each other, and so are theta being and GE. They are not two different systems. If the mind-body, or the theta being-GE, system is weak then it needs to be strengthened by resolving the anomalies in it.
In the first place, the theta being came into being without the need of a MEST body, without the need of motors. It is close to a perpetual motion picture machine in that it can create energy and impulses. It thinks without facsimiles, it can act without experience, it can know simply by being. When we have talked of optimum performance in Dianetics or Scientology, we have talked about the actual top-level capabilities of the theta being, not the capabilities of the MEST being. Early work in Dianetics treats of the composite called Homo Sapiens and treats that composite for what it is, an identity of several parts which act in greater or less coordination. You can go right on treating this composite being as a unit, you can go right on treating him and getting results for which, you will be praised. But you must know that you are not treating the actual identity when you treat the MEST body—you are furthering a composite and actually you are subscribing to the International Cult called “Care of the Body.”
Fixation on the body is something different. It is an anomaly that needs to be resolved. But mind-body, or theta being-GE, is a system, and not an anomaly. It must be treated as a single system.
You can, at your own choice, go on living with and processing this composite known as Homo Sapiens and create Homo Novis. You can use Dianetics to make hitherto impossible strides. But be advised that in this choice you are living with paradoxes which no philosopher in all the ages ever reconciled—the injustice of death, the depravity of human beings as in Plato, the penalty of assisting another, the impossibility of having good ARC and survival too, the liability of being kind and merciful and every “unanswerable” religious paradox known. You, by persisting in yesterday’s reality are persisting then in problems which have never been resolved with the factors accepted. You are demanding of a MEST-theta composite that he be self-determined when every zephyr from a hard universe contains death for him and can turn him like a top; you are demanding that he be “careful” when his only salvation is to be carefree, you are saddling him with all the unanswered riddles of an aberrated life in an aberrated world. And you are condemning a preclear to the dwindling spiral— for the theta being as part of the composite decays fast and soon dies forever in the rigid apathy of MEST.
Hubbard wants to achieve a certain ideal scene. There is nothing wrong with that ideal scene, but he seems to be pursuing a flawed reasoning toward some imaginary “solution.”
Thus, this data is given you. In lieu of this data the only thing which could be given Man is the answering salute to the gladiators—they who are about to die.
As an auditor, the choice is yours to make—the paradoxes or the answer. I would not give you this data unless it can be demonstrated on any preclear with ease. And I would not give it to you unless you needed it.
Here it is.
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