Category Archives: Scientology

PHOENIX LECTURES: Chapter 11

Project: Hubbard 1954: The Phoenix Lectures

This paper presents Chapter 11 from the book THE PHOENIX LECTURES by L. RON HUBBARD. The contents are from the original publication of this book by The Church of Scientology (1954).

The paragraphs of the original material (in black) are accompanied by brief comments (in color) based on the understanding from Buddhism.  Feedback on these comments is always appreciated.

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THE FOUR CONDITIONS OF EXISTENCE (Part 5)

With the data we have on these conditions we can talk a little bit here about how your preclear might possibly recover from the state which he conceives himself to be in.

We consider now that the pattern of existence through which he has been is a very definite track. It is a track which starts with As-is-ness, and this of course includes space. You might possibly completely miss in auditing a preclear if you didn’t realize that As-is-ness has to start with space. One could get so concentrated on and frantic about objects and energy, this factor of space might be completely missed. A thetan can communicate with space with great ease. The body has gone too far on this track to do this easily. The body finds it quite sickening to communicate with space, but a thetan can communicate with space rather easily, and the As-is-ness begins with space, and then it gets into, of course simultaneously, energy, and mass.

The track starts with static transforming into kinetic. The potential of Static appears as the energy of Kinetic. The energy of lowest vibration appears as “space”. Energy of very high vibrations appears as mass. Therefore, space-energy-mass describes the spectrum of energy of increasing vibrations. According to Hubbard, thetan finds it easier to communicate with space (low vibrations) than with body (high vibrations).

NOTE: Space defines the extents of energy. The energy of lowest vibration appears as “empty space”.

Now space, energy, mass, consideration of, are all simultaneous. There is no consideration here related to time.

We have to move the anchor points of the space, in order to get a continuance of the space, and move the energy itself in the space, and change them in one fashion or another in order to get a continuance of that energy, and when this has not been introduced we have not postulated time. A thetan doing this would theoretically pass from As-is-ness into Alter-is-ness just immediately. He’d have to, or he would have no continuation of any kind.

In other words, it wouldn’t exist unless he intended to change it. He would have to make the intention of change simultaneous with the action of creation. And if he did not, he would get a disappearance immediately of that mass.

He passes then into Alter-is-ness, which is a simultaneous action with As-is-ness at first, and then of course immediately becomes an action of continuation, and we get Is-ness, which is this reality that we talk about — space, energy, objects.

After the transformation of static to kinetic, space-energy-mass not only appear but they continue to exist. This means they have duration or Time. This is simply the potential manifesting itself, but Hubbard sees this as “As-is-ness followed immediately by Alter-is-ness.”

Just exactly why we consider this combination to be a reality, that reality is Is-ness, is a little bit dull, because the fact of the matter is that reality itself to continue as a reality would not be an Is-ness at all but a continuous Alter-is-ness.

So, we get Is-ness actually as a hypothetical state.

Space-energy-mass are vibrating. This may be called “continuous Alter-is-ness”.  But, conventionally, this forms our reality or Is-ness. Thetan may actually represent the vibrational aspect of energy.

Now the fact that the thetan is a Static — that’s not hypothetical or theoretical. The fact that he is a Static that can consider, and can produce space and energy and objects, is not hypothetical. That’s true.

Hubbard says. “The fact that he [thetan] is a Static that can consider, and can produce space and energy and objects, is not hypothetical.” That means when the static potential of thetan is expressed, we have enduring space-energy-mass. In other words, thetan transforms into enduring space-energy-mass. This may be viewed as space-energy-mass having consciousness.

We have facts, facts, all the way along here, until we get to this thing called reality and we suddenly discover that Is-ness is hypothetical.

In the whole field of As-is-ness, the creation of space, energy, objects, of Alter-is- ness, Is-ness, Not-is-ness and more Alter-is-ness, there is only one hypothetical state. And that’s Is-ness. It never exists. It can’t ever exist. It has to be Alter-is-ness or As-is-ness, and of course As-is-ness can exist. As-is-ness can exist. It really would have to be able to exist, if you can repeat it. It must be in existence if you can repeat it and cause a vanishment of mockups or objects or spaces, so it obviously exists.

But this is not true of Is-ness.

Is-ness is the outcome of As-is-ness and Alter-is-ness. As-is-ness moves Is-ness upwards on the Know-to Mystery scale; whereas, Alter-is-ness moves it downwards.

Reality does not exist. Because it says there is a stop. And there just isn’t any stop. It is continuous Alter-is-ness and when people stop altering the positions of things and stop altering anchor points, and stop pushing things around one way or the other whether they say they’re doing it or they say it’s being done on another determinism, or however, the moment they just relax on this whole thing, they get the condition which your preclear quite commonly is found in, of no longer postulating time. You see, the mechanism of saying “It will continue because I’m saying someone else is responsible” is of limited use. It’s of very limited use.

One may say that Is-ness is always changing on a continuous, harmonious and consistent basis as you scan it in space and time. Any fixation on other determinism is aberration because the person simply gets out of sync.

Let’s go into that a little more clearly — you set up this machine — or something to go on and shift and change the anchor points of the space, manufacture the energy involved and take care of the objects. You set up this machine and you say: I’m no longer responsible for this. I have no further responsibility for this now, and therefore it’s other space and it will go on happening, and therefore I can continue to have this space because somebody else is making it. You see we could get into that rather shifty by-pass, and so we could then have — not over too long a time — but we could have a consistent Alter-is-ness, and this alteration would continue to take place as long as he at least kept one tiny little fingernail on the machine over here. We weren’t looking to see that we had, but as long as we had that fingernail just touching that machine, we were all right. We said just that much of it is ours.

The moment that an individual entirely relaxes and he says I have everything all set up, it’s beautifully set up, and it will all run automatically, and I don’t have to worry about it anymore, after all a fellow created this universe, other people are the ones who caused time to take place, they tell me when to get up, when to go to bed and I’ve just got everything all set and it’s totally other-determined now — it becomes just that totally other-determined, but it also, for the individual, passes by the board.

A person generally has filters set up to look through. The filter takes care of the perception. The person does not have to compute from fresh input. The moment a person puts everything on other determinism, he is finished.

He’s no longer postulating a persistence, he’s no longer changing any objects in space, and so he will simply sit still. Everything gets very dim; everything gets very thin. Well, the funny part of it is that in that state he couldn’t even keep an aberration going. But his Alter-is-ness has been practiced so long after the fact of Not-is-ness that even though he sits still he’ll keep on changing something, and that condition is known as figuring, thinking, thinking. He tries to change something, and he feels, Well, I will just sit here and think, and that will keep the universe moving, it will keep time going. The only one trouble with this is, he is dealing basically with the root stuff of what makes universes but now that he is sunk into that category where he is doing nothing but consider again, not creating or moving anything, he is going to have a very difficult time of it. In fact, everything is going to get dimmer and dimmer and less real and less real. What will persist there is that which he is still changing, which is his worry about aberrations.

It is true that the mechanical aspects of this universe are nicely set up by physical principles, and we don’t bother with them, but then we don’t sit still. We use those principles to create all kind of things. We may even look at those principles more closely to discover finer principles and create more sophisticated things. There is no other determinism postulated as long as there are no fixations.

But when a person just sits still, thinking others will keep everything going, he is no longer part of the reality. He cannot go back to being Static without taking responsibility for reality. He simply gets lost in unreality.

This is not esoteric or difficult. The only thing which goes on persisting is that which a person is actively working to change. You can only have those things which you handle. You can only have those things which you move around.

What are most relevant are the cycles of action that one is engaged in.

But an individual gets into a tremendous protest against mass. He has decided that the continuous survival of things is very bad. In other words, he starts to fight survival itself with Not-is-ness. Now, as you know, Not-is-ness is a highly specialized activity. It is the activity actually of causing something to vanish or dull down or become less, simply because It IS too much. There’s too much Is-ness, the fellow considers. He’s got too much persistency, too much survival — Joe Jinks that got him across the barrel in a bank and took all his money away from him, and, well, there was just too much Is-ness, and the best thing to do about that is to cause a Not-is-ness, and let’s just fight everything.

 When a person is unable to face the Is-ness he uses Not-is-ness.

For an example, let’s take a war. A war is just simply each side saying the other side must cease to exist, and they are doing it with shot, shell, lead, dynamite, spears, arrows, deadfalls, and they’re using energy to make other things cease to exist. Well, it was perfectly all right as long as you were building your camp, you see, but if you suddenly started to fight a war with somebody on the other side of the mountain, whereby you were saying he must cease to exist, you were fighting persistence by causing persistence. If you want to know why a war which shouldn’t take more than a couple of days, goes on and on, and on, and on, and on — they got so bad a few centuries ago that they had a hundred years of nothing but war — everybody was saying everybody else mustn’t exist, and they kept moving objects around to cause existence to cease. Now you see how these postulates could become completely tangled.

Wars are Not-is-ness. They arise from an inability to As-is the situation. Thus, they always end in destruction.

And the thetan does this because he so loves the problem, and that is the most problem there is. The thetan loves a problem, and that is the basic of problems. You move masses around, which basically causes persistence, in order to cause persistence to cease. One hundred per cent paradox. Cannot exist, can’t ever happen, never has happened, and yet he will do this. But he is never happy doing it. There is no serenity involved in this. It becomes nothing but a complete chaos. Probably the only joy any soldier ever gets out of a war (and don’t spread this around, because the society doesn’t believe you should tell this) the only joy anybody ever gets out of a war is by kidding himself that he has made absolutely nothing out of something. Whether it’s enemy troops or tanks, or ships, or anything, there’s a big WHEE in there some place, a big thrill. Combat troops know about this. It’s only when they cease to make nothing at will, apparently, that they become very downhearted.

Hubbard says, “You move masses around, which basically causes persistence, in order to cause persistence to cease.” Masses can be moved around with intelligence to solve the problem. They don’t just have to be moved around with force to destroy a seeming opponent. It is simply As-is-ness versus Not-is-ness.

Hardly anybody would be able to comprehend what is known as a military rout, whereby a body of troops, suddenly, and instantly and immediately disheartened, just completely, completely quits. It’s a strange phenomenon. It has been rather incomprehensible how fast they keep shooting at a castle on a hill. And they just keep shooting at this castle, and shooting at this castle, the castle keeps shooting back, and they keep firing at the castle, and the castle keeps shooting back. Well, they start to go to pieces in morale. They can’t make nothing out of something. Observably — the castle continues to live. They bog down on that rather badly, they get to be rather 1.5, and actually that is the manifestation of 1.5 on the Tone Scale. People using force to make nothing of something which continues to exist in spite of it. And they’ll suddenly drop. It isn’t a slow curve. They enter it rather slowly, and then they will just suddenly go to pieces, because the only compensation they have for war is the fact that as thetans, you see, they can observe that they are at least going through the motions of and have the manifestation of making nothing of form. And the sadness underlying it to them is the fact that they don’t make nothing of it really.

A person goes to pieces when he is overwhelmed by the feeling of failure. This may happen to an army too.

Beyond this point still, all kinds of suffering take place, and sadness, and it goes on and on, but you start moving that many particles with that much velocity, such as a German 88, and you’ll get persistence. That shell bursts, and we don’t find that the fellow in whose vicinity it hit is still there, but there’s persistence. Somebody’s got to go through his effects, and then somebody’s got to write a letter home and say he died a hero, and somebody else has got to carry the news through, and then there are people at home, and he’s left a hole in the society one way or the other, and this goes on and on and on, and then years later they dig up what’s left of him and ship him back over and put him into a cemetery. There’s persistence occasioning here. And what’s persisting? Well, there was that particle — it certainly was moving fast, and when we get a particle moving with this much velocity, we get some persistence, and in a war all they can think of is terms of more and more and more particles, moving with more and more velocity to cause less and less persistence on the part of the enemy.

Random Force leads to Alter-is-ness and not to As-is-ness. What persists is the result of Alter-is-ness. It will keep on persisting and will result ultimately in Not-is-ness.

If you wanted to know why the German nation keeps fighting and keeps overrunning its borders, well it can’t do anything else by this time. From Legion times forward people have been going in there saying, “You mustn’t persist, and these fast-moving particles which we’re making you handle will make it so.” Oh really? This can’t be, you see.

When we find anything about which Man is extremely puzzled, we lead directly into the one little formula which is the mechanism of making things persist: we’re going to use particles to make things not persist.

Alter-is-ness is unnecessary random force that makes things persist.

And any time you find anybody in difficulty or in the middle of a problem, just look at the basic anatomy of a problem which is that anatomy. It’s, “We’re going to cause a non- persistence by the use of the mechanisms which cause persistence.”

And you’re going to get a game — there’s undoubtedly going to be a game occur here. There are going to be lots of problems.

Hubbard describes the basic anatomy of a problem as, “We’re going to cause a non- persistence by the use of the mechanisms which cause persistence.” The mechanism of persistence is Alter-is-ness and not As-is-ness.

If you want to know how to take apart a problem, just look where the person is using particles which you know by changing them will cause persistence, in order to make a non-persistence.

To help a person, just look where he is using random force, which is making his problem persist.

He’ll be using Alter-is-ness to create a Not-is-ness, and of course will be getting consistently and continually an Is-ness. Which is a continuous state. It’s a hypothetical state, because you can never stop it, you can never arrest it, you can never take a look at it. You know that any time you really recognize an Is-ness — not in a state of change — why, it will disappear, it will vanish or it will dim down, something will happen with relationship to it, so you always have to look at the change.

Change can lead to As-is-ness as well as to Alter-is-ness.

This is the fellow living up the time track, this is the fellow living in the past. He’s looking at the changes and he isn’t looking at the reality. Actually, that’s a very healthy state of mind.

The fellow’s looking at the changes, he’s looking at what will be, he’s very cheerful about how many particles he can move around and cause to come into existence or persist. Or he knows the proper modus operandi for mocking things up that he wants to destroy, just As-is-ness. And that would destroy it perfectly adequately, and he could start in again.

The whole effort is to resolve a problem.

To look at the basic mechanics of any problem which is causing any trouble, just find the matter of the particles, the particle motion, the Alter-is-ness in other words, which is aimed with the goal of Not-is-ness and is an impossibility. You’ll find that’s your preclear who’s hanging fire in processing. He’s doing this. He’s using particles to knock down ridges (Ridges: Solid accumulation of old, inactive mental energy suspended in space and time), something on this order.

The person who is not improving is simply using unnecessary force to resolve problems without understanding.

Actually, he’d feel a lot better if he’d simply go out and trim the hedge. Let him move something around not quite as damaging but with the same goal, because if he’s all messed up with his engram bank, and he’s all messed up with tremendous ridges and black ridges and that sort of thing, and he sits there as a thetan creating particles and bombarding these ridges, what is he going to get? He’s going to get a persistence of ridges. That’s why we never use flows in processing. You can process objects you want to, you can process space if you want to, but we’ll just stay away as a general principle from flows.

A person cannot resolve his case (engrams) by being fixated on it and using force. Going out and doing simple manual work will do a lot of good, because it extroverts his attention.

Now your thetan has a great objection, because of the communication formula as used in this universe, a great objection to somethingnesses. He looks across a distance and he sees a somethingness and this begins to tell him after a while that he has to be a something too, and he doesn’t like this. He doesn’t enjoy this really, because it’s an other-determined something that he has to be. It’s looking at a wall, he has to be a wall, you see. And that’s what this universe is dictating to him. Well, actually, because it’s all a consideration in the first place, he doesn’t have to fall into that little grave. He doesn’t have to do that kind of a shift, at all. He could simply say I’m looking at the wall, you see. But after a while he gets into the mechanics of perception, the mechanics of communication. He’s using energy in order to communicate with energy. There’s nothing wrong with that, except to the degree that he loses his fluidity on it. As long as he could maintain the idea that he was simply communicating by postulate, that he was communicating, he’s doing all right, but when he drops below that level — and you get him forced to communication, when he’s made to stand still and be talked to, when he’s made to stand to and hold that ridge, when he’s made to sit there and absorb that textbook, any of these things, he gets under this bombardment, and he starts fighting the communication formula. Of course, we get a persistence then of this universe’s communication formula.

A thetan is part of the Static potential that transformed into this universe. The manifested universe is the eighth dynamic that has theta as its spiritual aspect and MEST as its physical aspect. The thetan individuates from it because of its misconceptions, confusions and fixations. It acquires a certain vibration.

When a thetan is communicating, it is not looking across some distance. It is simply looking at a difference in vibrations. As it duplicates the vibration of the thing it is communicating with, the misconceptions vanish, and it becomes that much part of the theta of the universe. When the thetan starts to look at the universe as other determinism it starts to go downhill. That is what happened to Hubbard.

Remember that this universe has a communication formula, and that that formula is based on the fact that two things can’t occupy the same space, so immediately we fall away from cause, effect and no distance. Cause-and-effect with no distance is not the same thing as the bottom-scale manifestation, where complete identification never actually occurs. There’s still a slight distance no matter how downscale you go; it’s only way upscale that you can get a perfect identification between cause point and effect point. These two points can be coincident way upscale. Well, if they can be coincident way upscale, the individual could put a distance on them or whatever he liked, but to the degree that he began to agree with this universe, we would get the manifestation of “have to have a distance across which to look” because he can’t occupy the same space as the object at which he’s looking.

Each object has its own vibration. Their extents form their space. They are separate because of different vibrations. They must adjust to the same vibration to merge into each other. Thus, the difference between cause and effect is only in terms of vibrations and not some “distance”. Up the scale the vibrations of cause and effect become the same and they become coincident. Down the scale there is no perfect matching of vibrations because of misconceptions and fixations; and mimicry is employed.

That is this universe’s formula, and that by the way is native to a lot of universes — it’s how you keep everything stretched apart. You say two things can’t occupy the same space; therefore, we’ve got to have a lot of spaces and things more or less fixed in these spaces, and we’ve got to keep them all apart and therefore they are separate objects and we go into the communication formula. Cause, Distance, Effect.

Space is the extent of energy. “Empty space” is not really empty but contains energy of lowest vibration. Therefore, there is no empty distance between cause and effect, only a difference in their characteristics. The communication formula should be “cause – difference in vibrations – effect”. Here “distance” is replaced by the difference in vibrations at cause and effect.

As the individual agrees that two things can’t occupy the same space, and as he agrees with this communication formula, he then gets into a situation where he says, “Now look at all these somethings around here. And I am actually basically a nothing, and therefore if I have to duplicate these by becoming a something, I don’t like that. I can’t retain my own native form. I’m in a bad shape here. I can’t fly around and be a spirit. I’ve got to be pinned down here. I’ve got to be an energy mass in order to look at those energy masses,” and he doesn’t like it. He objects to it. And so, we get to the other manifestation on the track.

The viewpoint of the individual has the ability to assume any vibration, and there is no problem in duplicating the things around him. Only misconceptions and fixations prevent him from duplicating.

The only objection a thetan has to anything, if he’s having a big objection, is to something. Just any something. Then this of course will invert and having objected to a something hard enough, you see, he’ll turn around after a while and start objecting to a nothing.

The thetan has objections only because of his misconceptions and fixations, which are handled when he is able to duplicate.

Now how is it then that we get any change at all if Not-is-ness doesn’t work? Well, there is the system known as valences: one ceases to be himself and becomes something else as his sole method of change. You see that? He is causing a persistence by saying things mustn’t persist, and he keeps saying, mustn’t persist, mustn’t persist, and it goes on persisting, and he uses more particles and more particles and more particles — and pretty soon the United States Army is wearing coal-scuttle helmets. Just like that. And the Government says, “Down with Karl Marx, down with Karl Marx, down with Karl Marx — and everybody is now going to be taxed according to his ability to pay.”

When the viewpoint cannot duplicate something by becoming, then the next best thing is to mimic it. This mimicry generates the phenomenon of valences.

So, we get another type of change. Two things can’t occupy the same space; therefore, we are an identity persisting, therefore the best way to get it changed and get an utter change is simply to be somebody else. In other words, completely shift the valence, and because we want to win all the time, why naturally, shift to winning valences compared to oneself. If one thinks one is losing, then anything can start looking like a winning valence. A beggar utterly penniless about to die would look like a winning valence to some people. And we get valence-shifting going right along with “two things can’t occupy the same space”. So, an individual goes out of one spot and over onto another spot and when he is running a lot of Not-is-ness you can expect him to do a lot of valence shifting. He can’t continue to be himself, because he’s in communication with nothing.

“Two things can’t occupy the same space” is false when applied to a thetan, for a thetan can assume any vibration when not prevented by misconceptions and fixations. So, a thetan can duplicate anything easily. When prevented from duplicating one ends up using mimicry instead and the valence phenomenon comes in. The thetan gets stuck in a valence because he cannot duplicate it.

At that time, he will start to believe that he must have nothingness. And he goes from there into having to have somethingnesses and he goes from there into having to have nothingnesses by change of valence, and actually there is no other deep significance to it.

A thetan without misconceptions and fixations has no difficulty duplicating anything.

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FINAL COMMENTS

A thetan is part of the Static potential that transformed into this universe. The manifested universe is the eighth dynamic that has theta as its spiritual aspect, and MEST as its physical aspect. The thetan individuates from Theta because of its misconceptions, confusions and fixations.

The viewpoint of the individual has the ability to assume any vibration, and there is no problem in duplicating the things around him. Only misconceptions and fixations prevent him from duplicating. When the viewpoint cannot duplicate something by becoming, then the next best thing is to mimic it. This mimicry generates the phenomenon of valences.

When a thetan is communicating, it is not looking across some distance. It is simply looking at a difference in vibrations. As it duplicates the vibration of the thing it is communicating with, the misconceptions vanish, and it becomes that much part of the theta of the universe. When the thetan starts to look at the universe as other determinism it starts to go downhill.

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PHOENIX LECTURES: Chapter 10

Project: Hubbard 1954: The Phoenix Lectures

This paper presents Chapter 10 from the book THE PHOENIX LECTURES by L. RON HUBBARD. The contents are from the original publication of this book by The Church of Scientology (1954).

The paragraphs of the original material (in black) are accompanied by brief comments (in color) based on the understanding from Buddhism.  Feedback on these comments is always appreciated.

.

THE FOUR CONDITIONS OF EXISTENCE (Part 4)

Here we take up the various reasons why.

We have in Scientology a lot to do with reasons why, but the fact is that a fellow who goes around always looking for reasons why is usually not in particularly good shape.

But there are a lot of reasons why the states of existence and conditions of existence are put together the way they are in this outrageous fashion in which As-is-ness followed by Alter-is-ness gives us Is-ness, followed by an Alter-is-ness, or desire to, which brings us into Not-is-ness, and which then brings us into Alter-is-ness, which brings us into Not-is-ness which brings us into Alter-is-ness, which brings us into Not-is-ness.

A “Static that can consider” is actually a sum total of potential. It is not nothing. The potential is like “potential energy with very sophisticated programming”. As Static becomes kinetic the potential expresses itself as the universe. See Static to Kinetic. This transformation is not As-is-ness followed by Alter-is-ness to generate Is-ness as postulated by Hubbard.

The Is-ness is all the forms of the universe including life. It is a single interconnected system. It is naturally continuous, harmonious and consistent. The “duplication” of the universe means that any observation must also be continuous, harmonious and consistent. Not-is-ness comes about when this continuity, harmony and consistency of Is-ness is not recognized.

There’s a good reason for all this. An excellent reason for all this.

We are talking right here about the fundamental of all aberration, which is incidentally the fundamental of all existence.

The fundamental of all aberration is fixation. A fixation prevents one from seeing things as they are. The fundamental of existence is also a seemingly fixed structure but that structure changes with evolution. It is not absolutely fixed. A fixation does not change when circumstances change around it, and that is why it appears as aberration.

There is found a strange condition here. If a thetan were to remain with an As-is-ness, he would thereafter have nothing. Therefore, immediately after the postulation of some object, it is necessary, by mechanics, and it is just happens to be so in this universe it’s not reasonable, it’s just the way it is in this universe — which puts you right in the field of mechanics) that the As-is-ness must immediately be altered in order to become what we call a reality. And thus people attempt various mechanisms.

Hubbard says, “If a thetan were to remain with an As-is-ness, he would thereafter have nothing.” This is not true. As-is-ness removes fixations and misconceptions only. The Is-ness remains in perfect clarity. It does not vanish. Subsequent Alter-is-ness is not necessary to have Is-ness.

One of those mechanisms is the device of God. Now then, we’re not saying that there is not a God. But if there were never any type of alter ego of this character there wouldn’t be any permanent reality.

It’s one thing for there to be a God and quite another thing for everybody to blame everything on him. The most barbaric manifestations that we have, generally includes a deity. The savage out in the Gullaby Isles is practicing this — he says that the fault is the trees and the River Sprite and so forth. I’m talking to you now about the mechanism of use of, rather than the identity of, when I mention God.

All right, God, then, is to blame. If we make something and have some hard luck, something like that, the way it looks to us here at this stage of development, we can then say, “Well, God did it to us and He has afflicted us.”

Hubbard is implying that the mechanism of blame is used to prevent As-is-ness from making the Is-ness vanish. This is not true. As-is-ness only clarifies the Is-ness. The mechanism of blame comes from the inability to As-is a situation.

Quite in addition to that, every primitive people has the legend of a creator. They have to have a legend of a creator, otherwise they would never have anything. The immediate and intimate use of the legend of the creator is to continue in existence.

Hubbard says, “The immediate and intimate use of the legend of the creator is to continue in existence.” This is a stretch. A legend of creator is there to have an explanation for existence in the absence of a better explanation.

Whether you built it or not, you can cause something to vanish simply by looking at it as it is. Somebody else can put up a mock-up of one kind or another and merely by your perceiving it and making a perfect duplicate of it, you can vanish it. It is not necessary that you exclusively devote yourself to the vanishment of those things which you yourself have made. That is not necessary in order to carry through this cycle. Somebody else could have made it and you could have made a perfect duplicate of it — an As-is-ness — and it would have vanished.

Hubbard says, “Whether you built it or not, you can cause something to vanish simply by looking at it as it is.” This is again not true. As-is-ness simply causes engrams and confusions to vanish. For example, an engram vanishes in auditing when the underlying fixation is handled. A confusion vanishes very commonly the moment a person recognizes the underlying misconception. The energy of engram and confusion simply transforms. A complete vanishment of Is-ness violates the law of conservation.

Now we are talking about something which is very easy to work with and which can be put to objective proof. I can ask you to make a perfect duplicate of something, which is to say, get it in the same space, same time continuum, using the same mass, and your perfect duplicate will cause it first, probably, if you’re having a hard time of it, to brighten up — and then it’ll fade. Well, the next thing you know, even though you’ve made very poor perfect duplicate, why, you sort of get the idea, of looking through this item — and so it is with all of existence. Unless, in other words, there was a legend of other creation than your own, you would not at any time be able to have anything.

The idea of “perfect duplicate” is simply seeing things as they are. As-is-ness clarifies the Is-ness by making misconceptions and fixations disappear. This does not mean that the Is-ness itself vanishes.

The first and most fundamental principle of havingness is: it must have been created by somebody else. And thus, we get Is-ness. When you ask a person to remedy his own havingness, this is perfectly all right. You’re asking him to make nothing of something. He actually can. But the reason it does him so much good is he’s forgotten that he can.

Hubbard says, “The first and most fundamental principle of havingness is: it must have been created by somebody else. And thus, we get Is-ness.” This is not so because the Is-ness is always there. The first and most fundamental principle of havingness is simply the assurance of one’s basic capabilities of observing, postulating and resolving.

In a Remedy of Havingness you ask the preclear to mock something up and pull it in. In other words, you ask him to mock it up and alter it. Why doesn’t it remedy a person’s havingness simply to mock something up — just get a mockup? It doesn’t remedy his havingness because if he leaves it there, it will simply disappear. Many a preclear gets very upset because his mockups all disappear. He puts up a mockup and it disappears. Well, that’s because he doesn’t alter it in position. He puts the mockup up and leaves it right where it is and of course it dissipates and disappears. Now those preclears who put up a mockup and leave it in the same place, which does not disappear, are working on mental machinery which does their mockups for them and for which machine they have “No responsibility”. He’s doing them with a machine not because he’s crazy but because this is the only possible way he could make them persist. The machine changes them and he himself knows that he did not put up the mockup. He knows this. If he didn’t know that, the mockup again would disappear. So it is not a very undercover fact with which we are working.

When a person puts up a mockup and pulls it in, it gives him the assurance that he can postulate, observe and resolve. This builds up his havingness. If he mocks up something but does not resolve it, then he gets upset. Hubbard’s explanation that havingness comes from mocking up and altering that mockup to make it persist is not convincing.

Let’s take this legend of the creator. We discover that it is quite uniform. It is found in every savage tribe. It is found across the face of the world. And it is found throughout this universe. The legend of the creator. Very well, we can say there was a creator and he created everything and that’s fine. And if this were the case, why, that’s fine, too, because it wouldn’t unmock. In other words, things would not disappear if there were a creator who made everything. You could even use this as a tremendous argument to prove that there was such a thing as a creator and he made everything, just by the fact that it’s here and if you had made it and continued to accept your responsibility for it, it wouldn’t be here, so there must have been a creator. You could go at it with this type of logic. However, it works this way: if somebody else, other than yourself, made a mass of energy, all you would have to do would be to come along and fish around for its approximate moment of creation and duplicate it and it would then disappear. So, whether the creator created everything or not, it’s a certainty that you, in order to continue with a physical universe, have to, to some degree, lay the blame on some other identity.

The legend of the creator does not exist in the Vedas, Hinduism and Buddhism. The universe is not there because of some Creator. It is simply there, and all creators and creations are part of this universe.

Therefore, this postulate, he created it or you created it, does not enter the question at all. If you duplicated it, it would go away regardless of who created it. We’re talking now about a very basic fundamental, that it is necessary for you to carry around the postulate that somebody else created it in order for it to exist.

The universe will continue to exist whether you think that somebody else created it or not.

Now it’s a little bit difficult to prove this. You have to work with a preclear for a short time. But the main difficulty of proof which lies on this track is simply proving who made the mockup in the first place. You see, if it disappeared because you duplicated it, why then, you probably made it. But it doesn’t matter then whether we use this one way or the other. We don’t have to admit that you could make anything disappear whether you made it or not. We don’t have to admit that, to continue along with this proof. What we are coming down to here is this matter of responsibility.

We learned in Dianetics that people would not accept responsibility for their own acts, and actually they’re as bad off as they will not accept responsibility for their own acts. And individuals are other-determined to the degree that they will not accept such responsibility.

As a matter of fact, you discover a complete dianometry, scientometry, anything you want to call it, a complete set of tests, which will demonstrate that there is a direct ratio between the health and ability of the person and his willingness to accept responsibility. But the funny part of it is, this only goes up to a certain point and when you achieve that point of acceptance of responsibility, then havingness as such, and the universe, or that part of one’s interest in the universe, would vanish.

Hubbard claims, “… when you achieve that point of acceptance of responsibility, then havingness as such, and the universe, or that part of one’s interest in the universe, would vanish.” Of course, when you complete a cycle, you get busy with another cycle. But this has nothing to do with the universe itself vanishing.

Now here is the Bodhi. Here is the individual who aspires to the attainment of perfect serenity — he can’t have perfect serenity and have something, because he’d have to give away a certain amount of his responsibility in order to continue it in existence. Havingness would only persist so long as he felt somebody else had had a hand in creating it. And the moment he said “I created this” one hundred percent all the way along the line, he wouldn’t have a thing. The perfect duplicate here is what we are looking at, again. Therefore, the condition of becoming a Bodhi is the condition of having nothing.

Hubbard says, “… the condition of becoming a Bodhi is the condition of having nothing.” This is not true because Hubbard’s premise for his argument is wrong. A Bodhi has everything, but since he has a completely objective view, he is not attached to anything. In other words, he is exterior to everything.

A thetan is very able to have something or nothing at will. But it happens that he is appealed to very often on the basis that all somethingnesses, including space, would vanish. He thinks this might be a good thing. The only protest a thetan has, actually, is somethingness.

If you want to say what is wrong with a thetan, you’d say, “somethingness”, and you have stated it. He has something. There is something in existence.

He is perfectly willing to have many somethings, but after a while, the communication formula comes into effect, and he becomes frantic about it. This is something that is terribly elementary. In spite of the fact that it is as deeply pervasive as it is in life and existence, it is terribly simple. It is one of these idiotically elementary factors that everybody could have overlooked forever. They would have had to have overlooked it. They didn’t even dare tread on the edges of it for fear that everything would blow up or disappear.

All right. A thetan makes something, and he himself natively is a Static, capable of consideration, has no mass, no form — as a spirit he has no form — he has no wavelength, he only has potentials. He has the potential of locating objects in space, and the potential of creating space, energy and objects and the action of locating those objects in that space. And with this as his potential, the moment that he makes something, he violates his own communication formula.

Hubbard is saying that a theta violates his own communication formula the moment that he makes something. Well, a thetan transitions from static to kinetic the moment he makes something. The thetan becomes that something itself.

A thetan in excellent condition is able to communicate easily with something. He can simply change his mind about anything and work it around. But the formula of communication becomes native to the creation of space, energy and mass, and that formula is, of course, Cause-Distance-Effect, with a perfect duplication taking place at Effect of that which emanated from Cause.

That is the Communication Formula. And that becomes the formula the moment you have space. Up until that time, you have all cause and all effect capable of occupying exactly the same location, since there is no location.

Hubbard is assuming cause and effect to be there in the condition of static. This is incorrect because in the condition of static everything is potential.  Cause and effect emerge in the kinetic condition only.

So, a thetan is perfectly able, way up the scale, to occupy the space of anything, and so duplicate that thing. But his formula when he’s doing this is not cause-distance-effect. It’s just cause-effect. That would be the formula he’s operating with because he wouldn’t communicate across a distance to something, since he wouldn’t be occupying any cause or effect points.

But he can’t have a game if he does this. He can’t have mass if he does this. If every time he selects out an enemy and then communicates to the enemy and simply becomes the enemy at that point, he couldn’t have an enemy very long, could he? If he said I am fully responsible for everything and I will now make a plot of land, and he mocked up some space and a plot of land, and he’s fully responsible for it — what happens? It’s gone. If he had mocked it up and altered it or changed it, he could then bring about the phenomenon of persistence, which is itself time.

No game can exist in the condition of static, because everything is potential.

When you say survive, you’re saying time. Just put those together and make them synonyms and you understand all you want to know about time. It’s a consideration which leads to the persistence of something, and you can enter all the mechanics into time that you want to, and you can paint it up in any way you want to and you can write textbooks on it and test it and buy very fancy watches and chronometers and set up observatories to measure the movement of the stars, and you still have “Time is a consideration which brings about persistence”. And the mechanic of bringing about that persistence is, by alteration. And so we have Alter-is-ness taking place immediately after an As-is-ness is created, and so we get persistence. In other words, we have to change the location of a particle in space.

Of course, as static transforms into kinetic there is motion. This is simply the potential expressing itself. This is a transformation and not alter-is-ness.

Let’s get back to this communication formula.

A perfect duplication would be cause and effect in the same point in space, wouldn’t it? So, communication as we consider it through space is not a perfect communication system.

Space is the extent of something. That something is energy made up of vibrations that are smooth and uniform throughout its space. Perfect duplication will be recognizing that smooth gradient of energy throughout that space.

You on one point in space communicate with something at another point in space and if you continue to interpose a distance in between the things or space in between the things, you get even then the basic of persistence. All you’ve got to do is get that distance in there, and we have this taking place.

When you communicate you manifest yourself as energy in the kinetic world. You are no longer static. As energy you have space. The something you are communicating with also has space. Your spaces are touching. You are separated only by a gradient of vibrations (not “distance”). The purpose of communication is to change your vibration to the vibration of what you are communicating with.

A thetan cannot duplicate a mass. That is to say he cannot himself actually be a mass. He can conceive that he is by saying now look at all this mass that somebody else put on me. I didn’t create this mass.

There is a very high gradient between the vibration of thetan and the vibration of mass.

He can conceive himself as mass. But he starts to get very unhappy about communicating with somethingnesses because here is this distance factor and he is a nothingness. Now if he can be the somethingness on the same point in space where that exists, then he feels very, very good about things. He feels all right simply because he’s occupying the same space. Well that’s perfect communication for him. That’s a perfect duplicate. But if he totally occupied it at its instant of inception it would disappear.

The basic concept underlying communication is “sharing duties”. It is sharing the vibration. It is not only back and forth but a simultaneous functioning like two gears rotating together. When communicating with mass the thetan must increase its vibration to that of mass.

So, he gets caught between not wanting to communicate with something and wanting to have something. You see, that to really have something he would have to occupy the same space. To communicate with something, he has to stand off at a distance and pretend to be a something. Communication, as we know it in this universe, is cause, distance, effect. Perfect communication, like a perfect duplication, is: the point, the point, there’s something on this point. The thetan can also occupy this point, therefore he can have something, he can communicate with something, but if he says it belongs utterly to him and he’s occupying its basic point, it will disappear.

The thetan increases its vibration greatly to match that of mass. Mass also slows its vibration slightly to match that of the thetan. There is a point of balance in between. It endows mass with thetan energy.

Therefore, he has to have another creator. He has to have some other author of the universe. If he doesn’t have, why, it will disappear.

The thetan now occupies the space of mass. Any misconception of mass that the thetan has now disappears. No misassignment of creator is needed to make that mass persist.

Now, we could enquire at some length into the tremendous complexity of this and why is this. A thetan should simply be able to say by postulate, well, it’s as it is, and it’s going to persist as it is, and we’ll just make this postulate and that will be that. But the funny thing is that it just doesn’t work this way, and it looks here as though we have an arbitrary which has been entered in from one quarter or another, which we don’t fully comprehend even at this moment. But this universe went together on this basis of: AS-IS equals VANISHMENT.

You make one just as it is — all you have to do is pretend as if you were making it at this moment — and boom, it’s gone.

You then see the necessity, at least in this universe, to have another determinism at work. Well, that’s just one point. We see it in terms then of the Creator. That’s fine. This does not enter the question of whether there is or is not a God. We are talking about whether or not people blame God, or why they blame God, or why they put things onto God.

Other determinism is not necessary because Hubbard’s premise above is flawed.

Well, if they didn’t, they wouldn’t have anything.

The other point involved here is people blaming each other. They stand there and one says: You said that, and That’s your fault, and this is why we have this fight, and so forth. And the other person says, No, that wasn’t the way it was, that’s an entirely different situation, you actually were the one that started all this.

We talk to a preclear and we want to know what’s wrong with this preclear. Well, it’s “what Mother did” to him, not what he did to himself. We can’t conceive that an individual could actually become aberrated without his own consent, and sure enough he can’t. He can’t become aberrated or upset, or thin or lean or fat or thick or stupid or anything else without his own consent because he is part of the agreement pattern, and unless he has agreed himself to other entities of agreement, why he won’t get stuck with any kind of a pattern.

The individual is a system of energy. He interacts with other systems of energy. It may not be aware of all interactions. He has problems but he does not know the actual source of these problems. So, he guesses at the source. This appears as blame.

Now let’s look at how that adds up. We find that if an individual to have something went into agreement with other determinisms and said these other determinisms caused all this, he could sit there comfortably with something persisting. But what did he have to do? Basically, he said: in order to have anything I’ve got to go into communication with these other-determinisms and blame them or fix the responsibility of causation upon these others.

So, the child blames his parents. He gets up into the age of puberty, he runs into sex, sex tells him he can’t survive — that’s the basic manifestation of sex — tells him he can’t survive, and he begins to worry about this fact. Why, here he is all equipped to make another generation, he’s hardly started living this one, and that’s a confusing and upsetting fact. He’s already warned in advance that someday he’s going to die. To see something really morbid, read some teen-age writings. You never saw such complete sadness anywhere. Well, they’ve been told they can die, and the appearance of sex, physiologically, told them they could die. They become anxious then about surviving, so they have to turn around and blame somebody for something, anything, and simply by blaming somebody they obtain a continuance of whatever condition they are in at the moment. In other words, they can continue to survive simply by turning around and saying, Well, the trouble with me is all what my father and mother did to me. So, if you were to take somebody and bring him very, very close to death and cause the chilly breath to draft down his neck, you would find him very shortly blaming something else but himself. But he runs in a cycle on this. He discovers that the situation is untenable. Then he’ll blame himself.

Why does he blame himself at that point?

A person blames because he is ignorant of the overall circumstance.

He wants to unmock it. And he actually has forgotten the mechanisms of unmocking. By blaming himself, by taking it upon himself, by holding it all close to his own bosom, he thinks: Now that it’s my fault it will all unmock, and he’s a very surprised person when it doesn’t unmock. He merely gets upset. And the other one is, he finds his condition of survival desirable, and when he finds it even vaguely desirable — it doesn’t matter if he’s a slave in the bottom of a salt mine working out a sentence for having voted, or whatever — the fact is that this individual obtains continuance by blaming others. So, he goes through a cycle of Blame somebody else, that means I’ve got to or I want to, or I haven’t any other choice but to, survive, and the best answer is survive, therefore I’ll just blame everybody else.

Hubbard says, “… this individual obtains continuance by blaming others.” The truth is that the situation is too complex to be As-ised, and the person cannot find the cause of it. He feels very uncomfortable and simply guesses at the cause. Obviously, it is not the right cause and it appears as blame. The situation does not go away.

And the mechanism of blaming oneself is unmocking oneself. Unmocking oneself and the mass with which he is immediately and intimately surrounded. People go through these two cycles and they invert, and that is the basic inversion. They start in by saying, somebody else was responsible for the creation of all this. They’re quite happy about all this and they stand off and look at it and then they begin to get tired of communicating with these somethingnesses, because they cannot enter into a perfect duplication. They are nothing, that’s a something, they begin to get impatient about it after a while, so they decide to unmock it. They look at it and say: I did it. Well, there’s something wrong here. Come on, come on, come on. I did it. It goes right on. They don’t mock it up in the same part of a space in which it was initially mocked up, they don’t try to duplicate it with its original mass.

They omit some of the basic steps of saying I did it and they’re trying to go up against the postulate with which they did it.

The person simply does not know how the situation started.

Having made this postulate and said already that it belonged to somebody else, now they try to take it back, and their next move is to try to squash up these energy masses, use more force in order to flatten force, and he is on his way, this thetan, right away, you see, he’s on his way. Because the more he tries to use energy to knock out energy, the more energy he’s going to have, and the more dislocated the basic particles of that energy are going to be, and he’ll just get more and more and more persistence, and if he keeps on protesting all the way on down, it will just become more solid, and more solid and more solid, and more solid, because he’s protesting that it’s other-determinism then he protests by saying it’s my fault. Now I’m going to disappear and die and that will make you sorry. But again, he’s entering a protest into the line.

The person tries to solve the situation without understanding it fully.

So, we get this basic thing of other men’s responsibility, or “God is responsible”, as the fundamental of persistence and survival. We have to have other-determinism at work or we get no persistence whatsoever.

Either the person understands the situation fully and it resolves, or he simply fumbles around trying to solve the situation by trial and error.

And so we get these postulated other-determinisms, and when you recognize this clearly in your preclear and in creation itself, it will cease to be as entirely baffling as it may have been in the past.

Hubbard is simply trying to advance a complex theory to explain why other determinism comes about.

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FINAL COMMENTS

Hubbard’s terminology of Is-ness, Alter-is-ness, As-is-ness and Not-is-ness is quite useful. But then he insists that As-is-ness not only makes the misconceptions and fixations vanish, but also everything, including the universe.

Thus, Hubbard commits the error of going against the Law of conservation of energy and matter. No doubt the forms vanish because energy and matter change their forms all the time. But that does not mean that energy and matter themselves vanish completely.

Hubbard then uses his premise to explain why other determinism exists because, in his theory, a person is totally responsible for everything that happens to him. But the universe (eighth dynamic) is bigger than the person and the person is limited in this sense. It is not up to the person to resolve the universe (eighth dynamic).

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PHOENIX LECTURES: Chapter 9

Project: Hubbard 1954: The Phoenix Lectures

This paper presents Chapter 9 from the book THE PHOENIX LECTURES by L. RON HUBBARD. The contents are from the original publication of this book by The Church of Scientology (1954).

The paragraphs of the original material (in black) are accompanied by brief comments (in color) based on the understanding from Buddhism.  Feedback on these comments is always appreciated.

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THE FOUR CONDITIONS OF EXISTENCE (Part 3)

The four conditions of existence are actually variations of existence itself. They are certain attitudes about existence, and they are the basic attitudes about existence. Now we could include a great many more attitudes, and we would find that we were deriving them all from these four. But we could take these four and find out that we were deriving them all from one — Is-ness, or reality.

The basic condition of existence is Is-ness, or reality.

There has to be an Is-ness before you can do an Alter-is-ness. There has to be an Is-ness before you can do a Not-is-ness — unless of course you want to postulate it in reverse.

But we are talking now about this particular universe and how it got here and we discover as we look along the track, that these four conditions of existence, that all existence, presupposes the postulate known as TIME.

Now time is just a plain ordinary postulate which says that out of a non-consecutive beingness, which doesn’t exist forever, we would get then a parade of time. A time continuum.

TIME is the endurance characteristic of Is-ness.

There’s no forever, it would just be there — no forever, no instant involved. There just isn’t any consecutive existence at all. And then out of this we would have to make a postulate that there would now be consecutive existence, existences, or a consecutive series of states.

There is a continuity of varying states of the same thing, with those states having durations.

Now an individual who is simply occupying space without any energy involved whatsoever doesn’t have a good feeling about this. Without any space he could have a good feeling about it. No space, no energy, no continuum — he could have a fairly good feeling about this, but when he gets into the occupying of a space, now he has this feeling of foreverness unmocked. He makes that uncomfortable for himself, so he will now go on creating consecutive states of existence. He can have a game. Space is necessary to start this game but when you’ve just got space and nothing else, it’s rather unbearable. You’re already occupying, so there is an existence there, but it isn’t an existence which has any consecutive difference of state. And that’s real poor. This is a kind of feeling you run into in space-opera.

Nothing can occupy space without energy involved because space is the EXTENT of energy. If an individual is occupying space, then that individual must consist of energy. Space without energy is an inconsistency. The feeling of “foreverness” is really the feeling of nothing (no energy, no time, no space). To occupy space the individual must identify with some energy, which gives him duration. To have the feeling of forever, this duration must be infinite. To have infinite duration that energy must continue to exist in one shape or another. Thus, come about phenomena. The feeling of “space-opera” is a single cycle of infinite wavelength and infinite duration.

Here we have, then, a state of existence being conditional upon a time postulate which would include a space-energy manifestation, and this would be a simultaneousness.

Energy-space-time must be simultaneous. This must be so for physics too.

There would be no question about whether you made the postulate for space and energy before you made the postulate of time. There is no question of any postulate before or after because you have not postulated the postulate which causes a before or after, and that postulate would be time. So actually, to have a game, there must be a simultaneous action whereby you postulate space-energy-time — space, energy, continuous existence. Which is an As-is-ness of space — altered, energy — altered, time — altered. So these items have to have the time postulate with Alter-is-ness in them in order to get a persistence. That’s how it’s done in this universe. You don’t “just have to do this all the time”. But when those three consecutive postulates are made simultaneously, why we then have a continuum of existence, demarked by differences of position of the particle in the space and we have time being marked out for us very neatly. We have to alter positions in order to get a continuousness. We have to say it is here, now it’s here, now it’s here, now it’s here.

All three, energy-space-time, must maintain continuity at the fundamental level.

There’s another way of making time come true. We say space, no space, space, no space, space, no space, space, no space. You’re postulating, however, that you can do this before you can say space, no space, space, no space. Well now, this postulate is so easy for a thetan to make, it might be considered a native part of his makeup. So, we have before this an ideal state, that is to say an idealized or theoretical state. We have this theoretical state whereby we merely have a Static which has no space, no mass, no wavelength, no motion, no time, which has the ability to consider, and we are dealing with the basic stuff of life. Just by definition.

Buddha’s concept of EMPTINESS goes deeper then Hubbard’s concept of Static, because it is empty of thought (THETA) too, which Static is not. THETA (thought) and MEST (matter, energy, space and time) are not separate, but are integrated together. They cannot exist without each other. THETA-MEST are simultaneous and continuous. They have no beginning or end.

It is very peculiar that: “We, mixed up in all of this energy and so forth and way on down the track from the time this postulate was made” — do you see anything specious about the way that remark hangs together — “Way on down the track from the time this postulate was made” — “Very difficult and very strange that we could even discuss this higher state of existence which was made trillions of years ago”? No. You see, it must have been concurrent with this, right here, and so we don’t use the word existence, we use the word “is”. We don’t use the word “then” or “will be”, we don’t go back into the past or go into the future for this continuousness at all. It just is.

There is no one making postulates. There are simply certain principles that seem to underlie the structure of this universe.

Now, in past ages it was just: “Well, reality is reality and you’ll have to accept it. There’s nothing more you can know about it than that.” Oh yes, there is a lot more you could know about reality than simply, it is.

So, is is not a complete and embracive definition of reality. It’s not complete and embracive because reality has a certain mechanical structure and that structure is composed of these four states of existence. And it would actually take all these four states of existence to make the kind of existence which we are now living and that is to say, we would have to have Is-ness then Not-is-ness and Alter-is-ness and did it strike you before that we might have forgotten and might never have known about and it might not have had called to our attention directly, this other state? We’ve always had these three states, Alter-is-ness, Not-is-ness and Is-ness.

Alter-is-ness and Not-is-ness, of course, are variations of Is-ness and depend upon Is-ness. But there is a fourth one and that is As-is-ness. And that condition natively exists at an instant of creation, yet it also can be made to exist again any time anybody wants to make it exist again, simply by saying AS IS. If anybody had truly and actually accepted reality and had got all of his fellow beings to simply accept reality, we wouldn’t have any. But whose reality? Whose reality in each case? Somebody else’s. So, this reality was actually another condition, other-determined As-is-ness. Other determined. Which is Not-is-ness!

There is a certain Is-ness associated with each point on the Know-to-Mystery scale. That Is-ness moves upwards on the scale when As-is-ness is practiced. It moves downward on the scale when Alter-is-ness is practiced.

Too much Alter-is-ness results in Not-is-ness. It produces the unreality of total subjectivity. In the opposite direction, too much As-is-ness results in the Universal viewpoint, which produces the reality of total objectivity.

The way you get Not-is-ness is to say “as is created by you”. That’s an awful one, that’s a big curve, and that is Not-is-ness. It’s an As-is-ness created by somebody else, which of course isn’t an As-is-ness at all. It’s a very specious As-is-ness, and naturally the world would sort of look unreal to everybody if Joe Blow and Doctor Stinkwater and the Heavily Laden Order of Pyramids all said “This is reality and this is As It Is and you’d better accept it.” That’s a Not-is-ness, isn’t it?

So if everything starts to sort of dim down on you and you kind of find things going out, and getting sort of resistively thin — all transparent-but- they’re-there, or, they’re “all hung with black sheets” — you must assume at that time that you have faced up to too many As-is-nesses which somebody else created.

Not-is-ness is putting responsibility elsewhere, whereas, As-is-ness is taking responsibility. The two are opposite of each other.

Somebody else says, “This is the way things are.” And you’ve had that. You get that operation in conversation: “And yesterday you said to me, just when I got up, you said to me, you never work, you are a dirty loafer, you remember that, don’t you?” I think every familial unit of thetans should always have, not a Bible, but so and so’s Rules of Evidence, lying right there to be resorted to at any time, and there ought to be a Court in every neighborhood to which you could repair and decide whether or not this was an As-is-ness or a Not-is-ness.

Now what is a Not-is-ness? A Not-is-ness comes about in that exact manifestation, or simply by the separate postulate: “Well, it is and I regret it. It isn’t.” You know, you could have made it and then said it wasn’t. Oddly enough, if you made it and you know you made it, you have a special case of being in a position to say any time, “It doesn’t exist now,” and it won’t — if you have also accepted responsibility for having created something and said, “I made it.” So we see that there are two different conditions of Not-is-ness.

One is just vanishment.

The other one is an Is-ness which somebody is trying to postulate out of existence by simply saying “It isn’t.”

Not-is-ness, the way it is being used here, is not vanishment.

A Not-is-ness, in our terminology, would be this second specialized case of an individual trying to vanish something without taking responsibility for having created it. Definitive, positive and precise definition.

And the only result of doing this is to make it all unreal. To make it forgotten. To make it “back of the black screen”. To make it transparent. To make it dull down. To give it over to a machine. To wear glasses. Anything that you could possibly do to get a dimming- down of an Is-ness.

And that is done by saying just this, just this precise operation and no other operation: “I didn’t make it. It isn’t.” “I didn’t do it, so it doesn’t exist.’,

And that will always bring about this second condition, the one we give the term of Not-is-ness.

“I didn’t create it. I had nothing to do with it. I have no responsibility for this at all, so it doesn’t exist as far as I am concerned.”

An individual doesn’t have to operate on these postulates at all, but he is running on this makeup of postulates. He, of course, then will trigger in all the rest of his postulates and they’ll cross-reference in to sticking him right there with it. He’s Not-ised it and he’s got it.

Now he thinks the only way he can get rid of it is to dim it down, dim it down.

Not-is-ness by force simply dims down the Is-ness.

You can process a preclear on a gradient scale of change on something — and this is of great interest to us — if the gradient scale is back toward his acceptance of responsibility for having created it. It would not be far enough to go, as in Dianetics, simply to find out that your mother did it, that “it was what your mother said”. That wouldn’t be far enough to go. This is built into the woof and warp of the track, the very composite of postulates on which an individual is running.

You would have to go back this far: you would have to postulate: (1) that the time Mother said it was NOW, and, (2) that the time when Mother said it caused the time when I said it (a million or fifteen billion years ago) to key in. (key in (Verb): An earlier moment of upset or painful experience is activated, restimulated, by the similarity of a later situation, action or environment to the earlier one.)

To take responsibility means to sort out the situation objectively.

Every time somebody else can put one of your own pieces of mental machinery or one of your engrams into restimulation, it is only because he can work on something which was natively created by yourself. All things carry the germ of their own destruction.

So, any engram, as we were operating with it in Dianetics, was actually a key-in. When I discovered that the whole track ran back, back, back, back, BACK, it was, “Oh! We’re back to where the guy did it in the first place!” Well, that was very interesting, and one result was the essay on responsibility in Advanced Procedure and Axioms.* The essay on full responsibility.

When you are blaming the situation on somebody else you are not taking the responsibility for sorting it out to find the right cause. It doesn’t matter if you created that condition millions of years ago.

Well, a fellow did. He created the condition from which he is now suffering, and he didn’t even create it in other wise than he is now suffering it. But it has been keyed in and he has consented even to its being keyed in.

Nothing really is sneaking up on anybody. That’s a horrible thing, isn’t it? People haven’t even made it worse. But we’re having a good game. If that game is a game called psychosomatic illness, bereft lover, neglected baby, it’s still a game. And as such, the individual is still playing all roles.

A condition is created by certain factors coming together in a certain way. This is what needs to be sorted out.

Now what happens is that as an individual goes along the line, he starts identifying himself with the source point and receipt point of the communication line. As a child, he identifies himself as the one who is talked to. Very seldom do you discover a little child giving mother a good lecture. If you had, you probably would remember with great satisfaction, the good lecture you gave your mother.

Here is a condition in which the individual has identified himself with a continuous effect point, or a continuous cause point, and having said “I am now on this point,” he now makes his considerations below the level of that point. He has considered he is on that point. Henceforth all further considerations are monitored by this consideration that he’s on the point, as long as he considers he’s on that point. And he would have to recognize that he was on the point (an As-is-ness) before he would come off the point.

A process immediately occurs to us on such a level. If you just simply ask an individual a question such as this over and over and over and over:

“Where could you be, where you would be willing to recognize and realize that you were?”

And you would just run a gradient scale all the way back up the line, to the point where the individual recognizes, finally, “You know, I’m sitting right here!” There wouldn’t be any mysticism involved in this.

One simply has to take a pan-determined view to resolve a situation.

Now, these conditions of existence are composited up in an inter-dependency one upon another. An Is-ness exists only because of As-is-ness. As-is-ness took place in the first place. It got created. Then we had to alter it slightly to get an Is-ness. We had to give up some responsibility for it and we had to shift it around. A Not-is-ness then exists in order to provide a game.

Things are what they are. We just have to recognize them for what they are. That is As-is-ness. If we refuse to recognize them for what they are, then that is Not-is-ness.

A game is an Is-ness which is being handled by Not-is-nesses. A football game could be added up in terms of these conditions of existence. One side has the ball and the other side must Not-is the side that has the ball, and the side that has the ball has to win — in other words, has to arrive at a receipt point.

A game is simply a contest of skills to reach a goal.

We get the communication formula itself as being below the conditions of existence and we get affinity, reality and communication as simply being the methods by which existence is conducted. It is not the interplay of existences. So, we’re dealing with a higher echelon than ARC right now.

Affinity really is merely the consideration of how well it’s going. In the agreement or reality, itself we’re talking about Is-ness and that is the corner where we enter this ARC triangle. We just slide into that triangle of Affinity-Reality-Communication on that Is-ness point of reality, and then it is modified by affinity and communication, which of course come in simultaneously with it. We discover then that these conditions of existence would add up to all manifestations of behavior. There would be a great many of them. There would be a finite number, however. It would be the number of possible combinations, singly, doubly, trebly or quadruply, of these four conditions of existence. We get this individual who in only 75% of his life is trying to say Not-is to, another 10% of his life he’s giving an Alter-is, one hundredth of one per cent he’s giving an As-is, or trying to give an As-is to — and the remainder is Reality. Acceptable reality. And that would be just one makeup of a personality.

If we say that there is a gradient scale of Is-ness, a gradient scale of Alter-is-ness, a gradient scale of As-is-ness (which there isn’t) and a gradient scale of Not-is-ness, why we can see then that you could take these gradient scales and in one combination and another, have a character composited from them.

It is not true that there isn’t a gradient scale of As-is ness. A person goes up the Know-to Mystery scale toward the Universal viewpoint on a gradient of As-is-ness.

Characterization must be made up, in great degree, from these conditions of existence. Some space, some energy, and his considerations of Is-ness, Not-is-ness and Alter-is-ness. We would not say that any part of his characterization was made up of As-is-ness, because if it was it wouldn’t be there.

Characterization is made up of the position on the Know-to-Mystery scale.

One also has been trained to believe that loss is bad. This is just a reverse postulate, made just to keep life interesting. Loss is bad, therefore he has a tendency to avoid As-is-ness. Therefore, he will avoid duplication — he’ll avoid all kinds of things. He’s afraid he’ll unmock. He’s afraid he’ll vanish. Here he is struck in, eighteen feet thick, and you couldn’t get him out with a pneumatic drill, all scheduled to go back to the between-lives area (Between-lives area: The experiences of a thetan during the period of time between the loss of a body and the assumption of another. See A History of Man by L. Ron Hubbard) and pick up another baby. Silly, isn’t it? But it doesn’t matter too much. Any life or continuance, to him, has begun to be better than no life at all.

Such manifestations are part of Know-to Mystery scale that prevent a person from rising up the scale.

You could say, well then why would you process somebody? Well, let’s look at that. In order to accomplish a two-way communication, just after the basic and most rudimentary chitter chat, I would start asking somebody why he was being processed. And you know, I’m just wicked enough to go on asking the person why he is being processed for hours. Until he can at least find one reason why he is being processed. It’s a very interesting process. A preclear comes in saying, “Process me,” and you have always supposed they knew. Well, at this point they don’t have any idea at all why they want to be processed.

The desire to be processed goes against the desire to maintain status quo. Just sorting out this inconsistency may lead to some interesting results.

A process which would be quite powerful would be: “What wrongness or what wrong thing would you find other people would accept from you?” or “What could you do that was wrong that other people would accept?” and then “What wrongness could you accept from other people?” — back and forth and back and forth. Here goes the guy’s manners, his social pattern, his behavior pattern, and everything else will just go by the boards running that process but he won’t be able to tell you, first and foremost, why he’s being processed.

Processing resolves a person’s fixations, but the person is not aware of that.

He won’t be able to tell you he wants to feel freer. He won’t articulate any of these things. He’ll just sit there and want to be processed. What toward? Until you’ve gotten him to put a little time on the track, he will use “forever” in processing, because he’s sitting in forever.

The person just wants to be processed forever.

He isn’t moving on the time continuum. Well, if you can’t get him processing toward some goal or other or in some direction, he just makes processing the end all of everything and he’ll just go on being processed forever. But if he’s going to be processed forever, he’ll have to hold onto his aberrations forever, otherwise he couldn’t be processed forever, could he? And that’s why some cases stay so long in processing. It’s actually as elementary as that.

And so, he wants to hold on to his aberrations forever.

So, I have been sorely tempted to alter that early auditing step to just this: “Well now, give me some goals you have in processing.”

And just keep it up until it’s no longer forever, and the preclear has a future.

The person must have a goal in processing to have a future.

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FINAL COMMENTS

The basic condition of existence is Is-ness, or reality. Time is duration of Is-ness. Space is extents of Is-ness. Thus, space is occupied by is-ness. Is-ness consists of energy.  If an individual is occupying space, then he is part of this is-ness, and he has the characteristics of energy.

The feeling of “foreverness” is really the feeling of nothing (no energy, no time, no space). To have the feeling of forever, the individual must continue to exist as energy in one shape or another. Energy-space-time are simultaneous and continuous at the fundamental level. Going deeper, THETA-MEST are simultaneous and continuous with no beginning or end.

There are certain principles that seem to underlie the structure of is-ness. When alter-is-ness is practiced, the is-ness moves downward toward Not-is-ness of unreality on the Know-to-Mystery scale. And, when As-is-ness is practiced, the is-ness moves upward toward a Universal viewpoint of objectivity. As-is-ness is taking responsibility whereas, Not-is-ness is putting responsibility elsewhere.

A condition is created by certain factors coming together in a certain way. To take responsibility means to sort out those factors objectively from a pan-determined viewpoint. It doesn’t matter if you created that condition millions of years ago. Things are what they are. We just have to recognize them for what they are. That is As-is-ness.

Processing resolves a person’s fixations, but the person is not aware of that. The person simply wants to be processed forever, and so, he holds on to his aberrations. Therefore, a person must have a goal in processing to have a future.

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PHOENIX LECTURES: Chapter 8

Project: Hubbard 1954: The Phoenix Lectures

This paper presents Chapter 8 from the book THE PHOENIX LECTURES by L. RON HUBBARD. The contents are from the original publication of this book by The Church of Scientology (1954).

The paragraphs of the original material (in black) are accompanied by brief comments (in color) based on the understanding from Buddhism.  Feedback on these comments is always appreciated.

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THE FOUR CONDITIONS OF EXISTENCE (Part 2)

There are extremely elemental processes we discover could be designed when we look at the various factors in Scientology which we would call very upper echelon factors.

How much in the way of processes could we get just out of the concept of Is-ness? Just that one datum. Well, actually we could get a very great many.

We could get very many processes just out of the concept of Is-ness.

But let me call your attention abruptly to the singular fact that to give a thetan exercise in getting ideas is of minimal use. A thetan can always shift around his considerations one way or the other, but it all depends upon the scope he is willing to shift them around on.

An individual on one point, let’s say the receipt point in the communication formula, would feel himself limited to the degree that he had to be on receipt point. So, he would then feel that the consideration that he was on receipt point or was being the effect of existence would monitor his ability to make considerations.

That is to say: he would not feel then that he was free to make any other considerations above the level of the fact that he was on receipt point. And all of his other considerations would fall below this level.

A person who is being at effect would feel constrained by that basic consideration.

The formula of communication — “Cause-Distance-Effect” is the most elementary statement of it — “and involving attention and duplication”. We would discover that if an individual were monitoring himself with one basic consideration, his considerations would then fall below, and his ability to change his mind would then fall below, that basic consideration.

A person is monitored by his basic consideration.

A basic consideration could be “I am on an effect point. I am being the effect of many blows” — and messages and that sort of thing — “and this is very bad”. His considerations are various. “I must get off this point”. Or, “I am on this effect point and I do not like this”. Therefore, he makes the consideration that he must get off of this point. Well, what is monitoring the consideration that he must get off that point?

The fact that he’s on it, of course.

All his considerations are subject to that basic consideration.

Now let’s take it reverse end to, and let’s get an individual who finds himself on source point. There he sits on source point and he’s being cause. He’s being the source of the impulses or particles which are going across the distance and hitting effect point. And then this individual is saying: “Well now I mustn’t cause anything bad. I must cause only good things” and he must do this and that for this or for that.

And what is this host of considerations being monitored by? Of course, the fact that he is on a cause point. He’s on a source point of a communication. (Synonymous here: cause and source, effect and receipt.) And if he discovers himself suddenly on the receipt end of something, this fellow is really dismayed. Here he has this basic consideration that he’s being cause point, and then all of a sudden, he receives something! Now that would be a breakdown — basically and primarily — of his Is-ness. His reality.

If a person’s basic consideration is violated it would be a breakdown of his Is-ness.

He then can have a break of reality only to the degree that other-determinism brings into question the postulate on which he is operating. You see, you could have a break of reality only to the degree that other-determined-hammer-pound brings about an invalidation of the postulate on which he is basically running.

There is other-determinism that brings his basic consideration into question.

He says, I am cause and I am being a good fellow and I am doing this and doing that — and all of a sudden, he gets jailed. My, this is upsetting. But what is his basic consideration? That he is occupying a cause point.

This can be very upsetting.

Let’s take the example of somebody who is in a condition and who is trying to change this condition. Now we’ve entered into another level. We’ve entered into Not-is-ness and then we’ve entered into Alter-is-ness, you see. He has a terrible ill. He has this mental difficulty. He has some other difficulty or other and he now says it mustn’t exist. And in his next statement he says, all right now, don’t exist.

Well, what do you know, it keeps on existing. Well, all right, he says, I’ll change it on a gradient scale. I’ll chip away at the corners of it.

He’ll at length decide that he can’t do anything about it.

One of the actions that he would finally do would be to draw a black curtain over the whole thing. That’s one of the basic reactions of Not-is-ness. He says, Now, look, I can’t change it at all, so he’s trying to affect a Not-is-ness by using Alter-is-ness. Not-is-ness would not take place by a postulate, he discovered (or thought he discovered), so the basic thing he must do immediately then is start changing it on a gradient scale, which is to say Alter- is-ness — and it just stays right there. And he is already running on a failed postulate of Not-is-ness. His activity of change is then proceeding from the basic postulate that it must not be, which is proceeding from another basic postulate that it is, which is proceeding from the basic postulate that he’s there in the first place. You see that we’re just proceeding from the basic postulate that there must be a there for him to be at.

So, we trace back these basic postulates and we discover a little rule here. An individual has a condition and the condition continues to exist as long as the individual has a condition. It sounds like an idiotic little rule but it’s a very, very true little rule. It will continue as long as he has a condition. So, every time you find a condition? He must have a postulate about the condition before he has the condition. So, every time you find a condition there’s a postulate.

In order to get over something you have to have postulated that you have it. In order to recover you must postulate that you have something from which to recover. In order to go through the actions of emptying a pocketbook you had to have postulated that it was full and should be emptied.

Every time you find an unwanted condition there is a postulate that is keeping that condition there.

One is all too prone to look at existence and say, well, there’s existence there and now we’ll make some postulates. No. This is not quite the direction of drift. You’d have to make the postulate to have existence there so that you could make some postulates to recover from having the existence there. And any condition to have any existence or persistence must be based on time of some sort. There must be a time postulate.

And we find that an individual doesn’t have time unless he continues to postulate it and ceases to have time to the degree that he ceases to postulate it.

When I say cease to postulate time, I wouldn’t want you for a moment to get the idea that there is any witchcraft involved, that you have to go out with spider-webs and mix them up with four quarts of morning sunlight and stir them all up with a whisker. There’s no witchcraft involved in making this postulate. It’s simply this kind of a postulate: Continue: Just get the notion of continuing something and you’ll have a time continuum. Get the idea of a piece of space out in front of you and have the notion, Continue, about this piece of space. That’s making time. You’ve made time. That’s all the postulate there is. There isn’t even the words, “Now I am going to make some time and I am going to cause the time to persist and continue.” No, its just continue. You didn’t say continue.

Any condition is enduring because it is somehow being postulated continually.

This time continuum is a tremendously interesting thing particularly in view of the fact that so many people have agreed upon it, but their apparent agreement with it leads them to depend on other people, finally, to carry on the agreement while they just sit there. And what do you know, eventually they do just sit there. You’ll find many a person in this state, simply sitting at home in his bedroom, just sitting there. Well, he couldn’t have any motion, he says.

Motion consists of this: consecutive positions in a space. He’d have to conceive that he had some space, and that he’d have consecutive motions in it.

That continual postulate has become automatic. It has become integrated into a system.

If you could just ask such a person to go out and trim the hedge, just no more and no less than that, or if you asked him to go out and put pieces of chalk on the sidewalk all the way around the block every five feet — you would see considerable recovery in his case. Why? Well, he knows that he’d have to go all the way around the block or he knows that he would have to finish trimming the hedge, or he would have to come around to his door again in the block, or come around to the other side of the yard. In other words, he can continue to postulate a time continuum against the objects that are already there.

You could just say to this fellow, Get the idea of moving this dish. Now move it. Now get the idea of moving this dish again. Get the position you’re going to move it to now. Now move it. Now get the idea of moving this dish, now get the place you’re going to move it to and move it. Surprisingly enough an individual will sometimes turn on a violent body reaction on this.

By actively doing something different a person is departing from that condition of automaticity.

What’s kicking back there? It is the thetan’s agreement with the body, to the point where he’s saying he is the body, the body is himself — therefore everything that happens to the body is what happens to himself and everything that happens to himself happens to the body. In other words, he’s in a super-identification. And he would come through this to where he could have some future.

He is up against the automatic system.

What postulate is this individual already riding with? Let’s take a look at the Is-ness of this. He has to conceive that he has a body before he can recover from one.

And we get the salient and horrible fact that this whole thing is monitored by Is-ness. No matter how much Not-is-ness is taking place, you see Not-is-ness always pursuant to Is-ness. No matter how much Alter-is-ness takes place — you’ve got an As-is-ness, then Alter-is-ness has to take place to get an Is-ness. Is-ness is something that is persisting on a continuum. That is our basic definition of Is-ness. As-is-ness is something that is just postulated, or just being duplicated — no alteration taking place.

That automatic system is the Is-ness. It is the background fixation.

As-is-ness contains no life continuum, no time continuum. It will just go — every time you postulate a perfect duplicate for anything: same space, same object, same time — boom! If you postulated it all the way through, without any limiter postulate hanging around at all, it would just be gone and that’s all there is to it. It would be gone for everybody else, too.

As-is-ness makes the fixations disappear.

Now this, then, Is-ness, is your monitoring postulate. An individual couldn’t possibly get into trouble with As-is-ness. Unless you considered losing everything trouble — but it would be losing things which you either now didn’t want or had just postulated into existence.

Is-ness is the basic consideration of the individual that is monitoring his reality.

All As-is-ness is doing is merely accepting responsibility for having created it, and anybody can accept the responsibility for anything. That’s all As-is-ness is, when it operates as a perfect duplicate.

As-is-ness is taking responsibility for your actions.

There are two kinds of As-is-ness:

There is the As-is-ness where you postulate it in the space and time — you postulate it right there, and there it exists.

And then there is the As-is-ness where you re-postulate it. You just postulate it again.

As-is-ness comes about when you take actions in a responsible way, and also bear responsibility for the actions you have taken.

The object already exists, there is an Is-ness being approximated as an As-is-ness, and then it becomes an As-is that isn’t. It becomes, then, an actual Not-is-ness. So, if you created it, if you just created it as an As-is-ness, unless you altered it rapidly, you’d get this Not-is-ness. And if you exactly approximated an Is-ness as an As-is-ness, you would again get the same result. Same result both times — Not-is-ness. As-is-ness, perfectly done, if not followed by Alter-is-ness, becomes a Not-is-ness. Quickly and immediately. You’ve seen that as an auditor, erasing parts of the reactive bank — facsimiles, etc.

As-is-ness, perfectly done, if not followed by Alter-is-ness, becomes an actual Not-is-ness in terms of disappearance.

It hasn’t occurred to anybody yet, fortunately, to simply exactly approximate the body! Treat the body as an As-is-ness and go your way. Well, you say the body has a lot of facsimiles and so forth. Alright, treat them as the same As-is-ness, all in one operation — boom. Of course, you had to assume you had a body before you could possibly As-is it.

The body, in a way, represents the core of a person’s system of considerations.

Now, existence goes this way — this is the only error you could make, and this is another method, slightly, of getting a continuation, because it is an Alter-is-ness. There is an Alter-is-ness right there between Is-ness and Not-is-ness. The moment you say, “There it is, now I don’t want it and it doesn’t exist”, you’ve postulated that you’re changing it. It’s a very abrupt and particular kind of Is-ness — it’s a Not-is-ness.

If instead of following Is-nesses with Not-is-nesses, we followed them with As-is- nesses, nobody could ever possibly get into any trouble. The way you get into trouble is to follow an Is-ness with a blunt, thud, Not-is-ness. (1) There it is. (2) I don’t want it. (3) It isn’t. Oh ho! What’s the difference between these two operations? It’s a very interesting difference:

You’ve got an Is-ness. You have an ash tray, you don’t want the ash tray anymore, so the one operation, a correct one as far as you are concerned if you just really didn’t want it anymore, would be simply to do an As-is-ness. A perfect duplicate. Gone. You haven’t got an ash tray anymore. To follow an Is-ness with an As-is-ness, brings you into an actual Not-is- ness right there.

To follow an Is-ness with an As-is-ness, brings you into an actual Not-is-ness right there.

Or, on the other hand, you didn’t do an As-is-ness. And you’ve done what? You have refused the responsibility for having created it, and you have said, somebody else creates it and I don’t want it. You’ve said somebody else. You’ve postulated the existence of somebody else with regard to this thing and you’ve said, “Another determinism is placing this thing before me and therefore I don’t want it, so I’m going to say that it isn’t, but it really belongs to somebody else. We have to postulate another determinism, which is to say, refuse the responsibility for having created the object, before we can get such a thing as a Not-is-ness.

When you practice a large amount of Alter-is-ness, an unwanted Not-is-ness comes about.

Now, an individual can fail utterly. This is a very curious lot of phenomena that we are looking at here, and of course, we had no serious intent with this phenomenon, which is a fortunate thing. Otherwise, somebody realizing exactly how this is done, would sooner or later perhaps unmock the Republican Party or Russia, leave a hole, and of course to do that, you would have to accept the viewpoint of 200 million Russians. You could unmock Russia if you did that, but you would have to take full responsibility.

What is full responsibility? Full responsibility merely says: I created it. When you ask somebody to make a perfect duplicate of it, he’s going through the mechanics of creating it, therefore it disappears. He knows, unless he throws some other-determinism in on the thing, in other words practices some Alter-ism on its creator, that it’s not going to exist at all.

Full responsibility merely says: I created it.

The physical universe as we look at it right around us here is an Is-ness for one reason only. We all agree that somebody else created it, whether that is God or Mugjub or Bill. We agree that somebody else brought these conditions into existence, and so long as we are totally agreed on this, boy have we got everything solid. And the moment we agree otherwise, and we say, Well, we made it — it starts to get thin. This will worry a preclear for a moment. It’s just as if he feels he could never make another one. It’ll get thin.

The universe is not just physical. It is everything. The “physical universe” is a created consideration. That is the Is-ness for most people in the West.

In the processing of reality, then, if you handled Is-ness all by itself, you would simply have an individual start looking at what he considers to exist. And the most solid manifestation of that would be the space in the vicinity, the walls in the vicinity, and so on. That would be the most elementary process that we could do. Just start spotting spaces and walls and let what happens happen. That’s all. Just ask the individual to keep on spotting things, very permissively. Suppose he kept on looking at them with his physical vision — we find that he would get up to a certain level and then he’d start to have body somatics (Somatics: perceptions, stemming from the Reactive Bank, of past physical pain or discomfort, restimulated in present time) because making the body do this continually is actually processing a reality vaguely in the direction of an As-is-ness. It’s not bluntly or sharply in the direction of As-is-ness. It’s just asking them to process it a little bit in that direction:

“Let’s take the spaces around here just as you see them.” And of course, after a while, the walls are going to get brighter and brighter and duller and duller and — gone.

The most elementary process would be to compare your Is-ness (what you consider to be there) to what actually exists around you. Just start spotting spaces and walls and let what happens happen. That’s all. That will take care of a lot of your fixations.

Well, when they get brighter, that’s all right. The body will still feel all right, but when it starts dulling down the body doesn’t like this. It does not think this is the best thing to do. It would not recommend this as subject matter for an article in a body-building magazine. Because the body knows it will fall if it stands in space. Therefore, this very, very simple process would not necessarily have to be completed by remedying havingness, but just by getting the fellow to close his eyes, and spot anything he could see, no matter how vaguely, as a thetan. Just spot anything he sees. If he sees a nothingness, O.K., if he sees a somethingness, O.K. Just get him spotting. We don’t care what he sees. We might indicate various directions but we would make a very bad mistake if we indicated them as body directions. On your right. On your left. Above your head. Oh no, no. We just ask him to look around, and what he sees, spot a couple of spots on it. Did you do that? Now something else, spot a couple more spots on that. Well, we know already that if we’ve run it permissively in the environment, he’s had to point them out and walk around to them. He will obey orders. Now that we’ve got him to a point where he will physically obey commands we can trust him to close his eyes and spot spots or spot spaces or spot anything he wants to spot with his eyes closed. We just simply keep on spotting them, and that would be the most elementary process there is in Scientology.

Simply have him close his eyes and start spotting whatever is there in the space around him (not in any direction). These things would be his Is-ness mostly.

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FINAL COMMENTS

The automaticity of life is composed of all your considerations locked together forming a system. This system is your Is-ness that monitors your reality.

Every time you find an unwanted condition there is an automatic postulate that is keeping that condition there. When you actively do something different you are departing from that condition of automaticity. As-is-ness comes about when you take actions in a responsible way, and also bear responsibility for the actions of the past. It makes fixations disappear.

The most elementary process would be to compare your Is-ness (what you consider to be there) to what actually exists around you. Just start spotting spaces and walls and let what happens happen. That’s all. That will take care of a lot of your fixations. You may also close your eyes and start spotting whatever is there in the space around you.

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Static & The Unattached Viewpoint

STATIC is the most fundamental concept in Scientology. It is contrasted from MEST (matter, energy space and time), which is considered KINETIC. “Static-kinetic” is a dichotomy that may be expanded as a scale of infinite gradients.

A pendulum stops at either end of the swing for a fraction of a second. That condition is considered static. The pendulum has maximum velocity in the exact middle of the swing. That condition is considered kinetic. The total energy of the system is constant per the Law of Conservation of Energy. That energy is considered “potential” when the pendulum is static, and “kinetic” when the pendulum is in full swing. In between the energy is converting either from potential to kinetic or from kinetic to potential.

From the viewpoint of the example above, the STATIC of Scientology shall represent the totality of energy of the universe in potential form.

We may consider this to be the state just before the “Big Bang”. MEST, then, is the state where this STATIC is in the process of becoming KINETIC. This may be looked upon as the expanding universe.

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MEST

MEST is an acronym made up of the first letters of Matter, Energy, Space and Time. It is a form that has not yet become fully KINETIC. Here Matter is the condensed form of Energy that has become relatively static.

Matter is expanding into the the electromagnetic spectrum of physical energy and vice versa. There is a state of equilibrium there.

One may view this state of equilibrium in the atom where matter appears as the central nucleus, and the physical energy spectrum appears to be surrounding it.

Space represents the EXTENTS of energy-matter. Time represents the DURATION of energy-matter. Neither space nor time exists in the absence of energy-matter. Therefore, “space-time” are essentially the characteristics of “energy-matter”.

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Expansion of Universe

The expansion of the universe shall mean that more matter is de-condensing back into energy then energy is condensing into matter. Energy occupies much greater space than matter. It also has much less duration than matter. Therefore, net de-condensing of matter into energy appears as expansion of the universe.

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Awareness

We cannot deny the presence of thought energy. It is just that it is not acknowledged in the science of Physics. The reason for this is the arbitrary division of reality by Greeks into “thought” and “physical universe”. Science of Physics then deals with the “physical universe” only.

But there should not be any arbitrary separation between thought and the physical aspects. Thought is a form of energy just like light, heat and electricity are.

The thought would also be potential in the STATIC at the beginning of the universe. Therefore, we may consider the STATIC to be self-aware. With this awareness the STATIC starts to change into kinetic on a gradient basis. Nothing affects the STATIC but itself through this awareness. This is the origin of Big Bang.

NOTE: In Scientology, the STATIC is represented by Dynamic 8.

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Energy

We perceive energy as having the characteristic of motion. When matter expands it appears as physical energy. It may be postulated that when physical energy expands it appears as “thought energy” (THETA). This is happening within life forms. A human form is most efficient in expanding physical energy into thought energy.

Matter expands into the spectrum of physical energy, which we know as the electromagnetic (EM) spectrum in physics. Physical energy expands into the spectrum of thought energy, which is represented by the Tone Scale of Scientology.

Matter together with physical and thought energy appears as life. We then have the spectrum of life represented by minerals, cells, plants, animals and humans.

NOTE: In Scientology Energy is covered by Dynamics 7, 6 and 5.

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Viewpoint

In life, the manifestation of thought energy may be viewed as VIEWPOINT. The viewpoint represents awareness, perception as well as the interpretation of that perception through thought and activity. The latter is considered to be the “function of the mind”, but it is part of the viewpoint. The viewpoint in humans is the self. Scientology refers to it as the THETAN. But we may conceive animals, plants, cells and minerals to have their own version of viewpoint.

In humans, the viewpoint appears as being made of very fine considerations. The animal viewpoint may be made up of coarse considerations. The viewpoint of plants, cells and minerals may consist of considerations that are coarser still.

The considerations of the viewpoint actively combine in infinitely varied ways to produce the human activity. Therefore, the activities of the mind and body express the viewpoint. When there is an inherent change in the character of these activities, we may identify that as change in the viewpoint itself.

In humans, the viewpoint may rise from lower levels up through THINKING, EFFORT, EMOTION, LOOKING, KNOWING ABOUT, NOT KNOWING and KNOWING; in animals, it may rise only to the level of EATING-NESS: in plants, to the level of SEXING-NESS; in cells, to the level of WAITING and MYSTERY; and in minerals, the viewpoint may be considered to stay at the level of UNCONSCIOUSNESS. These levels, together, are referred to as the Know-Mystery scale.

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Memory

Memory is a characteristic of energy. It is stored in the changing forms and condensations of energy. The more the energy becomes solid as a result of condensation, the more its memory appears in the form of mental image pictures. As the energy expands and becomes finer, the memory characteristic take on the form of a data matrix.

Therefore, memories may be concentrated in the brain cells but they exist throughout the cells of the body and in the electromagnetic field surrounding the body.

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The Unattached Viewpoint

It is a misconception to think that as a person rises, he reaches the state of STATIC. STATIC is the state of total potential energy of everything including THETA and MEST.

The highest state that a person reaches is the state of KNOWING at the top of the Know-to-Mystery scale. This state may be called the “Unattached Viewpoint”.

Once a person acquires the unattached viewpoint of KNOWING he perceives all things, physical and spiritual, completely objectively. A person’s interpretations are optimum on all eight dynamics only when his perceptions are unattached (objective).

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