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Reference: The Book of Scientology

Assist Processing

Please see the original section at the link above.

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Summary

When a person is injured in an accident, a facsimile of that incident is impressed on the person’s mind. The facsimile is held in suspension because the sensations from the injury are not easy to assimilate. Hubbard’s solution is to put attention of the person on the incident  and have him go through it repeatedly as if it was happening to him just that moment. This will assimilate the sensations to some extent and the pain will subside. The person is then asked to visualize that incident occurring at different places and times under different circumstances and even reversing its sequence. The whole effort is to lessen the person’s fixation on the incident.

Assist consists of applying the above procedure to a recent injury. The experience is fresh in a person’s mind, and so it is easier to process. It speeds up a person’s recovery from his injury.

When the person visualizes or mocks-up the incident or an injured part, he should put it next to another mock-up when there was no such injury. It brings the injury into focus and discharges the trauma. The mock-up should be controllable by the person. If the person cannot control his mock-up, then he should simply discard it and put up a new mock-up that he can control.

Hubbard says, “Using effort to control one’s mockups is of little avail; one simply creates them. Where mock-ups are absent, one will appear if the individual will simply keep putting the thought forward that it will appear. If he puts forward the thought often enough and long enough, he will get such a mock-up.”

The person may become ill or in pain while following this procedure. The remedy for this is simply to continue with the procedure until the illness or feeling has abated. This procedure makes a person look at an injury, or a worry, or a doubt, for what it is. It is continued only for as long as it is necessary.

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Comments

The facsimile is made of sensations that did not get broken up and assimilated within the matrix of existing experience. The entire handling of a facsimile is to break it up and loosen its content so they can be assimilated and perceived.

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Reference: The Book of Scientology

Thought, Emotion and Effort

Please see the original section at the link above.

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Summary

Thought is the least condensed substance that there is. It starts to become condensed down the tone scale. At the top of the tone scale the thought is free and the awareness is clear. Down the tone scale the thought acquires stimulus-response characteristics due to increasing identification, and the awareness becomes cloudy.

Hubbard believed that the clear thought is established by will, and that the stimulus-response characteristics come from counter-efforts of the surrounding MEST universe. But, will is the faculty of conscious and deliberate action associated with the concept of self, and self comes from a lasting identification of awareness with the postulates. Self is a subjective feeling that it is the source of postulates, but it is not aware of its own nature.

Ideally, awareness is completely free and fully aware of the postulates it is surrounded by. It is aware of postulates, just like it is aware of energy and matter. But as awareness is identified with postulates, there comes about the thought of a self as the source of postulates. As that identification deepens, the thought of self condenses, and MEST characteristics of stimulus-response start to manifest.

We see a law of thought emerging here. Stimulus-response behavior is proportional to the degree of identification of awareness with thought, resulting in increasing fixation of attention on self.

Thought is intimately associated with the idea of self. Self is then defined as the source of thought, while it itself is a thought. Thus we have a circular definition, which is the hallmark of identification. 

Thought is the lightest substance, which starts unbounded and free at the top of the tone scale. As it descends down the tone scale it gets condensed with increasing identification with the concept of self. It thus acquires stimulus-response characteristics. This has nothing to do with “thetan inside the head,” but it has to do with fixation on the body.

Postulates provide the framework in which reasoning takes place. As thought condenses, reasoning also becomes increasingly illogical taking on stimulus-response characteristics.

Emotions are the expression of the tone characteristic of the thought. These emotions become quite observable at the lower part of the tone scale. The emotions link the thought to the effort exerted through the body.

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Comments

Hubbard starts out with a mathematical equation for life as the Theta-MEST theory. This is the dichotomy of two extreme conditions of life. Theta is total freedom and MEST is total slavery.

Hubbard associates the mathematical symbol ‘theta’ with the subjective feelings of self and will; and the mathematical symbol of MEST with the surrounding universe. He then identifies the surrounding universe with what is being postulated by self.

To Hubbard, this theory encompasses all that one can know, and nothing falls outside of it. Hubbard does not entertain the concept of unknowable. But all that we know is through postulates. What then is this self that postulates?

If we look closely, the Theta-MEST dichotomy ultimately reduces to the dichotomy of Unknowable-Knowable.

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Reference: The Book of Scientology

Terminals

Please see the original section at the link above.

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Summary

According to Hubbard, “A terminal is, in essence, any point of no form or any form or dimension from which energy can flow or by which energy can be received.” So, a battery has positive and negative terminals. Similarly, an electric motor has terminals. The motor runs when a current of electricity flows through the terminals. A stimulus-response behavior is like the running of the motor. It occurs when there is a flow of energy. The MEST universe is like that.

Hubbard, therefore, says, “… a viewpoint can be affected by the MEST universe only when the viewpoint has identified itself with some MEST universe article, such as a body.” This identification manifests itself as fixation of attention. So, a viewpoint should have the ability to unidentify itself, or release itself from fixation, rapidly. 

A terminal, therefore, is related to the phenomenon of identification with the MEST universe. This makes the viewpoint subject to MEST laws, which make it stimulus-response. When one mocks up a terminal similar to the MEST universe terminal and puts the two terminals side by side, there is a discharge. This discharge is in terms of the person getting an insight into the MEST universe terminal. This approach is different from the Dianetic process that uses recall. Like Dianetics, this is also a limited process.

Hubbard believes that if a person owns two of the same item, then the chances of misconstruing that item are less. A viewpoint is more apt to identify itself with an item if its duplicate is missing. According to Hubbard, “This fixes him in the belief that he cannot alter his relationship to the MEST universe.” The more aberrated a person is the more easily he gets fixated on terminals.

Hubbard says, “It could be said that the MEST universe is the average of agreement amongst viewpoints and that the laws of the MEST universe, no matter how physical, are the result of this agreement.” This assumption of Hubbard is in conflict with the work of scientists like Galileo and Einstein who exposed a new reality that went against the general agreement.

Not every person’s reality is the same because their ability to perceive the universe is different. A hypnotized person’s reality can even be controlled by the hypnotist. The struggle is to define reality, and Hubbard settles on reality being the average of agreement among viewpoints. But the actual definition of reality remains elusive in Hubbard’s Scientology.

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Comments

Hubbard does not see self as a MEST universe article. Therefore, he does not even consider the possibility that attention can be fixated on self. This is because self is in the domain of thought and, to Hubbard, thought is not part of the MEST universe.

However, thought can be sensed like energy and matter, and Hubbard also found that thought upon condensation becomes increasingly stimulus-response like energy and matter. We may, therefore, consider thought also to be part of the MEST universe. In that case, not only the body, but also the self can be a terminal. From this point of view, fixation on self becomes possible and it can be seen as an aberration.

The substance (thought, energy and matter) is the basis of the knowable universe, and of our sense of reality. The substance has the property of continuity, consistency and harmony. We may refer to this as the principle of oneness. The oneness of the universe provides the ideal scene of reality. Such reality is free of anomalies, fixations, and aberrations.

The reality of a person departs from the ideal as the oneness is violated in his perception. The anomalies appear as missing data, contradictory data and arbitrary data. They are manifested in the fixation of his attention, which is the basis of all human aberrations.

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