To train the student to BE there comfortably and face pre-conceived notions. The idea is to get the student to BE there and not do anything else but BE there.
Establish yourself in meditative posture. Comfortably perceive whatever is presented by your environment and the mind. Hold still, watch the flow of your breath, not attach yourself to passing attitudes, emotions, sensations and pains, and see what would happen.
When a problem or a situation show up become very alert. Ask yourself,
“How would this situation look different from a universally broad viewpoint?”
Keep looking at that situation with that question at the back of your mind. Simply BE there and do nothing else but BE there.
As you persevere in being there the situation may shift around and the pre-conceived notion may come to view. This may produce many realizations.
Each session may be 20 to 30-minute long; but a session can be as long as two hours. You may continue with this exercise over several sessions until you reach the end of this exercise.
END OF THE EXERCISE:
When you can BE there comfortably and PERCEIVE and have reached a major stable win, the exercise is passed.
To train the student to BE there comfortably and face anomalies in thinking. The idea is to get the student to BE there and not do anything else but BE there.
Establish yourself in meditative posture. Comfortably perceive whatever is presented by your environment and the mind. Hold still, watch the flow of your breath, not attach yourself to passing attitudes, emotions, sensations and pains, and see what would happen.
When something comes up that does not make sense become very alert. You may consult a dictionary or an encyclopedia to get more information on it. Assume the universal viewpoint as in the previous exercise. This will help you recognize the anomaly and the preconceived notion underlying it. Such anomalies may exist in the daily situations that you are confronted with.
As the anomaly comes into focus, ask yourself,
“What is making this anomaly violate the law of Continuum?”
Keep looking at that situation with that question at the back of your mind. Maintain the universal viewpoint. Simply BE there and do nothing else but BE there.
As you persevere in being there, the anomaly starts to unravel and the preconceived notion comes to view. This may produce many realizations.
Each session may be 20 to 30-minute long; but a session can be as long as two hours. You may continue with this exercise over several sessions until you reach the end of this exercise.
END OF THE EXERCISE:
When you can BE there comfortably and PERCEIVE and have reached a major stable win, the exercise is passed.
TR0 is simply a version of the ancient exercise of meditation. It is the very first exercise in Scientology. It is the first exercise in Subject Clearing too but with mindfulness.
“TR” stands for training routine. “0” stands for a reference point on a scale. Thus, TR0 serves as the fundamental reference point for all other training, exercises and processes in Scientology, and also in Subject Clearing.
People get wonderful results on TR0, when they naturallyBe There and Confront. The purpose of mindfulness is, “To be there with total attention so you can see things as they are.”
In the context of assisting another person, one should be able to see exactly what is going on with the other person. This requires that the person learn to totally be comfortable in the presence of another person. But before he can do that, he should learn to be comfortable with himself.
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Confronting Oneself
The first part of TR0 is “OT TR0, Operating Thetan Confronting.” The missing gradient in Scientology TR0 has been that the student needs to learn to confront his ideas of relationships with others before he can learn to confront others. Before you start this exercise, make sure you have read and understood the document Be There and Confront.
Here the student is not really confronting the other person because his eyes are closed. But he could be confronting his thoughts about relationships with others. This exercise may be done quite gainfully with thoughts that you are sensitive to, or with ideas that make you feel uncomfortable. You simply look at those thoughts and ideas more closely until you gain greater clarity.
So, you do the following exercise with the following purpose:
“To be there comfortably with your thoughts about relationships with others.”
You don’t try to avoid your thoughts or suppress them. You just be there with your thoughts without flinching away.
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Confronting Another Person
You actually confront another person on the second part of TR0 called “TR 0 Confronting.” This is a powerful exercise that promotes mindfulness if practiced with the following purpose:
“To be there comfortably observing another person as that person observes you.”
Do not try to suppress any thoughts, feelings of embarrassment, or pressure to do something. You just be there without avoiding such reactions, or flinching away.
This is not a simple exercise. It makes the student confront his social machinery, which is not easy to do. The social machinery is activated in close presence of another person, especially when there is not enough prior familiarity with that person. This exercise may be done with different people in an organized TR0 course. Alternatively, one may sit leisurely in a cafe and confront different people unobtrusively from a larger distance.
Everybody has skeletons in their closet. These are the things the person does not want others to find out about him, even when they are trivial. The student needs to confront all such things about himself that make him flinch and withdraw. He must be comfortable with himself before he can be comfortable with another person.
If ‘TR0 Confronting’ becomes a bit overwhelming, one may go back to ‘OT TR0’, until one can do both parts of TR0 comfortably.
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Please Note
In the Subject Clearing version, the TR0 exercises require two students who are practicing TR0. There is no coaching other than supporting each other by simply being present. The two students may not be the same each time. The pairing can keep on changing.
The longer is the TR0 session (uninterrupted), the more beneficial it is. You can start with a 20 minute session and build it up to a session that lasts for 2 hours or more. Do it daily until you can do both parts comfortably. After that you may extend this exercise by one week at a time, depending on its merit.
Anxiety comes when a person is not certain or confident about the outcome. He is lacking confidence because he does not have clear guidelines or principles to follow. The basic guideline is logic consisting of a sense of continuity, harmony and consistency. In its place this person has confusion, which goes back to past experiences. Such experiences contain confusion that caused anxiety in the past.
The resolution of anxiety requires that one looks at past experiences of anxiety as far back as possible. The person spots the precise confusion present in each of those experiences and compiles a list of those confusions without trying to resolve them. This may take hours if not days.
A complete and precise list of all such confusions must be made first, before any effort is made to resolve.
The next action would be to meditate on that list with mindfulness to see if all these confusions point to a single basic confusion! The person meditates and spots the confusion that is uppermost in his mind. He then simply meditates on that confusion with mindfulness.
Reduce all those confusions to a basic confusion that must be resolved.
The person isolates things from that basic confusion that do not make sense. Such things are illogical because they contain discontinuities, disharmonies or inconsistencies. He traces each discontinuity, disharmony or inconsistency to gaps in awareness.
Meditate on the basic confusion to discover gaps in awareness.
The person looks at each gap more closely. If something comes up then fine, otherwise he moves on to find another gap to examine. All such gaps are interrelated anyway. As he continues to examine these gaps a missing piece will fall into place and, sooner or later, his anxiety will start to lessen.
Let the realization occur by itself without being forced.
The person then continues with this process until all anxiety is gone.
