From SCIENTOLOGY – A Handbook For Use (see page 35):
“There is one potential danger in narrative style: the pc may start narrating the incident “by memory?’. He will start mocking it up again! This is not what you want. To avoid it, you must explain very clearly to the pc what he ought to do. It’s like he was watching a TV screen which the auditor can’t see. So the pc must tell the auditor what he sees on the screen, i.e. what he sees now while the action is happening, not what he saw the last time through the incident. (What the pc “sees” is not limited to his visual impressions only, but refers to 54 further sense perceptics as well!) Only what he sees now is of importance. “I see a man. He walks into a room. From the left; there is a door. He stops by the table. It’s dark and cold. I am afraid. Etc.” This way the auditor can tell how the pc is moving from the level of action to the levels of emotion and postulate. He can see the shift of importance’s. And he can see how the incident is gradually erasing and thus recognize when to stop. When the pc starts talking “about” the incident instead of describing what he sees, he will be beginning to put something there where there is actually nothing. This is a problem common to all thetans. It is so much easier to acknowledge that there is something than to acknowledge that there is nothing! Failing to accept that there is nothing, the pc will either put something there or pull in some other engram or picture, just so that he has something to talk about. But: this will go along with bad indicators, such as glumness, slowness, unavailability of data, and on the meter it will produce a sticky needle and finally a high and very stuck TA. Developing an awareness of when a process is complete, when the EP has been reached, and so when to stop, is one of the vitally important points of learning to audit.”
Mindfulness is “seeing things as they are.” The above note describes how important mindfulness is in handling one’s case. When mindfulness is lacking, all kinds of complications arise. But we find that Hubbard’s research ended up dealing with the complications arising from lack of mindfulness. That is what makes the subject of Scientology so complex.
Instead of giving importance to mindfulness, Hubbard gave all his attention to boosting the capabilities of “I”. Hubbard never realized that “I” acts as a filter. A filter is something that a person is looking through. It colors one’s observations. It reduces mindfulness.
The more is the focus on “I” the more it becomes difficult to practice mindfulness.
The key error in Hubbard’s philosophy is found in the section “Identity versus Individuality” of SCN 8-8008: Identity versus Individuality:
“The most common confusion on the part of a preclear is between himself as an identified object and his beingness. One’s beingness depends upon the amount of space which he can create or command, not upon his identification or any label. Identity as we know it in the MEST universe is much the same as identification, which is the lowest form of thought. When one is an object and is himself an effect, he believes that his ability to be cause is dependent upon his having a specific and finite identity. This is an aberration; as his beingness increases his individuality increases, and he quickly rises above the level of necessity for identity for he is himself self-sufficient with his own identity.
“The first question a preclear undergoing theta clearing asks himself is quite often: “How will I establish my identity if I have no body?” There are many remedies for this. The worst method of having an identity is having a body. As his individuality increases and his beingness expands—these two being almost synonymous—he is less and less concerned with this problem; that he is concerned with the problem tells the auditor where he is on the tone-scale.
“One of the control mechanisms which has been used on thetans is that when they rise in potential they are led to believe themselves one with the universe. This is distinctly untrue. Thetans are individuals. They do not as they rise up the scale, merge with other individualities. They have the power of becoming anything they wish while still retaining their own individuality. They are first and foremost themselves. There is evidently no Nirvana. It is the feeling that one will merge and lose his own individuality that restrains the thetan from attempting to remedy his lot. His merging with the rest of the universe would be his becoming matter. This is the ultimate in cohesiveness and the ultimate in affinity, and is at the lowest point of the tone-scale. One declines into a brotherhood with the universe. When he goes up scale, he becomes more and more an individual capable of creating and maintaining his own universe. In this wise (leading people to believe they had no individuality above that of MEST) the MEST universe cut out all competition.”
But the truth is that individuality is the core of identity or “I”. Scientology gets quick results in the beginning, because it practices a version of mindfulness, but those results become harder to get as one increasingly believes in the idea of thetan and identifies with it. This identification acts as a filter that interferes with mindfulness.
In Buddhism, the emphasis is on reducing the focus on “I”. This makes mindfulness increasingly possible. Buddhism states,
“The Absolute Truth is that there is nothing absolute in the world, that everything is relative, conditioned and impermanent, and that there is no unchanging, everlasting, absolute substance like Self, Soul, or Ātman within or without.”
But Scientology declares in absolute terms that each person is an immortal (permanent) thetan. It focuses on achieving the supposedly fantastic abilities of a thetan. And, thus, Scientology proceeds in a direction opposite to Buddhism.
If we can only reverse the vector of Scientology and make it to parallel Buddhism, amazing and endless results are possible.
When we reverse the vector of Scientology to parallel Buddhism, we may refer to it as KHTK.
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