Next in the ongoing series of essays by Terra Cognita. See earlier posts here: The Way To Happiness: Really? A Story, Auditing: a PC’s Quest for the Holy Grail, The Knowledge Report, Integrity, The Almighty Stat, The Reg, The Horrors of Wordclearing, Why Scientologists Don’t FSM, Respect, The Survival Rundown – The Latest Scam, Communication in Scientology… Or Not, Am I Still A Thetan?, To Be Or Not To Be, An Evaluation of Scientology, Fear: That Which Drives Scientology and Justification and Rationalization.
The Mind (I Think)
Does a separate entity called the mind actually exist independent of the body and the spirit? Or is the mind merely an abstract construct of philosophers, psychologists, and theologians trying to describe phenomena happening inside the brain? Whatever this is, thought, memory, reason, imagination, and consciousness have been attributed to this device since man chased mastodons.
Whether the mind is physical or metaphysical in nature has been debated for centuries. LRH had his own ideas on the subject.
The Triumvirate
LRH divided human beings into three main components: thetan, mind, body. The body is the easiest to know and comprehend. It can be seen, heard, felt, and measured. Men and women are born, live, and die. The other two parts of the equation are harder to explain and open to conjecture.
Most of the people on the planet believe we are immortal spiritual beings—or what LRH termed thetans. Some think this spirit ascends to heaven after we die (or Hell depending on their Karma). Many believe no such places exist. Others believe the spirit carries on by inhabiting another of these aforementioned bodies. Spirits or thetans conveniently have no matter, energy, space, or time—MEST—and thus, can’t be measured and proven to exist by conventional physical means.
LRH separated the spirit and the mind. He said the mind is “a literal record” of all our experiences—basically our own personal movie stretching back quadrillions of years. What distinguished his idea from others, though, was that he divided the mind into two halves: the analytical and the reactive.
Many believe the spirit and the mind are one. Not Ron.
The Analytical Mind
The analytical mind, or what LRH referred to as the “awareness of awareness unit,” is “the conscious aware mind which thinks, observes data, remembers it, and resolves problems.” “The keynote of the analytical mind is awareness.” How this differs from the spirit, I’ll leave for smarter minds.
Everything—24/7—automatically gets recorded in this mind. When the average person thinks of the mind, they usually think of something similar to this model.
The Reactive Mind
The reactive mind is the subconscious mind, “which works on a totally stimulus-response basis, which is not under his volitional control, and which exerts force and power of command over this awareness, purposes, thoughts, body and actions.”
Everyone’s experienced ups and downs in life. One minute, we’re happy, the next we’re not so sanguine. Was this drop in tone due to low blood sugar or because we were “keyed in” by a full moon? Did our eye start twitching due to some unknown symbol in the environment, or because we suddenly realized we’d forgotten our spouse’s birthday?
Are we really at the mercy of a reactive mind full of engrams (“a mental image picture which is a recording of a time of physical pain and unconsciousness”) that happened eons ago? Many believe LRH constructed and promoted this model solely for financial gain. Some think he truly believed in the duality of the mind, even if he was deluded or bi-polar. Others embrace his version as a “workable” technology useful to bettering themselves.
In any case, without the reactive mind there would be no Dianetics. And most likely, no Scientology, as well. Did LRH then invent the reactive mind as a means of explaining—or justifying—his concept of “aberration?” Was this all a big con job? Or was he on to something?
Many within the church—and some outside of it—swear that erasing engrams that happened long, long ago, in galaxies far, far away made them Clear and better able to handle life. Others got little to no gain and believe auditing is a hoax.
Just like with the spirit, it’s hard to prove or disprove something with no matter, energy, space, or time.
The Engram
One of the definitions of Clear—and there are MANY—is someone who “has no engrams which can be restimulated (sic)…”
LRH was never able to quantify how many engrams had to be “erased,” before a man was said to be “Clear.” Apparently though, if we just got down to the basic on the chain (the earliest one) and handled it, all of those that came after would crumble and fall away and never bother us again.
But if we’ve lived quadrillions of years as he’s stated, (and the universe was as dangerous as we’ve been led to believe) we would have trillions and trillions of engrams spread up and down billions and billions of chains. Even if the number was only in the millions, it would take more than one lifetime to tackle all these chains. And thus, the state of Clear would be impossible to attain.
[Just as an exercise, I calculated how many chains of engrams would be erased if I addressed 50 per day, 300 days per year, for 50 years. The answer: 750,000. Which is nothing in LRH’s universe but a shit-load in mine.]
Many would argue, however, that erasing ALL these chains isn’t necessary. Just handling the major ones is enough.
On the other hand, many believe Clear was the conceit of a demented mind and no such exalted state really exists. And Homo Novis is a mere fantasy.
One thing for sure, though: rich people have many more engrams than their poorer cousins.
Some philosophers believe the mind is all there is, and that everything around us is an illusion. I don’t share this view. There’s too much solid reality hitting me in the face every day to think this is all a big mirage.
Descartes famously said, “Cogito ergo sum.” I think, therefore I am.” Then again, perhaps it’s the other way around, “I am, therefore I think.” Either way works for me.
Still not Declared,
Terra Cognita
Wealthy Thetans obviously need to buy far more auditing than any others, and the imperative is that they absolutely must do it now. Check that priority with the leader. Get it done, just get the money first. No money? That priority, yours, needs to be severely adjusted. Room must be made for the future wealthy, after all…that’s how super-expansion works. LRH got it ALL figured out. Now get out there and save the planet!
I love your posts Tera. The concept of body-mind-thetan is one of the very few concepts I am still willing to conditionally accept from Hubbard. I believe that like many other concepts he plagiarised this one too.
I too am having a problem with the separation of mind and spirit. If the mind always goes where the spirit is, and they are inseparable, is it not a single unit?
The problem with Hubbard is that he never bothered checking his theory for contradictions. I believe he was not capable of it. His solution was “find your MUs.”
You parrot the “plagiarize” button without stopping for a moment to comprehend that all technological advanced are “plagiarized.” And it is all thought. Someone thought of it, then the mechanical accomplishment followed. Iron is “plagiarized” from bronze, which is “plagiarized” from copper. Steel is “plagiarized” from iron. Stainless steel, titanium alloys, carbon fiber, plastics – hell, you could say it’s all “plagiarized” from sticks and stones, and the jet engine is “plagiarized” from fire. As is clearly stated in Scientology, it is a summary and organization of previous thought. That’s a very modest description. Very modest.
It is so brutishly simply to “criticize”. There is something in the nature of Creation which seems to give the downhill an immunity: I can say “apple” and anyone can deny it, laugh at it, ignore it, make nothing of it. The challenge is not to fall off the cliff, but to climb it. How anyone can ignore what Hubbard accomplished is beyond me.
I am not sure that aharonfr was ignoring what Hubbard accomplished, his first sentence would indicate otherwise. ANd I agree, the idea that Hubbard plagiarized is sort of a pointless argument. If he did or if he didn’t, the immoral act of the plagiarist is in not identifying the source, not taking what is plagiarized. That in itself is a compliment.
The point of this post today was to highlight things certainly NOT plagiarized. These sort of statements about overcoming the endless cycle of life and death and having the “tech” to do so are what sets Hubbard and scientology apart. It does not mean everything is bad or unworkable – certainly a lot of religions and thinkers have had similar ideas. But I doubt you will find anyone that has made as many iron-clad claims and assertions of the results to be obtained by following his, and only his, path.
I accept – with some grudging thanks – that I’m maybe a bit quick on the trigger. I am trying to improve on that, and be more patient, but it’s a bit tough for me in blog-land. Someone comes up with some “he’s got brown shoes” and it gets repeated like some advertising slogan.
The distinction between analytical mind, reactive mind, and thetan (as well as somatic mind, genetic entity, and all) are functional descriptions. Most of us are taught to add four rows of three digit numbers by starting with the right-hand column. Is that a good description, is it the “right-hand column” or would “first decimal place” be better? Theoretically, it is possible to simply look at the numbers and have the answer, and I’m sure there are people who can do that. I imagine, probably correctly, that physicists read through math to the physical effects, kind of like a pitcher throwing a pitch. The math is transparent. You can say that’s still “the mind”, but one gets into other examples of things that are not so clearly “the mind”, like predicting or prognosticating, or foretelling the future. There are probably some people who look at numbers as a low-level activity to begin with. It’s a bit scary territory considering the logical extensions of all this, that if it IS thetan as distinct from mind, then isn’t it the thetan who actually controls matter, energy, space, and time? Ideas or thoughts are what run the world – the refrigerator, the gas pump, the baseball. The hierarchy of influence is: philosophy and religion, the arts, and the sciences.
Bank agreement – or whatever one wants to call it in less specific terms – undeniably exists, and feeds on itself, and if left unchecked and unchallenged. It is irrational. Hey, it doesn’t matter how many times it has caused millions of deaths and untold suffering – once should have been enough!
I see that you are fighting it and refuting it, exposing it. I’d like to think I’m kind of helping by keeping some distinctions and boundaries in place.
Mike – The whole idea is that it is possible to define life. if it could be defined, if the mechanisms of it could be shown …
“But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen ….” (T.S. Eliot)
Then we could see not just that being insulted or bored to tears creates similar reactions in most people, that good news is often well received with a smile, that coordination in aligning objectives creates group action, that perception is possible in some form in all life forms; we could also identify the basics of the mechanisms of all this, and have a predictability of cause and effect. With that, would come precision. Things we know (such as “lightning” and “gravity”) could be studied.
I think the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey” envisioned, perhaps poetically, what that would mean. But the movie didn’t lay out anything more than a vision, a dream, a hope.
“How anyone can ignore what Hubbard accomplished is beyond me.”
Nickname, I’m wondering why you don’t say what you think Hubbard accomplished and what you think people are ignoring.
Hubbard built a fantasy church out of imagination, claiming to be The Source of higher knowledge.
He captured the imagination of others and dared them to adopt his “beliefs” and his teachings and such that you allude to as accomplishment.
In the process, this “genius” of knowledge ruined and wasted lives and families, doing their best to cover the tracks and aftermath all along the way. Let this cult be remembered for its trademark unwillingness to be transparent about ANY of its activities, inside or out of the multi-layered and fortified walls. Even fellow scn-gists are forced to keep secret, to “not know” what goes on on the so-called Bridge to Total Freedom.
Accomplishment is measured by result.
The Church of Scn. is a monumental disgrace, fallen after years of deception governed by written policy, and corruption mandated by the founder. It is unfair and inaccurate to call Scientology a “mistake”, or even to give it enough creedence to label it as a failed enterprise or some lesser, wayward experiment. It is rather a type of orchestrated and protected chaos.
Let us remember that L. Ron Hubbard, the self-proclaimed originator of knowledge, died in near-total seclusion and in hiding from several global states including his own, along with his family, his former wives all refusing to acknowledge affiliation.
He died a stranger to himself, his body and decaying mind riddled with anti-psychotics. Most noteworthy of all, however, is that he, this leader, died separate from his ailing “church” and its policy refusing to tell you the truth.
So,
Meet the new boss…
Aharonfr – Sorry if I jumped on just one word you used. To me all of Scientology is to be conditionally accepted and tested to see if what it describes is there. I see a lot described in Scientology which I have seen for myself, but how to use it or what to make of it is still a challenge. I think far too many somehow come to read “Axioms of Scientology” as “Axioms of Life.” It doesn’t say that. Scientology is a discrete subject, but people lose sight of that and start blaming Hubbard because he didn’t solve all their problems for them.
Hubbard’s sense of humor is vastly underappreciated. In a way, “the joke’s on us” in that each of us has to decipher life for ourselves, and Scientology is just a help, or as Hubbard put it, tapes or marking in a labyrinth, showing the way out. That’s really all that’s possible. I’ve found it works wonders, and makes it possible to actually at least begin to come to terms with life on a very truthful spectrum. One may wish he could make another live, or magically change another, or wish someone could make everything right for oneself, but it’s only the individual himself who can do that.
Nice article. The triumvirate of mind-body-spirit (reactive mind-body-thetan) reminded me of one other component that never made sense to me: the so-called “genetic entity (GE).”
The GE seemed to be some sort of low-grade spirit that followed the line of physical reproduction and passed to another body when the current body died — but it was not the thetan, which had various descriptions (the thetan was described variously, such as the person him or herself, that which is aware of being aware, etc.).
But what the heck was the GE supposed to be? An animal spirit? The brain and neurological system of a body? An early rendition of body thetans? Some “thing” that enters a parent’s body shortly before (yep, that’s right, before) conception, so I guess the GE was prescient, too? A double entity that enters a new body via both sperm and egg (which sounds like simply DNA)? Some spirit of a planet’s evolutionary line? Gaia?
So much of Hubbard’s “theories” and “discoveries” were bunk and pseudo-science and the GE concept fits right in there. But the concept of thetan is fairly cohesive: it even clarifies some other religious concepts by claiming a soul is not something you have, but something you are (which might be a new way to put it for Christianity but fits nicely with some Hindu meditation). I personally liked the definition of thetan as “that which is aware of being aware” — but that definition is also not inconsistent with Hofstadter’s concepts in “I Am a Strange Loop” regarding consciousness.
But while the thetan made sense, the GE — and Hubbard’s stunningly ludicrous suppositions about evolution on Earth in “The History of Man” — still defies my ability to understand what the imaginary entity was.
Was it even included in the body-mind-spirit triumvirate as part of “body” or was it a fourth component that had its own slot to make a tetrarchy or quadrumvirate of some sort?
I just noticed Bruce Ploetz’s thought on the GE too.
FOTF2012: “But what the heck was the GE supposed to be?”
It was also called the somatic mind. I think it might be what some biologists are calling Morphogenetic Fields – or the Body Field. Here’s the link to a 3-minute video that explains it a bit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BYR32N04sE
The mind, there will always be a never ending debate on this subject. An individual’s strive for understanding “why” seems to pervade everyone at some point in their life. Outwardly most seem to go with the flow and not be concerned about such things, others wouldn’t have it any other way than what they believe and that is that! But the rather remarkable point in all this to me is, life is doing a number on you every step of the way, some good and some not so good but the body (the only reason you are here at all) will not last forever, plus it has at times wildly variable physical travails and you have certain rules to abide with in its travel through life, especially its demise. Just wait, you’ll change your mind on certain things as your body decays with age and immobility, arthritis and other predictable things occur, death and taxes as they say. But while young – go for it if you can, or not as the case may be and just do what you are told and let the consequences fall where they may. Old age is a luxury many will not experience though.
Religions, Hubbard, Jesus, Mohammad, witch doctors, who or whatever are there whether we like them or not, even if you forcibly reject them, others so affected will influence you to some degree. But there are also rulers, despots, politicians, generals, bankers, police and whole host of systems there to guide you, whether you want them or not. Being born into a system seems to be the go on what your life will be for most earthlings, particularly strict for the poor and less fortunate ones. The one openly (if you bother to look that is) horrible thing about humanity on this planet is that there are just as many hungry people as there are well fed ones, that shouldn’t be! No one should be undernourished but their economic systems are in place controlling the profit on commodities such as food. Some Govts actually pay their farmers not to grow stuff so as to control markets etc.
It’s having the power of choice and being able to exercise those choices that sits on the top of the pile for me. Most dream and strive for better circumstances, not that many are capable of making it happen as they really want their life to be. Justification and compromise makes for a remarkable study of human activity and inactivity but boy, isn’t the potential of life a huge and wonderful thing?
The mind is as complex as you have problems you can’t fix. But to step forward & beyond the body’s existence and have a look, now there’s a thought! How’s you mental mathematics? (Scientology can help you with that… LOL – oh yeah, didn’t that group activity turn out to be a fizzer!)
Are you a player who can absorb some failures every now and again and take it without imploding?
“It re-wires your brain.” Absolutely correct! Scientology is one cult that can take quite a bit of time getting back to normal.
Never understood 12 volt systems either. I still curse British motorcycle’s electrical systems. One hint at rain and that’s where you stay for awhile. Norton and Triumph were all the rage once and rage about them I did. I hear it’s all better now but they owe me, just like Scientology does. Brmmmm brmmm brmmm…
12 volts is very simple. The original Volta cell produces 1.5 Volts. You cannot get 10 Volts, but if you string 8 of them together you get 12 Volts, which is a nice round number.
My first boyfriend who I grew up with and broke off my engagement with to join SO,he adored Triumph sportscars In college he was in The Sports Car Club of the U.S.He had a Triumph GT6 but it had been worked on so it was very fast.I was in it when one time the speed got to 101.Never Again said Miss Ann.Shaking at that speed the car and me is frightening.But it never started in the cold or pouring rain.When I was driving I had a silver Capri72 the club got their paws on.It beat out Beamers at stop lights.Boy those drivers showed HE&R!❤️❤️
Terra:
Thanks for another stimulating column. I sincerely hope you were esconsed in the OSA offices typing this into one of their internet acessible computers and sending it out onto the ether from there. Are you by any chance the Antihubbard predicted in LRH’s secret preface to OT 28? Yes the very same passage so powerful that (predicting Monty Mython’s Lethal Joke sketch) it killed all the engravers working at Twin Peaks that were exposed to more than one word? At least COS didn’t need to pay sickness benefits as they laboured under Shelly’s direction to get it onto Niobium plates for posterity over the next quadrillions of years.
One lovely passage in your message was “One thing for sure, though: rich people have many more engrams than their poorer cousins.” Words to live and profit by!
Another — from commenter John Doe — that Elron claimed he photographed an engram the film editor laughed off as being just another bad hoax from the Founder. We have to forgive Ron though because everything else is so real!
I was happy to be reminded of the old fashioned words “make believe” in another comment which I can’t find again now but which sums the whole mess up as in “I make – you believe”
And finally laughing heartily at Harpoona’s “KSW (Keep $cn Withering) y’all!”
Scientology’s Bridge is falling down
falling down
Scientology’s Bridge is falling down
DM go fuck yourself.
Probably too childish to publish Mike, but felt good writing it!
Not took childish for me! I like it!
One of better tunes developed in C Major. Play in on the guitar can I.
TC, you are a lot of fun!
Vedic scripture explains in explicit detail the nature of the mind, body and ‘spirit’. This ancient knowledge cannot be refuted to this day. Hubbard seemed to have a partial comprehension of it but when filling the gaps of his understanding with his own stuff he went off the tracks.
For one thing, he makes a distinction between the mind and the “thetan”. But if you remove the mind from the thetan what do you have? The mind is the machinery necessary for the generation of thought. There are no postulates, intentions, desires, feelings or creative ideas without thought.
In order to have thought there must be impressions of past experience and there must be ‘out of sight’ storage for them. Thus the unconscious mind.
There must also be an analytical function called the ‘intellect’ and there must be an emotional, reactive function to initiate action. These are what we call the ‘conscious mind’. The conscious mind we know through direct perception and the unconscious mind we know through inference. Direct perception and inference are two valid means of knowledge. All of this ‘machinery’ is what allows for thought and thought creates the personality and thus the ‘person’.
What is a thetan without this? As per Hubbard’s thetan theory, not a heck of a lot. Apparently he had some inkling of pure, non-changing consciousness with his term, the “static” but he immediately conflated it with his fanciful ‘thetan’ and thus his cosmology begs questions that it can’t answer.
Something I’ve wondered and conjectured about is LRH’s involvement with Jack Parsons; the Aleister Crowley understudy. These guys were reputedly very much into the Occult/Black Magic stuff and went to very dark places. Crowley’s reputation is one of evil intentions and acts and I’d surmise he knew what the mind was and how it worked and that he used that knowledge purely to his own advantage.
Where did LRH’s tech of the mind & spirit actually originate? Given his history, it’s seems quite plausible that he perhaps started out in his Parsons days with the intention of getting the upper hand in life and making a lot of money through use of occult data and practices — but later found he could actually help people spiritually and still make a lot of money and that this did in fact draw out his “basic goodness” and more benevolent purposes. I don’t buy the notion that he was some sort of evil maniac. But he was no Mother Teresa either.
In my experience the essential tech of auditing does in fact work when applied correctly and with purely good intentions… but it is spiritual in nature and cannot be measured in terms of material benefits; no spiritual endeavour could be anyway. As for all the crap “the tech” came packaged in… that’s a pretty mixed bag and full of numerous wild cards. But the tech of the “mind” and spirit came from somewhere and I certainly don’t buy the “research” and “case history” stories alluded to in DMSMH; I’m more inclined to believe LRH was his own main research subject.
So I feel it’s very likely that Dn & Scn were basically hatched from involvement with occult practices re-directed towards enlightenment-for-profit and which resulted in all manner of bizarre fallout along with many good results. And this dubious history and ensuing damage control are why ppl such as Gerry Armstrong were so heavily attacked for shedding light on evidence of LRH’s less than admirable earlier activities. DM’s insane insistence on eradicating all and any hints that LRH was anything less than a god has a great deal to do with the cult’s contraction and quite possibly its future demise.
Personally, I’ve done quite well being audited both in the cult in the past as well as out of it more recently; (out is far superior IMO). It’s a very personal experience and one not easily measured or quantified in material terms. It’s certainly not for everyone. Obviously, results vary.
Scn911, it has been proven by THOUSANDS of PCs that the “tek” does NOT work (as measured by what LRH said it is supposed to do.) So unless you are gong to provide evidence you will be looked upon by sane people as a liar.
Well, Mike, what about the 30 years of research Hubbard did on Dianetics?
Just kidding! We all know there was no research done. It just came off the top of his head. Like everything else in the cult. However, if you’re into make believe, it’s pretty cool!
OSD, YOU did more research on Dianetics than Ron did WHILE you were surfing and chasing bikinis! Your lessons are more valuable than anything El Con spit out.
😉
OSD is the ultimate surfer and more OT every day than the most OT of all OTs.He is always learning and passing laughter on.
Mike: For many of us, however, scio DID work though the results may not have been precisely what Hubbard described. Personally, I never strived for all that he spoke/wrote, but I was doing well and continued to the top of what was, at that time, the “bridge”. I got in to scio because I met an interesting woman who seemed more at peace with herself than anyone I’d previously come across. I *wanted* that kind of peace. From my point of view, I got it. And, after leaving in the early 80s, I found a number of other practices and views which helped me continue MY journey. It’s never stopped and I continue to expand what I’d found. And I find that I still find “engrams” from my early years, specific events which impacted my early thoughts and from which I made incorrect “decisions” about what had taken place. These affected my relationships greatly in negative ways. In one case, it took me 78 years to find one such decision and, when I did, my life and personality altered rather dramatically…again. I could go on with experiences and events which derived from my early searches and paid off. Others didn’t work that well for me and I left them behind.
I left in the early 80s because I saw that scio had turned an incorrect corner and was going straight for the money. Since the actual exchange…which had been in…was disappearing, I knew it could not continue in the way that was evolving. So I quietly withdrew and no one seemed to notice.
But the wins remain, still in use. And the biggest of all is the lady I found while I was still in, my life partner. Had I gotten no other “prize” from scio than this delicious and beautiful being, I’d have considered scio to be a success and worth whatever I spent.
And so it goes.
Incoherent rambling thegman77. If it did NOT do what it was said to do, it DIDN’T WORK!
If I purchase wood glue and it DOESN’T stick two pieces of wood together, it DOESN’T work. Even if it removes pimples from my skin, the wood glue doesn’t work.
This is a PERFECT demonstration of what happens to people who get too deeply involved with scamology. Their ability to think logically goes to hell.
“If it did NOT do what it was said to do, it DIDN’T WORK!”
Oh, how you wish that was enough to discredit what it did do.
What did it do?
marildi, I give credit where credit is due. If you have evidence of what scamology DID do, please present it so it can be verified and acknowledged.
If you are just another person who has lost their sanity due to scamology, do something other than present that evidence to be examined.
Marildi: We have more than enough evidence to discredit Scientology and its creator. You don’t choose to believe it. That’s on you, not on us.
Whatever Hubbard’s intentions were…good or bad…the net effect of his creation of Scientology was a putative philosophy that encouraged adherents to focus on spiritual matters and to forgo MEST concerns, while the organization that Hubbard headed (the Sea Org) was ultimately focused on almost NOTHING BUT the accumulation of money and MEST.)
This might have been a little easier to stomach if it did not turn out that Hubbard was secretly enriching himself with tens (some estimate hundreds) of millions of dollars funneled to him personally via an elaborate corporate structure that hid both his personal control and his personal financial benefit from the operation of Scientology.
That is what can be known from observing the historical evidence.
Whatever else might be guessed about Hubbard’s intentions, we know with certainty that he accumulated enormous personal wealth while running Scientology, kept his most dedicated supporters living in near poverty…and deliberately lied about both.
It is not difficult to come to some conclusions about Hubbard’s motives when one can seen the irrefutable outcome of his objectively verifiable actions.
It is good to meet you and thank you for your comment which I found echoed my feelings about Ron.I will never say a person cannot audit another outside the cult,but for me personally it would have to be one hell of an auditor who could get me in the same space as that meter without me wanting to throw it across the room! Miss Ann does not go for that type of behavior,but The old Guardians Office wrecked my perception of what auditing was.And the Sea Org did not object at least until it was told to them I had blown.Then they celebrated.❤️
Dianetics, the modern “Science” is no longer “modern” and never was anything but pseudo-science,
like a plastic insect trapped in amber and frozen in time.
In the 7 decades since Dr. Hubbard’s “milestone” discovery, Dianetics has been debunked as shoddy pseudo-science by all but the remaining Scientologists and now some Farrakhan followers.
More of a millstone than a milestone.
In the intervening 70 years, knowledge of the mind has advanced considerably.
One very interesting book I’m now in the middle of is ‘The Tides of Mind – Uncovering the Spectrum of Consciousness” by David Gelernter.
Consciousness, memory, the architecture of the mind are explored honestly, in a provocative book that asks far more questions than it answers, unlike Dr. Hubbard, who had the answer for everything.
Speaking of Farrakhan followers, I’m right now reading a book called’ Message To The Blackman’ by Elijah Muhammad. Reads like the ramblings of a madman but to each his own.
Many have wryly noted that all of Hubbardian space opera seems stuck in the 1950’s, where DC-8’s were about as high-tech as Elron could imagine his intergalactic space vehicles being and long ago cultures in faraway planetary systems curiously set the 50’s fashion trends here on earth millions of years later. Elron pioneered the concept of being “stuck in an incident,” but he was thoroughly “stuck in an era” and drew upon the 50’s as the cultural context and background for much of his fantastical imaginings, making them a hilarious mash up of the very creative and the totally pedestrian.
But it wasn’t just fashion and space transport designs that were colored by and shot through with 50’s culture and technology, his basic concepts of the dualist nature of mind and body were developed during the heyday of Behaviorism, where the brain was considered to be a black box that would be forever impenetrable to the kind of empirical study that could reveal how it operates to enable mind and consciousness. As a result, all attention and scientific inquiry during that time was focused solely on the objectively observable and measurable aspects of behavior.
Like Freud, Elron created a comprehensive, systematic, abstract conceptual framework of understanding that diverged from empirical science from its inception. And after making a very early and unsuccessful attempt to have his method validated by academicians and clinical professionals working in the emerging field of Psychology, he abandoned that effort and never again attempted to reconcile his very complexly elaborated theoretical framework with any of the many fields of science that it relates to.
Unfortunately for Behaviorism, and for all grand theories of mind that are not grounded in the neurosciences, the seven decades since the inception of Elron’s dualist theory of mind and body have revealed how integrally tied every aspect of mind that we perceive at the phenomenal level of consciousness – memory, attention, perception, sleep/wake cycle – is grounded in and enabled by the neurophysiological operations of the brain. Mind is what the brain does and there is now such a massive amount of empirically-derived and peer-reviewed scientific data supporting that very simple invalidation of Elron’s dualistic theory of a disembodied analytic/reactive mind that to continue to believe in it as an article of religious belief is to be about as fundamentally wrong as it’s possible to be. It’s at the same level of scandalous ignorance as those whose religious indoctrination requires them maintain a biblical belief in a young earth and to disbelieve in evolution.
Even more damning, though, Elron was also foolish enough to hypothesize that our spirits (thetans) can float free of our bodies (after tons of very expensive auditing) and telepathically/telekinetically affect real objects and individuals in the physical world. The problem there, of course, is that those claims are very easily put to the test and, thus far, not a single instance of OaTy super powers has ever been demonstrated to objective researchers. Indeed, if the super power claims were to be validated it would so fundamentally undermine the known laws of physics that scientific researchers from around the world would descend upon $cn en masse and, if validated through further empirical research, $cn would boom in ways that even the cult’s most hyperbolic false advertising claims couldn’t come close to describing.
Instead, it’s dying on the vine as more and more folks get inoculated against the once-secret upper level space opera nonsense, involving Xenu, disembodied aliens stuck all over you and all manner of other whacked woo. And for that we can all be grateful, so KSW (Keep $cn Withering) y’all!
Bravo Harpoona!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind
My favorite parts of the wikipedia article on mind are:
“Psychologist B.F. Skinner argued that the mind is an explanatory fiction that diverts attention from environmental causes of behavior;[40] ”
and
“Reductive physicalists assert that all mental states and properties will eventually be explained by scientific accounts of physiological processes and states.[50][51][52]”
I’m a born again Physicalist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physicalism
Interestingly, any questions we have about mental vs physiological processes must be addressed to the mental processes as the physiological ones aren’t talking. How perverse it seems to make the dumb one the boss.
More perverse to me, is elevating the fictional “smart one” (the invisible soul we supposedly are each of us who puppet our human body) to existence.
It’s like Santa Clausing ourselves.
I loved that as well, terra cognita. I have had a bizarre experience for days in coma, whether from very big pains including very serious surgery op, added to very big lots of morphin to leave me alive for days, since pain would have killed me : I was already in coma when I arrived to the hospital. So, it could qualify as a big engram or series of engrams, if LRH was right.
But the problem is that whether caused by morphin, by coma, by pain, I lived a number of hallucinations during the coma, that I remain years later unable (tough an ex- OTVII) to erase as “engrammic” or whatever else.
As you can imagine I don’t believe that any BT could have them as engrammic, since none has ever existed, I can now say that nothing described as engram by LRH exists.
Moreover , the conclusion is worse, nobody, including LRH, has ever been able to find very exacts “mind” memories of past lives, while worse, even LRH ridiculized himself with one of his supposed past life some 2000 years ago in Sicilia.
So, LRH -uner the word “mind” invented his own version of what can be called our memory, whichi is very very far to contain hundreds of quadrillions facts, and not ONE scnist has ever been able to show he had even ONE correct and complete memory of his own present life, whether “analytical” or “reactive”.
Not to be forgotten either, OT III speaks and goes further than quadrillions, since one has sometimes to audit to past universes!
And the last one? LRH was not even able to get his own memory of “analytical” things he had written or said, tehrefore, he was forced to add many new techs so as to convince customers that past ones were somewhat wrong or incomplete and that he should buy these new products of his rewritten tech.
Nice Roger,
“Fiction” is the key word for me today.
Preclears and Pre-OTs become “fiction” creators, and some people obtain placebo and intellectual benefits from this fiction creation.
Calling the mind which is a fiction word, as real, opens up so many distracting discussion you get lost, and then Hubbard’s Scientology sells the users with the Hubbard therapy and exorcism to repair and fix this fiction.
.
Indeed. Then there’s the significance placed on the needle… introverting little swing of a thing!
I reckon, to be fair to those that came before, that Hubbard should have taken his own advice in 1965 and left it all as it was and put it openly on the market as a take it or leave it thing. It didn’t have to shoved down people’s throats as an “only way” or “do it or mankind will perish” sales pitch. But no, contradictions reigned supreme and were immediately ignored, then it was milked for all it was worth with a priesthood – the SO!
Self fiction is not necessarily a bad thing. Scientology’s technical version of it is though, especially that NOTs stuff.
This line from Terra’s article got me seriously thinking how much of a mind-fuck and how dangerous LRH’s engram and past life trauma concept of how life works could be to true believers.
“…But if we’ve lived quadrillions of years as he’s stated, (and the universe was as dangerous as we’ve been led to believe) we would have trillions and trillions of engrams spread up and down billions and billions of chains. Even if the number was only in the millions, it would take more than one lifetime to tackle all these chains. And thus, the state of Clear would be impossible to attain….”
If someone was completely brainwashed to swallow his make believe concept of how our mind works, I feel they would go completely insane. The enormity of facing the fact that billions of incidents of pain and unconsciousness (often violent, I would imagine) could be enough to drive someone insane. It is the opposite of many eastern beliefs of “living in the now”.
This thought brings to mind such names as Bruce Welch, McPherson, Yarrow off the top of my head of people that went “type III”. Maybe they really did overdose on the Kool-Aid.
Terra,
Nice piece. For a moment I thought you were going off into the mind-games thicket of “you cannot prove you exist” – which unfortunately Descartes bought into and attempted to refute. One of today’s PhD’s in a philosophy department at an Ivy League university will explain that “I think therefore I am” and also “I am, therefore I think” are each philosophically invalid, because in each case the subject presupposes the predicate (I think I got that right – what I mean is that they will tell you that when you say “I” you are making a logically unsustainable assumption, one which cannot be “proven” – sort of like: If “I” = “think”, then “I” = “am”). Gee, those guys are smart. But what are they trying to prove? Where is the responsibility? What is the intention?
Hubbard said somewhere that Descartes should have left it it at “I am”. Hubbard was interested in the practical of helping people, and not interested in arguing about semantics. (Btw, the refutation to the semantical philosophers is simply that their refutation is invalid, since to have a refutation, one must admit one is. If “I” = “refute”, and “refute” = “cause point”, then “cause point” = “I”. So you just ask “Who are you?”, and I’m sure that with their egos they’ll happily cite all their degrees and positions. I, not being as understanding as Hubbard, would ask, “… Something your mother did?”)
It might be possible to state accurately that the mind – as distinct from the being himself – deals with realities. “Realities” includes in its definition those things which are agreed upon, that’s the sense. So one remembers a lunch date at 12:15pm, and the restaurant, complete with images of the street and interiors, and that’s the mind. The being, it seems, deals in things such as responsibility – being on time. An apple in China is the same, basically, as an apple in Washington State – the mind computes the language differences as the reality of the body connects with the physical universe (i.e. eats the apple).
Auditing as-is-es agreements, bit by bit, on a careful gradient. It’s a carefully worked out program. A being could, theoretically, just with rudimentary knowledge of the existence of charge in the mind, begin to erase it. Charge is just unresolved past issues which pop up annoyingly from time to time, kind of like “Crazy Love” by Poco, because they have never been resolved. But before long, the being would run into the same problems that early Dianetics and Scientology ran into: how to effectively erase that charge without getting all wrapped up in it? How to handle the little devils in one’s ear whispering “You can’t trust him, don’t be a fool” or “She’s after your money” or “You can’t do that, you’re not bright enough”. Scientology, based on thousands of hours of clinical research – actual experimentation and controlled tests and trials – worked out a gradient, and it is a mix of introvertive and extrovertive processes. Training people to run the processes on that gradient was another challenge.
Perhaps it sounds like common-man practicality, that “it works” but the guys who slapped together the first atomic bomb did some pretty weird things, and they used common-man nuts and bolts and wires – and they were not sure it “would work”.
Hubbard’s descriptions make the relevant distinctions. It isn’t the mind that is missing, but the responsibility. The being can resolve the issues of the mind.
It’s really very simple. The mind’s nature can be directly seen by the meditating yogi.
Speculation, theories and relying on what this or that expert have to say and questions are put to rest when we can see a thing directly.
Seeing something directly is the only source of true knowledge.
Knowledge of the mind, the soul and the body, their interrelations etc. happens to the disciplined meditator.
Reading about the mind, hearing about the mind does not put us in the proper condition to know about it.
When we are still within, when the mind is slowed down and pure being, the self existent is perceived and experienced in its pristine nature, then other aspects and powers of our natures are directly intuited.
Meditation is that process by which the witness, the soul can perceive realities directly.
Belief and faith are not a prerequisite to the meditating yogi.
There are processes and procedures, when practiced, over time, make these things knowable and understandable.
There are many people who love to speculate on philosophy, psychology and religion, the yogi is tired of endless speculation. Tired of believing and faith. He wants to know.
But there are not many people who can create the habit of daily meditation, in order to have control of the mind, in order to know it’s nature and it’s relation to the soul and body.
A voltage tester cannot detect water in a bucket. That is because it’s the wrong tool.
To understand and thus be the master of the mind, meditation is the tool.
It’s really hard work.
“The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few”
Jesus the Christ
And….. Ron’s understanding of the mind was more Freudian than what liberated sages know.
Ron’s under standing of the mind was a very linear time model.
There is so much more to be revealed about the mind than what Ron knew.
Yet he convinced us of his total expertise in the area.
That is a false assumption. And grating Ron total expertise in the area has handicapped our personal experinentatiom with the mind.
In fact, Ron booby trapped our personal self inquiry by stating that self auditing is dangerous.
The injunction of no self auditing outside of his procedures is a singular doctrine that has caused fear to go within and see what’s going on.
The reasoning goes:
Only Ron knows about the mind. Ron had thought for me. All I need is to follow Ron’s thoughts.
This is a crime, when agreed to, to sovereign thinking.
This is one of the doctrines to get out of our cognitive faculties as soon as we can.
It’s very disempowering.
And………. Remember when Ron always talked like how I’m talking, about knowing Andy not just believing?
This doctrine of directly knowing the truth is THE ESSENCE OF THE VEDAS.
And remember that Ron said that his study of the Vedas was an important step in his discovery of Scientology?
Well……….. his promoting the idea of knowing truth directly actually came from the meditating Rishis of the Vedas. Particularly the Upanishads.
The Upanishads are those parts of the Vedas that deal with direct knowing.
The end result though, of Ron’s “knowing” about the Vedas, is that he created a belief system in Scientology while defining it as knowing.
Ron was ignorant to many aspects of life and the spirit. It wasn’t a fault really. It’s just where he was on the evolutionary rung of the ladder.
He said he knew, but he did not.
Know this for certain; the idea of directly knowing the true nature of body, mind and soul, comes from the ancient writings of sages that lived in the Himalayian regions of North India.
Now one truly knows how old the Vedas are. They are considered by many wise men and women to be the actual source of religion on this planet.
Ron was completely ignorant about many things that he convinced us of his expertise in.
This is the source of much wrong knowledge in the minds of Scientologists.
If you want to know the truth. Study the real source of Scientology.
And……… I fact the word Jnana, pronounced Neeyana, is the sanskrit root of the word knowledge.
There is a type of yoga called Jnana Yoga. It is the yoga of knowledge.
The word Veda also means “to know.”
These very basic understandings were read by Ron. He usurped these past understandings of wisemen and claimed them as his own discovery.
That is an intellectual crime. A crime against education and understanding.
By invalidating yoga and yogis, L Ron Hubbard third partied the sources of the knowledge he claimed to be his and his alone.
He gave lip service in the opening pages of Science of Servival to other thinkers. But I think what he did was a political move more than a revelation of the thinkers he said taught him.
He associated himself in order to affect how we perceived him. It was always about PR for Ron.
And his PRed, well marketed and agreed upon personality, is the source of much of this inharmony we see in Scientology.
To understand the true nature of Ron, study the ones he said he studied. Then you will know how his ego usurped the attainment of others to create a PR image that would guarantee income and loyalty.
Some excellent posting, Brian.
Good grief! How can anyone present a discussion of the Hubbardian Model of the Mind yet omit reference to the essential “File Clerk” and “Somatic Strip”? Tut tut.
🙂
I once saw Somatic strip. In a club near LAX.
I use to date her…
Not you too! Geezers, another well visited technology.
Then there was that line from the LRH directed tech film EM 4, How the Emeter Works….
In this film, one of the technicians plays a short film clip narrated by Hubbard himself, wherein Hubbard explains the idea of how an engram affects a thetan and impacts that entity sufficiently as to create mental “charge” which can be seen as a read on the meter.
During the description of an engram, there is a quick scene of a hand flashing into frame and it is holding a dark, oddly-colored photograph of a man lying on his back, and Hubbard, in voice-over says:
“[engrams] have even been captured by means of infra-red photography.”
Remember that? It appeared in the original LRH directed version but I don’t know if it appeared in the remade version.
As far as I know this is the only mention in all of Scientology of actual photography of an engram being achieved.
I first encountered this astounding claim when viewing a rough cut of the film a couple of years before it was even released. It was astonishing proof to me of the existence of engrams and I wondered how such a thing could be just given a casual mention and not broadly promoted and I asked the film editor, who had been on the scene when it was filmed. Her answer:
“Oh that’s just a picture of John Allesso that was tinted.”
I was shocked that that was it and stopped asking questions about it. But the door out opened a bit wider for me that day.
The “captured by infrared photography” bit is a back-handed reference to Kirlian photography. This is mentioned in some other film, I can’t remember where. You can easily look it up Kirlian Photography and see examples. The strange patterns captured by Kirlian photography are easily explained without “spiritual” means, you can get the same patterns with inanimate objects.
Hubbard also offers as proof of the disembodied mind that dead bodies weigh less than living ones before death. No actual experimental data is offered.
There are a few strange conflicts in the Hubbard explanation. One is that supposedly the thetan or spirit enters the body at birth, the “assumption”. But prenatal engrams are also supposedly important. To get around this and other oddities, like the unborn’s supposed ability to remember spoken words when still in the zygote state, Hubbard had to invent the “genetic entity” a supposed degraded sort of thetan that just operates the body and is present from conception.
Are these “genetic entities” formed from both parents, or just one, or were they wandering around and jumped in on a sex act just to get a body or what? If they are from both parents, how do two degraded spirits merge to become one? Not explained by Hubbard.
Also Hubbard made a big deal out of the rule that you could never accept a brain-damaged person for help by Scientology as they are damaged and would not be helped. Sort of makes sense, but if the brain is really just a “shock absorber” or a “switchboard” and has nothing to do with the spirit, why can’t you help the spirit regardless of the brain?
Like so much else about Scientology, Hubbard’s spiritual theories don’t hold up to even the slightest bit of actual examination or proof. I suspect he just borrowed them from Aleister Crowley.
This does not mean there is no such thing as a spiritual being or that we do not have some sort of spiritual nature. It just means that Hubbard did not really know how it works.
The main point I’m trying to make is that Hubbard made an extraordinary claim about his engram theory and the visual that went along with the narration was represented to be a photo of an engram when it was nothing of the sort and LRH and everyone that helped him to some degree were in on it, but it was a fraudulent representation.
And he justified doing so in the name of “Similated Realism”, the motif of these films he was directing.
Well Joe, El Con was just a Simulated humanitarian so it all works out. 🙂
I hate being the corrector, but I recall Hubbard mentioning a third part of the mind, the semantic mind. I don’t know if anyone remembers this one or if I maybe just dreamt it up.
From the Tech Dictionary:
SOMATIC MIND, 1. the mind that works in a purely stimulus response way,
contains only actingness, no thinkingness, and can be used to set up certain
physical machines. (HCO Info Ltr 2 Sept 64) 2 . that mind which, directed by the
analytical or reactive mind, places solutions into effect on the physical level. (Scn
0-8, p. 65) 3 . this is an even heavier type of mind than the reactive mind since it
contains no thinkingness and contains only actingness. The impulses placed
against the body by the thetan through various mental machinery, arrive at the
voluntary, involuntary, and glandular levels. These have set methods of analysis
for any given situation and so respond directly to commands given. (FOT, p. 61)
4. the somatic mind would be that mind which takes care of the automatic
mechanisms of the body, the regulation of the minutiae which keep the organism
running. (SOS, Bk. 2, p. 233)
I remember something about that but I don’t think it was called semantic… I remember of the “genetic entity” that was yet lower than the reactive mind, and there was also (in French because I studied and read in French) “magasin mnémonique standard” that I would translate in English as “standard mnemonic storage”…
El Con’s idea of the “engram” would make for EASY scientific testing. That El Con REFUSED to have it tested scientifically tells you EVERYTHING you need to know about its actual existence, because if it WERE to have been scientifically validated, he KNEW that he would be in hog (money) heaven. And as he admitted, he had a mania about wealth. Never it being enough no matter how much he amassed.
Let the El Con Bots start their engines!
L Ron Hubbard did have his definition of an engram scientifically tested. The testing took place under the aegis of New York University in 1959. It involved researchers Jack Fox, Alvin E Davis, and B Lebovits, along with direct assistance from the then Hubbard Dianetics Association and L Ron Hubbard hisself. The results were published in Issue 10 of the Psychological Newsletter [pp 131 – 134]. The resulting report is all over the internet and is listed in MEDLINE (Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System Online, or MEDLARS Online). Needless to say, the researchers found no basis in reality for L Ron Hubbard’s engrams and, surprise surprise, L Ron Hubbard never had any other of his claims scientifically tested again.
Thanks Crepuscule! No wonder El Con hated the medical community.
Did he not say once, “I have a thirst for money & power?”
In the 50’s an experiment was reportedly done in which a person was put under general anesthesia and verbal commands were shouted while extreme physical pain was administered to his body. In the auditing session that followed he was unable to recollect the incident.
I’m curious how scientology apologists explain the absence of inexpensive, easy research from testing people who have undergone major surgery. If being rendered unconscious and having your belly cut open with a knife doesn’t create an engram then what does? Why haven’t former surgical patients been put in session to prove engram theory?
When I was in scientology, it was a problem for me to understand the difference between the analytical mind and the thetan. One seemed to bother the other one and it was never clear. But once, I looked in the technical dictionary (the one edited before the DM era) and there was a sentence saying that “the analytical mind is actually the thetan”. I say this from my memory because I might still have that technical dictionary but I have to look for it in my huge messy cellar in the basement 🙂 But then, after that, my next question was “what or where is then the reactive mind” that, according to LRH, takes control of the body and the thetan ?
You’re right. Definition #5 of Analytical Mind says,
“5. we say the analytical mind is kind of a
misnomer because most people think it’s some kind of computing machine, and
it’s not, it’s just the pc, the thetan. (SH Spec 23, 6106C29)”
Thanks, Terra, for once again being so fair and balanced in your analysis.
And then along came quantum physics to really blow our minds! Perhaps it’s all a dream? But even that raises more unending questions.
Thank you Terra Cognita.
If one reads the ancient texts of India you could find similar concepts, such as: there is no time, just eternity. We have come here to have physical experiences. And, what occurs in human life is what forms events. The best way to approach life is live it NOW, not in the past. When you think or do unkind things to another you create a negative emotions. And many other similar concepts.
Knowing that LRH read the Vedas and other texts you could see he took some of the above concepts, renamed them and gave each a different importance.
Spirit and Body are real to me. Mind, could very well exist as a unit which contains or processes thought.
What is a nightmare is blaming your condition due to a 2 million years ago engram, very delusional really. Even some OT Levels have the concept that the way you are, act, behave is somebody else’s fault/responsibility/source. These scientology concepts, for me, are just a delusional way to not take
reposinsibility, really.
That’s what I concluded also Silvia. It is astounding the trap one can get into first by believing he has a reactive mind and certain unwanted thoughts, impulses, actions are due to this ‘mind’. Yes, it’s always someone else’s fault in LRHs world from the mind to the foot bullets.
Scientology traumatizes people. It re-wires your brain. The trauma is deep and will have an effect unless one “deprograms” and works it out in clay (oops…another Scientological circuit). It takes time, tears and talking, according to one expert who has excellent information on Trauma and how to heal.
There is a ton of information about Trauma on you tube and the internet. It is free. It will help you!
Study up on Complex Trauma too.
If you “can’t have” information from ” the psychs” you may want to consider to deprogram yourself from the “evil psychs” program implanted into your subconscious mind compliments of L Ron Hubbard. He was fighting a battle of long duration. He DID have FBI agents after him. A=A=A
There is help and hope for the nasty side effects from Scientology.