Total certainty is a much discussed subject in scientology. Hubbard promoted this often, telling people that scientology would bring them total certainty. He even named one of the first magazines of scientology “Certainty.”
But is certainty really such a good thing?
Certainty is the antithesis of knowledge. When you are certain you know things, it is impossible to teach you anything further. If you are certain the earth is flat, there is little point in providing evidence that this is not the case because that evidence will be rejected. The term is “thought-stopping.”
And on top of that, can one truly claim, as Jon Porter does above, that you gain certainty from knowing Hubbard’s rules of how you study? It’s a strange definition of certainty that you have learned to look up words you don’t understand. And oh boy, that certainty is SO MUCH GREATER when you do the GAT Phase II Student Hat than when you did the original one in 1976, though not a single piece of Hubbard “tech” on the subject has been added since then.
More of the delusion of scientology.
Addition
This is a comment from my old friend Bruce Ploetz — one of the smartest people I know. He was the audio technician at Gold for many years. I think his comment is worth preserving for anyone who reads this article and may not take the time to go through all the comments.
One of Hubbard’s most idiotically destructive statements:
Knowledge itself is certainty. Knowledge is not data.
– L. Ron Hubbard
It is even built into the very name “Scientology”, the science of knowing how to know in the fullest sense of the word.
Like our missing friend Foolproof who liked to say he could know things just by knowing them. Sometimes called OT knowingness, they just emulate Hubbard by pulling some assertion out of their nether fundaments and parade it before all the world as settled truth.
Scientologists work very hard at this. Every time you go into session you have to make unverified assertions and stand by them. An example, one of the questions in “Book and Bottle” (Opening Procedure by Duplication, don’t bother trying to understand the name it is gobbledygook). “What is its temperature?”
You are supposed to name a temperature. At best it is just a guess. Honestly, you could say “between freezing and boiling”. Without a thermometer you don’t really know. But you will be asked this question again and again, among other equally trivial questions, for hours. Any answer you give will be accepted. Authoritarian coercive training in knowing how to know without actually knowing at all.
Even worse, in other counseling procedures you are asked to make up stories by the bucket load. They ask for a memory, say for example a time you had a pain in your hand. If you get vague impressions, odd dream images, all will be accepted if it seems to remotely answer the question. If you come up with something they will probe with defining questions like “When was it?”
You will be asked to go over it many times, coming up with ever more detail. Before you know it, you have a fully developed false memory. We know from the recent work of mental health professionals that such a false memory can seem just as real as your real memories. Suddenly you know something that never was!
In the real world you gain certainty by testing the assertion. It is perfectly proper to come up with a tentative fanciful hypothesis that you think could explain the available information. Then you have to go through the rest of the steps of the scientific method to achieve any kind of certainty about it.
In the real world, some things will never be completely certain. Some assertions can’t be falsified, which means there is no test that can be done to disprove it. Such assertions are simply too vague or imprecise to even be verified. Useless.
Even after rigorous application of the scientific method, there is no absolute utter certainty. Tests may be imprecise, or there may be more to know. This is the glory of the scientific method. We can say an assertion is tested and duplicated by other researchers well enough to give some confidence in it. Never that it is uncontrovertibly True. Only faith can achieve that, and even then there is always doubt.
But as long as there is some uncertainty about even the most established scientific truths, there is room to grow. Newton explained the motions of the planets, but never fully described how the laws of gravitation really work. It took Einstein to do that, but even today there is more to learn.
Absolute certainty is a form of living death. Life with the blinders fully clamped to your head, no way to grow, nothing touches you and you touch no-one. Trapped in your fantasy, no escape to reality.
Since I left Scientology one of the things I studied the most is how we as human beings come to believe in things and to be certain.
A shocking change for me from the Scientology mindset is that there is in my opinion tremendously evidence that we are extremely biased and always subject to distortions in our perception, memory, and cognition (decision making).
We also unfortunately have no relationship between our certainty, our feeling that we are correct, and the degree of logic or evidence that supports our beliefs. They just have nothing to do with each other.
Lots of research has shown, for example, that we think we understand our own motivations and behavior and when put to the test we actually don’t behave as we predict.
We often, for example, believe we personally don’t hold sexist biases and would not let such things influence us, but when people are actually put in the position of promoting others we don’t promote women, often, and explain our actions by using explanations that contradict our alleged values in other ways. Subjects were asked if they valued experience or education more, for example, in one study and they gave their answers. Then when presented with female candidates for promotion they chose male candidates whether the men had more experience or education, no matter what their alleged values were.
The fact that high certainty is often our barometer for the truth or falsehood of something is recognized in logic as a flaw. The personal incredulity fallacy exists because of this.
The work that support these unpleasant conclusions is extensive. The Book The Knowledge Illusion digs deep into this with research and evidence that time and again supports this claim. The book Subliminal by Leonard Mlodinow is superb and has a lot of evidence on this topic.
Our tendency to stick with information that supports our beliefs and avoid or deny contradictory evidence is probably best explored in A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance by Leon Festinger. That book is also great regarding understanding cults.
Also worth reading are the Books Age of Propaganda and the book Influence by Robert Cialdini and the book Losing Reality by Robert Jay Lifton gives a description of solipstic reality. Doctor Lifton has explored the mindsets of gurus (cult leaders) and found that several have the belief that by believing or willing something to be it will to some degree exist, quite similar to Hubbard’s claims regarding postulates and his efforts to change himself via his infamous affirmations (self hypnosis commands he played to himself over and over for years).
Fortunately for the human race human females are very fertile. More dumb unknowing humans are being reproduced than are dying off.
I couldn’t find a definition of “solipstic”. Dictionary.com gives the adjective form as solipsistic or solipsismal. Here’s a definition of solipsism from wiki.
[Solipsism (/ˈsɒlɪpsɪzəm/ (About this soundlisten); from Latin solus ‘alone’, and ipse ‘self’)[1] is the philosophical idea that only one’s mind is sure to exist. As an epistemological position, solipsism holds that knowledge of anything outside one’s own mind is unsure; the external world and other minds cannot be known and might not exist outside the mind.]
It’s a philosophical position with variations. Years ago Jiddu Krisnamurti had a vaguely similar position, which is just my interpretation from listening to two or three of his talks and I may not be correct, that there is no I or Me, only a brain or mind receiving inputs of You and the environment. Something like that.
One might say that if an individual understands the concept of cognitive dissonance then the individual is senior to the concept. Personally I have no cognitive biases. Depending on with whom I am speaking I can be a Democrat, a Republican or an Independent. I know all the talking points. Likewise with atheists, agnostics and believers. Scientific materialism vs, belief in the paranormal and supernatural? Not a problem for me! Let’s converse.
(just being facetious)
Richard said:
“.. Scientific materialism vs, belief in the paranormal and supernatural? Not a problem for me! Let’s converse.
(just being facetious)”
No need to joke. It’s just a matter of putting yourself “in others’ shoes” for a discussion. Sometimes I learn a bit about my “opponent” when I take their valence up deliberately. Usually I pity them afterwards.
I used to take classes from people who used a system I later found out took some of its ideas from Scientology, including “certainty” as a desirable state. They were good at “mocking it up,” meaning that they imagined being certain and then embraced that feeling and warded off anything that might cause them doubt. I rarely, in all the years I had some connection to the group, thought of certainty as a desirable thing overall. If you were “doing a reading,” it was a way of telling a story in a way as if you believed it and therefore the other person could, too. Over time, I realized that wasn’t really a benefit either. (I tended to look as “readings” as possible interpretations rather than factual, so it wasn’t a big deal if I believed it temporarily and conditionally, as one does watching a movie plot unfold. I didn’t believe it as fact; it was in a different category of “info.” But a lot of people do believe such things as fact, and that does damage over time.) It has taken me a long time to unlearn some of the false New Age beliefs I acquired in that group, and I was only able to do it because I did not value certainty the way most people there did. All my friends from that group have disowned me in one way or another, and not because the group forces them to disconnect. Just because my not valuing false certainty in their eyes makes me a “negative” person they avoid listening to. So I agree with you, Mike, that the false teaching about certainty is part of the crux of the cultiness — it’s what holds the whole system of belief together so people can believe absurd things without examining the contradictions. The first thing one needs to learn to be able to evaluate what one can know and how, is that certainty is almost always false.
Certainty isn’t such a bad goal. Total certainty is, to a large extent like any absolutes, most likely unobtainable. But neither of these are achievable in Scientology. Well I guess the only certainty that I’ve seen in my many years, is the certainty that everyone will write raving success stories of their auditing and training so that they’ll be allowed to finish and leave in peace. And there is the certainty of god with prayers. Like; “Please god make my needle float at the examiner” and “please god, one more trip between this book and bottle and I’m going to go insane”. And I guess the only real total certainty is from the manic, bi-polar folks who are insanely psychotic in one way or the other; “Yes, Zenu was put in a wire cage with an eternal battery on a mountain top. And yes. he’s been there for 60 million years and he’s not likely to ever get out. Of that I have complete certainty”.
I am “certain” that I will do my part to defeat verbal tech-
This weekend I will throw out more LRH tapes and CDs.
Ya know they’re full of Verbal Tech, I’m certain of that!
William, yes, they are “verbal tech, but more, they’re false. certainty of false statements is self-destructive, particularly when the truth of the matter is available, such as: Hubbard was an AWFUL student. Any statements he made on the subject were counter-productive, and today seems to me to be made to make good students less satisfied that they understand what they are reading. After 40 years, I’m making inroads into banishing “study tech” from my life, so I can get back to enjoying what I read. The job’s not complete, as the “primary rundown” was an effective hypnotic that drilled deeply into my psyche.
As the great philosopher Socrates once stated,”The older I get,the less I know.”Now that is certainty and true knowledge.
I can find no mention of Porter and his “successful career and high level position that I work in” anywhere so it’s more than a good guess that he’s just another of the $camology living dead that doesn’t realise that his brain petrified years ago and can only keep up the appearance being alive while still in the grasp of the zombie masters.
If scientologists had “certainty” there’d be no such thing as “PTS.”
There’d be no need for disconnection.
They wouldn’t run and hide from protestors or whistle blowers.
And DM wouldn’t be in Hiding, asking customers to relay his messages.
#justsaying
One of Hubbard’s most idiotically destructive statements:
It is even built into the very name “Scientology”, the science of knowing how to know in the fullest sense of the word.
Like our missing friend Foolproof who liked to say he could know things just by knowing them. Sometimes called OT knowingness, they just emulate Hubbard by pulling some assertion out of their nether fundaments and parade it before all the world as settled truth.
Scientologists work very hard at this. Every time you go into session you have to make unverified assertions and stand by them. An example, one of the questions in “Book and Bottle” (Opening Procedure by Duplication, don’t bother trying to understand the name it is gobbledygook). “What is its temperature?”
You are supposed to name a temperature. At best it is just a guess. Honestly, you could say “between freezing and boiling”. Without a thermometer you don’t really know. But you will be asked this question again and again, among other equally trivial questions, for hours. Any answer you give will be accepted. Authoritarian coercive training in knowing how to know without actually knowing at all.
Even worse, in other counseling procedures you are asked to make up stories by the bucket load. They ask for a memory, say for example a time you had a pain in your hand. If you get vague impressions, odd dream images, all will be accepted if it seems to remotely answer the question. If you come up with something they will probe with defining questions like “When was it?”
You will be asked to go over it many times, coming up with ever more detail. Before you know it, you have a fully developed false memory. We know from the recent work of mental health professionals that such a false memory can seem just as real as your real memories. Suddenly you know something that never was!
In the real world you gain certainty by testing the assertion. It is perfectly proper to come up with a tentative fanciful hypothesis that you think could explain the available information. Then you have to go through the rest of the steps of the scientific method to achieve any kind of certainty about it.
In the real world, some things will never be completely certain. Some assertions can’t be falsified, which means there is no test that can be done to disprove it. Such assertions are simply too vague or imprecise to even be verified. Useless.
Even after rigorous application of the scientific method, there is no absolute utter certainty. Tests may be imprecise, or there may be more to know. This is the glory of the scientific method. We can say an assertion is tested and duplicated by other researchers well enough to give some confidence in it. Never that it is uncontrovertibly True. Only faith can achieve that, and even then there is always doubt.
But as long as there is some uncertainty about even the most established scientific truths, there is room to grow. Newton explained the motions of the planets, but never fully described how the laws of gravitation really work. It took Einstein to do that, but even today there is more to learn.
Absolute certainty is a form of living death. Life with the blinders fully clamped to your head, no way to grow, nothing touches you and you touch no-one. Trapped in your fantasy, no escape to reality.
Fantastic comment Bruce.
More comprehensive than my post.
Do you mind if I add it to the post itself so if people are reading it in the future they will have the benefit of your insight too?
I’d be honored, Mike.
Great comment. I am impressed Bruce. You nailed Hubbard.
👏👏👏
I obtained certainty of one fact in my many decades in the cult. It is that it is all complete and utter bullshit and none of it works. Of that I am absolutely certain.
Glenn observed:
“… It is that it is all complete and utter bullshit and none of it works. Of that I am absolutely certain.”
Congrats, Glenn. You can now attest to being “clear” …
.
.
.
of the cult.
VWD!
The Student Hat was one of the first courses I took. It used to be offered free with any major course. No more – DM decided to turn this into a “nice little earner.”
The content of the Student Hat is benign. Looking up words you do not understand is a good idea. I still do so when I am studying for my work or sometimes even when reading a novel.
I agree that there is a conflict between certainty of knowledge. One reason a person is unable to learn something is that he thinks he already knows it.
The biggest problem with Study Tech is the way it is used in Scientology Academies.
If a student disagrees with something that Hubbard said it must be because that student has misunderstood words. The idea that Hubbard’s words were just plain wrong would not be countenanced.
I found it very difficult every time I read anything that Hubbard wrote about science.
I am not a scientist but I do have a Bachelor’s degree in Physics.
After struggling with this for a long time and doing a great deal of word clearing on the subject I came to the conclusion that Hubbard did not know what he was talking about and that there was no point in word clearing this subject any further. Since I still saw value in Scientology I did not share this opinion with many others. It did come up in my OT eligibility sec checks.
This word clearing did raise my certainty on the4 subject of Physics, although not in the way that most in Scientology would approve of.
But the truth is that they do NOT have total certainty. Hearing that they do have total certainty enough times. and since these words are used very often, provides the sugar for the trap.
Looking up words is not a bad idea. However, nothing beats seeing something and seeing it work or not work. There are ways to do that without doing, redoing, re-redoing re-re-redoing the SH course. I personally have done it four times, if you count the Study Certainty Course (There is that c-word again) back in 2000.
Alas, the only people that do not know the truth about scamatology are the scamatologists themselves. Cruel joke.
He applied study technology to everything he did in life since 1976, and it was only after doing this new GAT Student Hat that he became Really certain of study tech?
He didn’t get that from applying it for 45 years?
wow.
that IS stupid.
hahaha!
….
I did the new GAT II Student Hat, and I can verify that it is the most watered down version of the course to date. The tapes have been further heavily edited.
The funny thing is how the course violates the study tech. It has its own dictionary and the Flag Student Hat Checksheet instructed the students to only use that dictionary to clear any words in the course. It amounted to a “dinky dictionary” Pointing it out didn’t win me commendation.
Flag was charging 5 grand for the course, and everyone had to do it because as we know, the student hat is a pre-req to any major course, and your pile of Pre-GAT II Student Hat certs now mean nothing.
Not even a discount on this 8th rendition of the Bull Shit Study Teck that haunts us even as we shed the shit from our minds.
…….
Glad to be out.
I did the Primary Rundown in the mid 1970’s. There were four or five reel to reel tapes with Elron explaining the study tech. Every word in the course was listed in alphabetical order and looked up in a dictionary the first time it appeared. It was time consuming but a worthwhile educational experience. To this day a misunderstood word or symbol rarely escapes my notice.
I wonder if there is anything that was once worthwhile in scn that DM didn’t screw up.
I did the Student Hat on those tapes, and there were no transcripts.
You had to call the supervisor over to ask to decipher the garbled word. The Sups of course had them down instantly from repetition.
I planned to do PRD but it was pulled to be revised.. and then we got the KTL instead.
The PRD disappeared ..the way they have now disappeared the SHSBC and VIII course.
and the clams clap on and fork over.
Good riddance!
I would have LOVED to have done the Primary Rundown, Richard.
But by the time I wanted it and would have appreciated it this course wasn’t being delivered anymore. That said, I did KTL and it was very beneficial. In fact, as I recall now, it was AFTER I did KTL and LOC that I longed to do the Primary Rundown. Alas 🙂
RIP and Aqua – For general interest here is how the Primary Rundown was delivered when I took it.
There was a booklet for each tape with every new word listed in the upcoming tape in alphabetical order. Each new word was cleared before listening to the tape.
At a normal speaking pace a person speaks about 140 words per minute. So if the first tape was 60 minutes long then Elron spoke 60×140=8,400 words or probably less allowing for pauses in presentation. Probably 2/3 to 3/4 of the words were repeats like of, and, the and so on leaving maybe 2,000 additional words to clear. Most of those words were common words easily looked up and then move on.
Elron stuck to the subject of study on the tapes so there were few Tek words that needed to be cleared so it might have taken me 40 to 60 hours of study time to look up all the words before listening to the first tape, maybe longer allowing time for troublesome words.
After clearing all the words and then listening to the tape I was impressed with how clearly I understood what Elron was saying, call it a win, haha.
Succeeding tapes had fewer and fewer new words to clear and the last tape might have had about 150 or 200 new words to clear,
There are certainly other How to Study courses on the market but as I mention above the Primary Rundown and diving into all that word clearing was a worthwhile experience to me. As a bonus after completing the Primary Rundown you were declared “Super Literate” (haha) and escaped most future star rate checkouts.
P.S. RIP and Aqua. Both of you express yourselves so clearly in your comments. I wish I had your writing skills. Both of you are quite “Super Literate”. (smiles)
Yeah, I twinned a few times on a fill in basis with one of the last PRD students we had in the Acad.
I’m not an adherent to any aspect of study teck. It’s all part of the mind-f*ck of the cult.
My love of language and people was there before hubbard pirated my life. Thanks.
🙂
I have total certainty that Jon Porter has clay demo clay under his finger nails. I am also certain that Jon is no rocket surgeon. I am also certain that he will get at least 10% of what ever anyone spends at his mOrg.
O/T. If I may, I would like to add to my comment yesterday about Scientology Youth For Human Rights Award Winner Nation of Islam Brother Rizza Islam.
Yesterday, I noted that Congresswoman Karen Bass issued a “Certificate of Special Congressional Recognition” to Rizza Islam before his 1/12/21 Pretrial Conference / Trial Setting on charges for felony Medi-Cal Fraud.
https://exscn2.net/threads/congresswoman-karen-bass-issues-certificate-of-special-congressional-recognition-to-scientology-youth-for-human-rights-award-winner-rizza-islan.2483/
Today, I want to add a reminder that this is the second such political recognition for community activism that Rizza Islam has received while his criminal charges are pending. On 12/7/19, he received a Certificate of Recognition from the City of Los Angeles as a “Community Activist” and “Voice of the District” for his “commitment and dedication to the South Los Angeles Community.” This certificate was signed by Curren D. Price, Jr., the Los Angeles City Councilman for the then new 9th District.
https://exscn2.net/threads/congresswoman-karen-bass-issues-certificate-of-special-congressional-recognition-to-scientology-youth-for-human-rights-award-winner-rizza-islan.2483/post-72432
Rizza Islam will be able to produce at least two significant positive pieces of evidence at the sentencing hearing if he is convicted after trial or pursuant to a plea bargain. He will also be able to convey the not so subtle message of political support.
/
Perfect title for some personal experience showing the certainty of scientology. One of my pcs a snr exec was programmed for a Not Clear Reality factor and to be run on New Era Dianetics. The odd scene was that the person in question was already on OT VII, thus he had already attested to the state of Clear and per his pc folder records, his state had been verified and confirmed as valid by the Snr C/S FSO Richard Reiss (Class 12 C/S) and also by a RTC Representative at Flag. So much for the certainty, yet now as the auditor was instructed to do something I knew to be awfully wrong: It was my right to object, so I did and next thing that happened was me being attacked verbally and made wrong by the RTC Rep on the ship who said that the reported Clear evidences where bullshit and that Richard Reiss was a Squirrel, thus I could not possibly take his viewpoint on the matter. She did not say anything about her pair RTC REp having confirmed the same conclusion of Richard Reiss (R.I:P.) I will spare you the rest of the story, but certainty was really what was in danger
TT Greco, Thank you for relaying your story. Did you get a Com Ev or other ethics trouble for saying not to do that C/S as it had already been verified etc? And what is your opinion of why they wanted to bust him down to Clear? Was it because OT VII was not working on him and this was just a fast “solution” for them? OR was it because they wanted money and figured putting him back on the Bridge would generate more money in review cycles when he would be run on Dianetics after Clear? (which is prohibited by LRH.) Any other reason you think the did this?
Dear Cindy, thanks for your message, the rest of the story is too complex to be mentioned here, that’s why I did not write more.
When I was in grammar school in the 1950’s, I remember learning the basics of Hubbard’s “Study Tech” in a simple little booklet that we used for homework. It was all in that booklet written by a long forgotten teacher. When I did the courses in Scientology, I already knew the procedures. When I took a simple English course at Freshman College level, one of our main assignments was to study opposites like “Truth/Lies”, “Beauty/Ugly” etc. When I did the Clearing Course in LA, the same procedure was on the course except with a meter. I concluded that Hubbard did really not have anything original and I was correct. The only problem at the end was the peer pressure to do OT VIII. Again, I found that not only did Hubbard have anything original, his mind was beyond repair with his travesty into Science Fiction. Reading Blavatsky, I found he even copied Marcabs from her followers. In the end, his below average mind created demons and entities that trapped him forever and he made a lot of people pay a large price.
Ah yes, the Golden Age of Tech Phase 2 issued by Miscabbage. Jon Porter got more certainty from doing that one compared to the original Student hat. So, Miscabbage made the study tech better somehow? And this improvement was the work of the idiot who flunked and left his auditor training back at St Hill? Inquiring minds ask.
I heard from a tech terminal years ago that the New Student Hat was “made better” by taking out the hard stuff so that young people could pass the course. They took out that technical tape about cameras for one thing.
I did the course when I was 10. The real one, with reel-to-reel tapes and the dude with the English accent announcing the date and title on each one. The tape with all the photography jargon (Study and Nomenclature? or some such thing) on it got me interested in photography, a hobby I enjoy to this day. That was the only good thing I got out of scientology!
If Scientology has complete certainty, complete competence in any field then why did Tom Cruise devolve into a raving fool on the set of his movie instead of finding a more mature, reasonable way of handling the situation? Why is Cap’n Davie playing hide ‘n seek with process servers?
With great gifts comes great responsibility. Scientology’s superiority in all things coupled with this certainty and expertise then requires that they step up, put their tax exempt money where their mouths are.
COS makes these bullshit, grandiose claims. Their conundrum is that they’ve maneuvered themselves into one of two untenable positions; either they are lying (they are) or they are actually possessed of the abilities they lay claim to but are choosing to do absolutely nothing to help Mankind.
The ad says, “Come to Central Ohio today and experience an ideal org.
I don’t think I need to do that because I am absolutely positively and totally certain of one thing for sure. That one thing is that I would never want to go to Central Ohio to visit some Scamatology trap. Of that I am absolutely certain.
“You is” is better than “you are”. because “is” is one and not two or more than one.
A David Miscavige thought “make” meant “take” so he took the power and outpowered the rest.
The leaders of the French Army believed they knew everything, they lost the war of 1940.
This is a good point indeed.
They are so sure of everything that they accept whatever the cult feed them and they no longer try to see how things really are.
Almost any discussion with them would end with the certainty that they are right because hubbard or DM said so.
No willingness to challenge any information (it would be an overt!).
It is precisely a characteristic feature of those who are brainwashed, they stop reasoning and observing and just go on only with “certainties”.
Any given day (no matter how bad can be sometime) I am so thankful to my life and for having left that asylum and to know to have no “certainties” to deal with.