Possession and Dependency

Possession is the way you pin people down.  If you give them enough possessions, you fixed them.  You really fixed them.  The way to ruin somebody would be to give him a million dollars!  That would just ruin him.  Right now there’s a government on the face of the earth which is making a principle of giving everybody money. And I’ll be a son of a gun if people don’t take it.  It’s a sure way to ruin. To have, to have, to have, to have; a dependency, a dependency, a dependency — it’s ruinous.  Because the only way to have is to create and then not have.  Just create and not have, create and not have, create and not have will put you in full command of time and make you cause without ever getting an effect  And the magician wanted this answer — oh, my God, how he wanted that answer!  And there it is for you.  If you create, create, create, create, create, you never violate the second law of magic, “Do not be hoist by your own petard.”  ”Do not be an effect to your own cause.”  And the only way you can be an effect to your own cause is to keep moving up the time stream and acting after you’ve postulated.  So you want it — if you can get it on the level of create, create, create, create, create, create, then you’ll never have “have”  You haven’t got time!

So, how do you avoid this?  Never borrow any money from a bank — make it.  Never accept a gift — make it.  Dealing in the MEST (Matter, Energy, Space, Time) universe you can shilly-shally around and monkey around a little bit if you want to, shift possessions around — don’t take them very seriously.

                        –  L Ron Hubbard, 7 November 1952

Fill your bowl to the brim; and it will spill.

Keep sharpening your knife; and it will blunt.

Chase after money and security and your heart will never unclench.

Care about people’s approval and you will be their prisoner.

Do your work, then step back

The only path to serenity.

                                  -Lao Tzu, circa 500 BC

Life Is So Good

I’ve added another book to the recommended reading section. It is Life Is So Good by George Dawson and Richard Glaubman.  Dawson was 101 years old when he worked with author Glaubman to chronicle his life which touched on three centuries.  Dawson had become somewhat famous after having checked into Elementary school at 98 years of age to learn to read.

This book will be of particular interest to those who bought into Dianetics or Scientology out of concerns for health and longevity – two things the subjects have consistently promised to better.  In a way the book validates the core reasons the subjects posit as the primary causation of ill health and early expiration.  On the other hand, it might help free one from the misconceptions the Corporate Scientology culture hammers into one about the alleged importance of becoming superman and lording over people and things.

It is a wonderful exercise in ‘problems of comparable magnitude’ (a Scientology concept that if you view a problem you are having against ones of greater magnitude than your own, your problem won’t look so nasty any more).   Worried about starting a new life outside of the cult in your forties, fifties, sixties or seventies?  Read George Dawson’s story.

In either event, it is a simple, enjoyable, and educational read.   It is a view of the 2oth Century from eyes that simply observed with no jaundice, no agenda, no disappointment, no justifying.

It also a great study in the Tao. Though Dawson never references it and presumably was never aware of the writing Tao Te Ching, he certainly understood and lived in accordance with the Tao.

Debbie Cook and Wayne Baumgarten Update

While this group is still a bit amorphous to the liking of some, it is damn effective.  In just about twenty-seven hours you all contributed what I predicted we would likely collect by Friday.  And that figure is what I thought it would take to reverse the vector of attack from Debbie and Wayne and re-direct it back onto her tormentors.

You all acted nearly spontaneously from fourteen different States of the US and six countries.

I estimate that the amount we have to work with is about 1/20th of what Miscavige has already spent in legal fees alone in mounting his attempt to crush Debbie and Wayne.   But that is one major difference between corporate scientology and Independent Scientology.  The business of attempting to kill and bury truth is one heck of a lot more expensive than is the activity of purveying and nurturing truth.

Our first point of strategy is simple, taken from the Tao:

Men are born soft and supple;

dead, they are stiff and hard.

Plants are born tender and pliant;

dead, they are brittle and dry.

Thus whoever is stiff and inflexible

is a disciple of death.

Whoever is soft and yielding 

is a disciple of life.

The hard and the stiff will be broken.

The soft and supple will prevail.

 

 

 

Corporate Scientology Aggression

While I was out of town once this summer, Mosey had a lengthy, frank, off-camera conversation with the non-Scientologist minders of the corporate Scientologists who harassed us every day for one hundred and ninety nine days straight.  Monique asked them “what do we need to do to make you people go away?”   The answer was “Marty needs to stop talking to the media.”  Besides the fact that that unguarded, presumably honest answer put the lie to the entire “Squirrel Busters” front of being here to burn heretics, Mosey did not hesitate for a moment to inform the hired guns that their answer demonstrated the double-digit IQ mentality of their boss, David Miscavige.  Mosey informed them that “Marty hadn’t spoken to any media for months, until you goons showed up and made it an ongoing hard news story.”

Apparently so much so, that Village Voice Editor in Chief Tony Ortega listed it first in introducing a year-end poll on the top Scientology story of the year.  Here’s Tony’s summation:

1. Marty Rathbun besieged by the Squirrel Busters

In April, the sudden appearance of John Allender and his fellow Squirrel Busters, with matching sky blue T-shirts and video cameras strapped to their heads, was a powerful image that made for one of our most popular blog posts of the year. The goon squad had showed up at Marty Rathbun’s front door in little Ingleside on the Bay, Texas, where the former high-level Church of Scientology executive, several years after defecting, was now involved in an independent Scientology movement and inviting people not only to leave the official church with announcements on his blog, but also by coming to his house for unsanctioned auditing. To Scientology, people who conduct such out-of-church activity are “squirrels,” and the goons sent down to intimidate Rathbun called themselves the “Squirrel Busters.” The Busters rented a nearby home and set up all-day surveillance of Rathbun and his wife Monique for the next five months, until they finally managed to get Rathbun arrested on what turned out to be spurious charges. Keeping an eye on this ongoing siege is what, in part, inspired us to go from occasional Scientology writing to a daily blog that covers all things Scientology around the world, so this story was important to us personally. But it also is one of the most remarkable operations of Scientology’s retaliatory “fair game” that we’ve ever seen or heard about.

Click here for the full Village Voice Story.

Miscavige’s antics resulted in seven feature articles in the Corpus Christi Caller Times newspaper – many of which were picked up by the Voice and other web based news services.  Click here for access to the Caller Times stories. 

Miscavige is a loser.

That is because he has one impulse that substitutes for strategy, and one impulse alone that he follows: attempt to overwhelm by force.

I’ve posted the answer before  and I’ll post it again here though I hold little hope that the overexcited boy with the gangster complex will wake up and learn from it.

When two great fores oppose each other, the victory will go to the one that knows how to yield.  - Tao Te Ching

The Purpose of Scientology

I want to share a few thoughts concerning the debate raging over spriritual philosophies and practices.

First, I don’t believe there is any substantive, divisive differences between Scientology philosophy and Eastern philosophies, including Buddhist, or even Judeo-Christian and Islamic philosophies.  I agree with L Ron Hubbard when he said in the Phoenix Lectures that they are all best summed up – and perhaps were even divined from – the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu.

What I think is most unique about Scientology is that it contains a practice, that does not require belief or faith (and thus does not conflict with any of these brethren philosophies), that can and does enhance understanding of that common set of truths best distilled in the Tao.   Scientology is sometimes difficult to understand because it is a doingness, a practice that assists one to freely change his or her considerations.  It is not an intellectual debate toward enlightenment. Instead it is a methodology that assists one in achieving enlightenments.   Note, the plural form of enlightenment.  The entire subject being based upon infinity logic (there are no absolutes) the quantity of potential enlightenments is unlimited and inestimable.

I think the trap we get into, and the trap Corporate Scientology became, is the insistence upon absolutes.   The constant and obsessive assert that the practice is the philosophy, that the philosophy is completely original and absolute and exclusive of any other philosophy, can serve no other purpose than to alienate and make people withdraw from it.  As such it no longer serves as the unique methodology that can assist anyone increase his or her enlightenments and go out into the world exercising the ability of knowing how to know.  Corporate Scientology then became the antithesis of Scientology philosophy by erecting walls and enforcements to dictate what it is an individual can go out into the world and know.

Knowing how to know is the definition of the word Scientology.

If involvement in Scientology creates the mindset that one knows all there is to know then what good does attaining ‘knowing how to know’ achieve?

The highest attainment I have seen someone reach through Corporate Scientology is KNOW ABOUT on the Know to Mystery scale.  And when it is static, a destination, it becomes something far less, an arrogant sort of assert.

I’ve seen many an Independent Scientologist reach a far higher plane on the scale, called NOT KNOW.  And from there,with some courage and curiosity (the very qualities that I believe LRH possessed in spades and led to his own discoveries), I’ve seen them get increasingly extended glimpses of KNOW on the scale.

And the real sharp ones recognize that an obsessive must-KNOW all the time leads to a motionless, timeless, lifeless, lack of game.  This passage from L Ron Hubbard’s lecture of 9 July 1954, The Nature and Effect of Communication in Games is apt:

Well, if the state of total knowingness and total serenity were not horrible, then one would certainly stop communicating and simply assume it.  Is that right?  He’d simply assume this state, wouldn’t he?  All that’d be necessary for him to assume any kind of a state of this character would just seem to be — to simply abandon all parts of the communication system – swish!  Abandon them all, though, and abandon them all simultaneously, with no hangovers in any direction, before the system can police itself back into existence. Just have to skip everything. And if you did that, why, theoretically you’d get out into this state of total knowingness and total everything.

There must be something bad about this state. Must be.  Just must be something horrible about that state.  Or there’s something very, very betraying in the first considerations that came through, that you ought to start communicating in the first place.  That must have been a trick then; it must have been based upon a base betrayal.  And this base betrayal, then, must have led one into communication. Because nobody would start communicating at all, you know, and of his own free will and accord, knowing very well where it would lead to.  That’s obvious, isn’t it?

Oh, so there must be something horrible about being totally knowing, totally serene and without any time of any kind, so on.  This must be dreadful and probably is — probably is.  Undoubtedly is. You probably got that way and were awfully bored.  Only trouble with boredom is it’s a problem in barriers.  You can always solve boredom.  And barrier — boredom doesn’t exist unless you’re trying to go someplace, so we find boredom is part of the communication system — it’s the affinity corner. 

Well, then, there isn’t anything bad about this state of total serenity at all, is there?   

Well the way to assume it is simply drop all communication lines and all parts of the communication system and never do it anymore.  That’s what Buddha said, Gautama.  He said in one of his lectures to — discussions or discourses to a fellow by the name of Ananda: There are twelve things which you would just have to abstain from and any two of them would bring you bliss.  He’s a great man but, right there, there was a great big raw-tooth bear trap laid on the track.  If anybody abandoned any of these two parts of anything – by the way, they’re not the parts of communication but they’re wonderfully similar to some of the processes which we handle.  That is to say, he just groups a number of actions.  And if you didn’t ever do these actions anymore and if you just abstained from all these, then you’d get total serenity and so on.

Well, it looks to me like life is just life, isn’t it?  That it isn’t bad or good unless you want to make it so.  And that an individual could go into a 18 billion, trillion year communications spasm and then come out the other end unscathed.  And — but think, he would have had all of the randomity. But, look, that’s a consideration too, that one has to have a game is consideration too. 

Oh look, this is too much of a problem.  I mean, it’s just too much of a problem, so let’s not maunder around about it.  We’ll just look at the component parts of communication, restore the ability of an individual to conform with each of them and say, “All right now, you want to go be a personalized nirvana.  Well, goodbye.  And if you want to sell groceries, that’s all right with us too.” Because the truth of the matter is the primary violation which one could perform is a violation of an individual’s self-determinism.

Finally, let us never lose sight of the end object of Scientology, very concisely memorialized in Professional Auditor Bulletin 86, 29 May 1956:

The end object of Scientology is not the making into nothing of all existence or the freeing of the individual of any and all traps everywhere.  The goal of Scientology is making the individual capable of living a better life in his own estimation and with his fellows and the playing of a better game. 

Heretics and the Scientology Inquisition

A heretic is a person who committed heresy.

Heresy (from Greek αίρεση, which originally meant “choice”) is a controversial or novel change to a system of beliefs, especially a religion, that conflicts with established dogma.^[1] It is distinct from apostasy, which is the formal denunciation of one’s religion, principles or cause,^[2] and blasphemy, which is irreverence toward religion.^[3] The founder or leader of a heretical movement is called a heresiarch, while individuals who espouse heresy or commit heresy, are known as heretics. Heresiology is the study of heresy.

The word heresy is usually used within a Christian, Jewish, or Islamic context, and implies something slightly different in each. In certain historical Christian and Jewish cultures, heresy was punishable by law. In modern times, the word heresy is often used in jest and without religious context.

-Wikipedia

All the noise about “squirrels” and “squirrel busting” is a nifty distraction to mask corporate Scientology head David Miscavige’s operations in Texas of late.

What Miscavige is dramatizing is the centuries-old control device of burning heretics in an attempt to protect a dirty monopoly.  And as with everything Miscavige his dramatization is done with a criminal-mind twist.  The heresy he attacks is the original doctrine of the Founder of Scientology, L Ron Hubbard.

The following completely spontaneous video illustrates that what I state here is the truth:

Now, do you think that for one moment David Miscavige’s reaction to Erin Haskell’s heartfelt words will be anything other than “Squirrel!  Can you believe that?  Mixing Scientology with Christianity, the Tao. Squash the b____ along with Marty, goddamn it!”?

Here’s the twist and the heart of the matter. L Ron Hubbard would beg to differ with Miscavige’s view, and might even have defended Ms. Haskell:

Scientology is the science of knowing how to know answers.  It is wisdom in the tradition of ten thousand years of search in Asia and Western civilization.  It is the Science of Human Affairs which treats the livingness and beingess of Man and demonstrates to him a pathway to greater freedom

Subjects which were consulted in the organization and development of Scientology include the Veda; the Tao, by Lao-tzu; the Dharma and the Discourses of Gutama Buddha; the general knowingness about life extant in the lamasaries of the Western Hills of China; the technologies and beliefs of various barbaric cultures; the various materials of Christianity, including St Luke; the mathematical and technical methodologies of the early Greeks, Romans and Arabians; the physical sciences, including what is no known as nuclear physics; the various speculations of Western philosophers such as Kant, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Herbert Spencer and Dewey; and the various technologies extant in the civilizations of both the Orient and Occident in the first half to the twentieth century.

- L Ron Hubbard, A Summary of Scientology from The Creation of Human Ability

 

Time Out for the Tao

Having noticed certain shortcomings in my own conduct of late, I turned to the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu as I often do.  I am noting some passages below that particularly rang applicable given current events.  Maybe they’ll also provide some food for thought for others too.  For those folk who are still so programmed to believe any wisdom outside of Scientology is deleterious, a few words by L Ron Hubbard on the Tao Te Ching:

“It says that man could seek his Tao-hood in various ways, but he would have to practice and live in a certain way in order to achieve Tao-hood.  Now, there’s no reason to belabor this any further, but it would amaze  you that this book is a very civilized piece of work.  It would be the kind of civilized work which you would expect maybe to appear from a very, very educated, extremely compassionate, pleasant people of a higher intellectual order than we are accustomed to read.  It is a very fine book.  It’s sort of simple, it’s sort of naive and it tells you that you should be simple and economical and should do this and that.   And that is, by the way, about the only flaw there is in it from a Scientological point of view: that you must be economical. [laughter] That one is a little off the groove. But the rest of “The Way”, who knows but what if we took the Tao just as written and knowing what we already know about Scientology, we simply set out to practice the Tao.  I don’t know but what we wouldn’t get a Theta Clear.”  – lecture Scientology, Its General Background, Part II, the Phoenix lectures.

Selected passages from Tao Te Ching:

There is no greater illusion than fear, no greater wrong than preparing to defend yourself, no greater misfortune than having an enemy.  Whoever can see through fear will always be safe.

…

If a country is governed with tolerance, the people are comfortable and honest.

If a country is governed with repression, the people are depressed and crafty.

…

The Master views the parts with compassion, because he understands the whole. His constant practice is humility.  He doesn’t glitter like a jewel but lets himself be shaped by the Tao, as rugged and common as a stone.

…

When the great Tao is forgotten, goodness and piety appear.  When the body’s intelligence declines, cleverness and knowledge step forth. When there is no peace in the family, filial piety begins. When the country falls into chaos, patriotism is born.

…

Fill your bowl to the brim and it will spill.  Keep sharpening your knife and it will blunt.  Chase after money and security and your heart will never unclench.  Care about people’s approval and you will be their prisoner.  Do your work, then step back. The only path to serenity.

…

He who stands on tiptoe doesn’t stand firm. 

He who rushes ahead doesn’t go far.

He who tries to shine dims his own light.

He who defines himself can’t know who he really is.

He who has power over others can’t empower himself.

He who clings to his work will create nothing that endures.

If you want to accord with the Tao, just do your job, then let go.

…

A great nation is like a great man: when he makes a mistake, he realizes it.

Having realized it, he admits it.

Having admitted it, he corrects it.

He considers those who point out his faults as his most benevolent teachers.

He thinks of his enemy as the shadow he himself casts.

…

What is a good man but a bad man’s teacher?

What is a bad man but a good man’s job?

If you don’t understand this, you will get lost, however intelligent you are.

It is the great secret.

Radical Scientology’s Public Enemy #1

All streams flow to the sea

because it is lower than they are.

Humility gives it its power.

- Lao Tzu, The Tao Te Ching