Dianetics 55! 1955 Chapter 4
Chapter 4: Accent on Ability
Almost anyone realizes that he can be better than he is, that he can do things better than he has been doing them. It is an entirely different thing to ask someone to realize that he is ill, aberrated, or stupid. Why is it that a man can understand that he can be more capable and very often cannot understand that he is incapable? It would seem to follow that if a man realized that he could be more capable, then he would realize at once that he was, to some degree, less capable than he could be. For various reasons, however, this does not follow. One is confronted many times too often by his insistence upon brilliance of a very stupid man. It could be said with some truth that the person who asserts he needs to know no more to be fully as bright as his fellows, would, upon examination, be discovered to be quite deficient in capability and understanding.
Earth has had many examples of this. The Fascist is probably best described as a very stupid man who insists upon a status quo which is intolerable for all others, yet who believes himself to be brighter than all others. But even a Fascist of the most modern sort – the Fission Fascist – would be the first to admit that both he and others could do a better job of being fascistic.
The basic reason for this is a simple one, almost idiotically simple. One can understand understanding, and can see that understanding can increase. Stupidity, ignorance, illness, aberration, incapability are only a fall away from understanding and are, themselves, less understanding and so are less understandable. One does not understand that he might get worse, and so does not have any great communication with people who tell him that he will get worse. The dying man believes right up to the moment of his last breath, no matter what he is saying to his doctor and family, that he is going to get better. He has no understanding of that state of non- understandingness called death. One can understand the understandable. One cannot understand the comprehensible because the definition of incomprehensibility is non-understandability. As I said, this is an almost idiotically simple situation. Life in its highest state is understanding. Life in its lower states is in a lower level of understanding, and where life has ceased to function and has arrived at what one might call total incapability, there is no understanding at all.
In Dianetics and Scientology we have a great deal to do with this subject called understanding. Understanding has very specific component parts. These component parts are: Affinity, Reality, and Communication.
Affinity, Reality, and Communication form an interdependent triangle. It is easily discovered on some inspection that one cannot communicate in the absence of Reality and Affinity. Further, one cannot have a reality on something with which he cannot communicate and for which he feels no affinity. And similarly, one has no affinity for something on which he has no reality and with which he cannot communicate. Even more narrowly, one does not have affinity for those things on which he has no reality and on which he cannot communicate, and one has no reality on things which he has no affinity for and cannot communicate upon, and one cannot communicate upon things which have no reality to him and for which he has no affinity.
A graphic example of this would be anger. One becomes angry and what one says does not then communicate to the person at whom one might be angry. Even more crudely, the fastest way to go out of communication with a machine would be to cease to feel any affinity for it, and to refuse to have any reality upon it.
We call this triangle the ARC triangle. The precision definitions of these three items are as follows:
1. COMMUNICATION is the interchange of ideas or particles between two points. More precisely, the definition of Communication is: Cause, Distance, Effect with Intention and Attention and a duplication at Effect of what emanates from Cause.
2. REALITY is the degree of agreement reached by two ends of a communication line. In essence, it is the degree of duplication achieved between Cause and Effect. That which is real is real simply because it is agreed upon, and for no other reason.
3. AFFINITY is the relative distance and similarity of the two ends of a communication line. Affinity has in it a mass connotation. The word itself implies that the greatest affinity there could be would be the occupation of the same space, and this, by experiment, has become demonstrated. Where things do not occupy the same space their affinity is delineated by the relative distance and the degree of duplication.
These three items, Affinity, Reality and Communication, can be demonstrated to equate into Understanding. Above Understanding is Knowingness without formula or design, and this might be considered to be a unit activity. Dropping down from a complete Knowingness we would arrive into the realm of Understanding, for this is a Third Dynamic* manifestation peculiar to two or more individuals. Were you to be a clever mathematician, you could discover by Symbolic Logic how all mathematical formulas could be derived from this principle that Understanding is composed of Affinity, Reality, and Communication. No mathematics falling outside this triangle is valid mathematics to man. There is no additional factor in Understanding except Significance, but this, of course, is the idea or consideration mentioned in the Communication Formula (1., above).
It is a truism that if we could understand all Life we would then tolerate all Life. Further, and more germane to ability, if one could occupy the position of any part of Life, one would feel a sufficient affinity for Life to be able to merge with it or separate from it at will.
When we say „Life“ all of us know more or less what we are talking about, but when we use this word „Life“ practically, we must examine the purposes and behavior, and in particular the formulas evolved by life in order to have the game called „Life.“
When we say „Life“ we mean Understanding, and when we say „Understanding“ we mean Affinity, Reality, and Communication. To understand all would be to live at the highest level of potential action and ability. The quality of Life exists in the presence of Understanding – in the presence, * See full list of Dynamics in Chapter XI. then, of Affinity, Reality, and Communication. Life would exist to a far less active degree in the levels of misunderstanding, incomprehensibility, psychosomatic illness, and physical and mental incapabilities. Because Life is Understanding it attempts to understand. When it turns and faces the incomprehensible it feels balked and baffled. It feels there is a secret, and feels that the secret is a threat to existence.
A secret is antipathetic to Life, and therefore Life, in searching for those things which would seem to reduce it, will hit upon various secrets it must discover. The basic secret is that a secret is an absence of Life, and a total secret would be a total unlivingness.
Now let us look at this formula of Communication and discover that we must have a duplication at Effect of what emanates from Cause. The classic example here is a telegram sent from New York City to San Francisco which says „I love you.“ When it arrives in San Francisco the machinery of communication has delivered it so that it says „I loathe you.“ This failure of duplication is looked upon as an error, and would cause considerable problems and trouble. It could not be considered to be a very good communication. There was nothing wrong with the basic intention. There was nothing wrong with the Attention which would be given the wire in San Francisco. The only thing that was wrong was a failure to duplicate at Effect what emanated from Cause.
Now if Life is Understanding it would find it very hard to communicate with something which was not Understanding. In other words, Life, faced with a non-understanding thing, would feel itself balked, for Life, being Understanding, could not then become non- understanding without assuming the role of being omprehensible. Thus it is that the seeker after secrets is trapped into being a secret himself.
Where one has an effect point which is an incomprehensible thing, and where one is occupying a cause point, in order to get any communication through to the effect point at all, it would be necessary for the one at cause point to somehow or another reduce his understandingness down towards incomprehensibility. The salesman knows this trick very well. He looks at his customer, recognizes his customer is interested in golf, and pretends to be interested in golf himself in order to have his customer listen to his sales-talk. The salesman establishes points of agreement and potential duplication, and then proceeds into a communication. Thus searchers after truth have often walked only into labyrinths of untruth – secrets – and have themselves become incomprehensible, with conclusions of incomprehensibility. Thus we have the state of beingness of the philosophical textbooks of Earth. A wonderful example of this is Immanuel Kant, the Great Chinaman of Koenigsburg, whose German participial phrases and adverbial clauses, and whose entire reversal of opinion between his first and second books balks all our understanding as it has the understanding of philosophic students since the late Eighteenth Century. But the very fact that it is incomprehensible has made it endure, for Life feels challenged by this thing which, pretending to be understanding, is yet an incomprehensibility. This is the grave into which so many philosophers walk. This is the coffin into which the mathematician, seeking by mathematics the secrets of the universe, eventually nails himself. But there is no reason why everyone should suffer simply because he looks at a few secrets. The test here is whether or not an individual possesses the power to Be at his own determinism. If one can determine himself to be incomprehensible at will, he can of course, then, determine himself to be comprehensible again. But if he is obsessively, and without understanding, being determined into incomprehensibility, then of course he is lost. Thus we discover that the only trap into which Life could fall is to do things without knowing it is doing them. Thus we get to a further delineation of the secret and we discover that the secret, or any secret, could exist only when Life determined to face it without knowing and without understanding that it had so determined this action. The very best grade secret, then, would be something which made Life also tend to forget that it was looking at a secret.
One can always understand that his ability can increase, because in the direction of an increase in ability is further understanding. Ability is dependent entirely upon a greater and better understanding of that field or area in which one cares to be more able. When one attempts to understand inability he is of course looking at less comprehensibility, less understanding, and so does not then understand lessening ability anywhere near as well as he understands increasing ability. In the absence of understanding of ability we get a fear of loss of ability, which is simply the fear of an unknown, or a thought-to-be-unknowable thing, for there is less knowness and less understanding in less ability.
Because Life does not want to face things which are less Life-like, it has a tendency to resist and restrain itself from confronting the less comprehensible. It is the resistance alone which brings about the dwindling spiral, the descent into less ability. Life does not will this descent into less ability unless Life is cognizant of the principles involved. Life exists itself into this less-ability. There is a primary rule working here: that which one fears, one becomes. When one refuses to duplicate something, and yet remains in its environment, his very resistance to the thing he refuses to duplicate will cause him eventually to become possessed of so many energy pictures of that thing which he refuses to duplicate that he will, to have any mass at all, find himself in possession of those energy pictures, and without actually noticing when it happened, is very likely to accept, at their level, those things which he refused to duplicate earlier. Thus we get the riddle of the engram, the facsimile, if we understand, at the same time, that Life does not necessarily find it bad to have masses of energy around, and is, indeed, unhappy unless it does have some energy. For if there is no energy, then there is no game. Life has a motto: that any game is better than no game. And it has another motto: any havingness is better than no havingness. Thus we find individuals clutching to them the most complex and destructive of facsimiles imaginable. They do not necessarily want these complexities, and yet they want the energy or the game which these complexities would seem to offer them.
If you would make anyone well, you must then concentrate upon an increase of ability, an increase of understanding. The only reason bad things come to Life is because understanding has impressed further life into them. When an individual faces some secret, the fact that he is facing it and injecting life into it alone causes the secret to activate and have force in action. The only way a bad situation in existence can continue to have life is by taking life from nearby sources of communication. The bad things of life, then, have life only to that degree that understanding is invested in them. We have an example in poliomyelitis, which was at one time an extremely minor and unheard-of illness. By various publications, by a great deal of advertising, by many invitations to combat this illness, it is made to take prominence and manifest itself in this society. The only life, actually, which poliomyelitis has is the amount of life which can be invested in poliomyelitis. Yet, poliomyelitis, one thinks, would exist and continue its way if it were ignored. If one were to go on ignoring poliomyelitis, now that one knows about poliomyelitis, yes, this would be the case. It indeed would continue to exist even though everyone was studiously ignoring it. As a matter of fact it would get worse. If, however, it were to be completely understood, and if an ability on the part of individuals existed by which they could face it without having to resist it, then the matter would be solved.
One wonders why all the nurses and doctors in contagious wards do not immediately pick up the illness, and here we have another factor which is the same factor as understanding, but couched in a different way. People do not acquire obsessively those things which they do not fear. An individual has to resist something, has to be afraid of something, has to be afraid of the consequences of something before it could have any adverse obsessive effect upon him. At any time he could have a self-determined duplication of it, but this, not being obsessive, not being against his will, would not produce any ill symptom beyond the length of time he determined it.
Part of understanding and ability is control. Of course, it is not necessary to control everything everywhere if one totally understands them. However, in a lesser understanding of things, and of course in the spirit of having a game, control becomes a necessary factor. The anatomy of control is Start, Stop and Change, and this is fully as important to know as Understanding itself, and as the triangle which composes Understanding, Affinity, Reality, and Communication.
The doctors and nurses in a contagious ward have some degree of control over the illnesses which they see before them. It is only when they begin to recognize their inability to handle these ills or these patients that they, themselves, succumb to this. In view of the fact that of recent centuries we have been very successful in handling contagious diseases, doctors and nurses, then, can walk with impunity through contagious wards.
The fighters of disease, having some measure of control over the disease, are then no longer afraid of the disease, and so it cannot affect them. Of course, there would be a level of body understanding on this which might yet still mirror fear, but we would have the same statement obtaining. People who are able to control something do not need to be afraid of it, and do not suffer ill effects from it. People who cannot control things can receive bad effects from these things.
Here we have an example of what might happen in the realm of disease. How about human aberration? We discover that the sanitariums of the world are all too often inhabited, in addition to patients, by these persons who were formerly at work in these institutions. It is a rather shocking thing to discover in Ward Nine the nurse who was once supervisor of a mental hospital. Now here we have a condition where there was no control or understanding. People do not understand mental illness, aberration, insanity, neurosis. The first actual effort along this line which cut down the tally was Freudian Analysis, and yet this, requiring much too long, was not an effective weapon. These doctors and nurses in institutions who, then, are themselves patients in the same institutions knew definitely that they did not have any real control over insanity. Thus, having no control over it, they became subject to it. They could not start, stop and change insanity. The franticness of this state is represented by the medieval torture which has been utilized in such institutions as „cures.“ By „cured“ the people in such institutions merely meant „quieter.“ The natural course of existence would lead them to think in terms of euthanasia, and so they have – that it would be best to kill the patient rather than to have his insanity continue. And they have even accomplished this at the rate of two thousand mental patients a year dead under electric shock machines. And they have accomplished it by a very high percentage dead under brain operations. The only effectiveness of electric shock and brain operations would be to render the patient less alive and more dead, and the end-product we see so many times of death, which would be the only way to stop the insanity. These people, of course, could not envision the fact of immortality and that the insanity would crop up as a problem in future generations. They had to conceive that if they killed the patient, or if they simply made him much quieter, they had then triumphed to some degree. In view of the fact that Man, sane or insane, is not to be destroyed according to law waives against this „solution.“
With Dianetics, to use the study in a relatively narrow field of application, we have assumed some control over insanity, neurosis, aberrations, and can actually start, stop and change aberration. In the first book, „Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health,“ techniques were present which would place in view, and then vanquish them, almost any mental manifestation known in the field of insanity and aberration. Where an auditor was unable to do anything for the insane or the neurotic, the fault (if fault there was) generally lay in the fact that the auditor was actually afraid. His fear was borne entirely out of his insecurity in starting, stopping and changing the condition.
In modern instruction at Academies of Scientology, there is little or no emphasis placed upon the case of the student, and yet when the student graduates he is discovered to be in a very high tone. The entire concentration is upon giving the student the ability to handle any and all types of case, and he becomes sufficiently secure in his ability – if he is graduated – to walk without any fear and considerable calm through any and all areas of human aberration. He has been given the technologies by which these misbehaviors of Life can be controlled. In view of the fact that he can start, stop and change them he need no longer fear them, and could with impunity work around the insane if this were his mission.
The handling of psychosis, neurosis, and psychosomatic illness do not happen to be the mission of the auditor. Indeed, these things get well only if they are more or less ignored. As long as the accent is upon ability any malfunction will eventually vanish. The mission of the auditor is in the direction of ability. If he increases the general ability of the preclear in any and all fields then, of course, any misability such as those represented by psychosis, neurosis, and psychosomatic illness will vanish. The auditor, however, is not even covertly interested in these manifestations. Around him he sees a world which could be far more able. It is his business to make it so. While business, in general, does not recognize that there is anything wrong with its abilities, it can recognize that its abilities can be better. One well-trained auditor working with group processing in the United States Air Force could treble the number of pilots successfully graduated from a school, and could reduce the crash toll of high-speed planes by fully three-quarters. This is not a wild statement. It is simply an application of the research data already to hand. The mission is greater ability, not an eradication of inability.
Just to give more understanding to those around him could be said to be a sufficient mission for a well-trained auditor, for by doing so he would certainly increase their ability. By increasing that ability he would be able to increase their Life.
The common denominator of all neurosis, psychosis, aberration and psychosomatic ills is „can’t work.“ Any nation which has a high incidence of these is reduced in production, and is reduced in longevity.
And what does he do about „how bad it is“? Well, if one depends for a long time upon others to do something about it, or depends upon force, he will fail. From his viewpoint the only one who can put more Life, more Understanding, more Tolerance and more Capability into the environment is himself, just by existing in a state of higher Understanding. Without even being active in the field of auditing, just by being more capable, an individual could resolve for those around him many of their problems and difficulties.
The accent is on ability.
* Amongst the unable is the criminal, who is unable to think of the other fellow, unable to follow orders, unable to make things grow, is unable to determine the difference between good and evil is unable to think at all on the future – Anybody has some of these. The criminal has all of them – LRH