Dianetics 55! 1955 Chapter 6
Chapter 6: Trapped
In Greece, Rome, England, Colonial America, France and Washington, a great deal of conversation is made on the subject of Freedom. Freedom, apparently, is something that is very desirable. Indeed, Freedom is seen to be the goal of a nation or a people. Similarly, if we are restoring ability to the preclear we must restore Freedom. If we do not restore Freedom we cannot restore ability. The muscle-bound wrestler, the tense driver, the rocket jockey with a frozen reaction time alike are not able. Their ability lies in an increase of Freedom, a release of tension, and a better communication to their environment.
The main trouble with Freedom is that it does not have an anatomy. Something that is free is free. It is not free with wires, vias, by-passes, or dams, it is simply free. There is something else about Freedom which is intensely interesting, it cannot be erased. In „Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health“ we learned that pleasure moments were not erasable. The only thing that was erasable was pain, discomfort, distortion, tenseness, agony, unconsciousness. In more modern Scientological parlance, Freedom cannot be „as-ised,“ it is something which is imperishable. You may be able to concentrate somebody’s attention on something that is not free and thus bring him into a state of belief that Freedom does not exist, but this does not mean that you have erased the individual’s freedom. You have not. All the freedom he ever had is still there. Furthermore Freedom has no quantity, and by definition it has no location in space or time. Thus we see the awareness of awareness unit as potentially the freest thing there could be. Thus man concentrates on Freedom.
But if Freedom has no anatomy, then please explain how one is going to attain to something which cannot be fully explained. If anyone talks about a „road to Freedom“ he is talking about a linear line. This, then, must have boundaries. If there are boundaries there is no freedom. This brings the interesting proposition to mind that the very best process, by theory, would be to have an individual assume himself to be free, and then he would simply be asked to assume himself to be free again. Indeed, upon many cases of a high toned variety this is a quite workable process. An individual is „sick,“ he is usually in very good tone, the auditor simply asks him to assume that he is free, and he will cease to be „sick.“ The magic, however, is limited to those people who have some concept of what „free“ means. Talk to a person who works from eight o’clock until five with no goals, and no future, and no belief in the organization and its goals, who is being required by time-payments, rent, and other barriers of an economic variety to invest all of his salary as soon as it is paid, and we have an individual who has lost the notion of Freedom. His concentration is so thoroughly fixed upon barriers that Freedom has to be in terms of less barriers. Thus, in processing we have to audit in the direction of less and less barriers in order to attain Freedom.
If Freedom is so very compelling and is so useful, and is in itself something like a synonym for ability – even if not entirely – then it is our task to understand a little more about Freedom as itself in order to accomplish its attainment, for unfortunately it is not enough for the bulk of the human race simply to say „be free“ and have an individual recover.
Life is prone to a stupidity in many cases in which it is not cognizant of a disaster until the disaster has occurred. The middle- western farmer had a phrase for it: „Lock the door after the horse is stolen.“ It takes a disaster in order to educate people into the existence of such a disaster. This is education by pain, by impact, by punishment. Therefore, a population which is faced with a one-shot disaster which will obliterate the sphere would not have a chance to learn very much about the sphere before it was obliterated. Thus, if they insisted upon learning by experience in order to prevent such a disaster, they would never have the opportunity. If no atomic bomb of any kind had been dropped in World War II it is probable there would be no slightest concern about atomic fission, although atomic fission might have developed right on up to the planet-buster without ever being used against Man, and then the planet-buster being used on Earth and so destroying it.
If a person did not know what a tiger was, and we desired to demonstrate to him that no tigers were present, we would have a difficult time of it. Here we have a freedom from tigers without knowing anything about tigers. Before he could understand an absence of tigers he would have to understand the presence of tigers. This is the process of learning we know as „by experience.“
In order to know anything, if we are going to use educational methods, it is necessary then to know, as well, its opposite. The opposite of tigers probably exists in Malayan jungles where tigers are so frequent that the absence of tigers would be a novelty, indeed. A country which was totally burdened by tigers might not understand at all the idea that there were no tigers. In some parts of the world a great deal of argument would have been entered into with the populace of a tiger-burdened area to get them to get any inkling of what an absence of tigers would be. Many cases in processing have suddenly lost a somatic,* to discover themselves in a new and novel state. This somatic was so routine and so constant and so pervasive that they could not intellectually conceive of what life would be like without that particular somatic.
The understanding of Freedom, then, is slightly complex if, then, individuals who do not have it are not likely to understand it, and thus we have an individual who knows nothing about exteriorization and knows everything about being in constant contact with the sensations of a body failing to grasp the idea of the freedom resulting from exteriorization. These people do not even believe that exteriorization can exist, and so combat it. They are so little experienced on the subject of Freedom that this type of Freedom is „known to be non- existent“ to them.
The way to demonstrate the existence of Freedom is to invite the individual to experience Freedom, but if he does not know what Freedom is, then he will not exteriorize. We have to hit some sort of gradient scale on the matter, or make him turn around and look squarely at the opposite of Freedom.
But the opposite of Freedom is slavery and everybody knows this – or is it? I do not think these two things are a dichotomy. Freedom is not the plus of a condition where slavery is the minus unless we are dealing entirely with the political organism. Where we are dealing with the individual better terminology is necessary and more understanding of the anatomy of minus-Freedom is required.
Minus-Freedom is entrapment. Freedom is the absence of barriers. Less Freedom is the presence of barriers. Entirely minus- Freedom would be the omnipresence of barriers. A barrier is matter or energy or time or space. The more matter, energy, time or space assumes command over the individual the less Freedom that individual has. This is best understood as entrapment since slavery connotes an intention, and entrapment might be considered almost without intention. A person who falls in a bear-pit might not have intended to fall into it at all, and a bear-pit might not have intended a person to fall upon its stake. Nevertheless, an entrapment has occurred. The person is in the bear-pit.
If one wants to understand existence and his unhappiness with it, he must understand entrapment and its mechanisms.
In what can a person become entrapped? Basically and foremost, he can become entrapped in ideas. In view of the fact that freedom and ability can be seen to be somewhat synonymous, then ideas of disability are first and foremost an entrapment. I dare say that amongst men the incident has occurred that a person has been sitting upon a bare plain in the total belief that he is entirely entrapped by a fence. There is that incident mentioned in „Self-Analysis“ of fishing in Lake Tanganyika where the sun’s rays, being equatorial, pierce burningly to the lake’s bottom. The natives there fish by tying a number of slats of wood on a long piece of line. They take either end of this line and put it in canoes, and then paddle the two canoes to shore, the slatted line stretching between. The sun shining downward presses the shadows of these bars down to the bottom of the lake and thus a cage of shadows moves inward towards the shallows. The fish, seeing this cage contract upon them, which is composed of nothing but the absence of light, flounder frantically into the shallows where they cannot swim and are thus caught, picked up in baskets and cooked. There is nothing to be afraid of but shadows.
When we move out of mechanics man finds himself on unsure ground. The idea that ideas could be so strong and pervasive is foreign to most men. For instance, a government attacked by the Communists does not perceive that it is being attacked only by ideas. It believes itself to be attacked by guns, bombs, armies and yet it sees no guns, bombs, armies. It sees only men standing together exchanging ideas. Whether or not these ideas are sound or not is beside the point, they are at least penetrative. No 16-inch armor plate could possibly stop an idea. Thus a country can be entrapped, taken and turned towards Communism simply by the spread of the Communistic idea. A country that fails to understand this arms itself, keeps its guns cocked, its armies alert, and then succumbs at last to the idea now entered into the heads of the armed forces, which it so hopefully employed. The collapse of Germany in World War I was an instance of this. Its armies, its grand fleet were all flying the red flag. Although Allied pressure and the conditions of starvation in Germany had much to do with its defeat, nevertheless, it was keyed into being by the Communist idea infiltrated into the minds of the men who originally were armed and trained to protect Germany. And Communism, just as an idea, traps the minds of men. They find themselves organized into cells, they find their customs abandoned and are regimented by a militant biological, soulless tyranny, their master. Here is an idea becoming a sort of trap.
So, first and foremost, we have the idea. Then, themselves the product of ideas, we have the more obvious mechanics of entrapment in matter, energy, space and time.
The most common barrier which man recognizes as such would be a wall. This is so obviously a barrier that individuals quite commonly suppose all barriers to be composed of solid walls. However, almost any object can be made into a barrier. A less common use of an object as a barrier would be one which inhibited, by some sort of suction or drag, a departure from it. A solid lump of considerable magnetic properties will hold to it a piece of steel. Gravity is, then, a barrier of a kind. It holds the people or life units of Earth to Earth.
Another barrier would be energy. A sheet of energy or something carrying energy, such as an electrical fence, can prove to be a formidable barrier. A cloud of radioactive particles obstructing passage into another space could also be a barrier. Tractor-type beams, as in the case of gravity, could be seen to be a barrier of sorts, but in the form of energy.
Yet another barrier, easily understood, is that of space. Too much space will always make a barrier. Space debars an individual from progressing into another part of the galaxy. One of the finest prisons one could imagine would be one located on a small piece of matter surrounded by such a quantity of space that no-one could cross it. Space is such an efficient barrier that people in the Southwest of the United States, committing crimes, discover their way everywhere blocked by the giganticness of space. In New York City it would be very easy for them, after the commission of a crime, to vanish, but in attempting to cross a space of such size as the Southwest they become exposed everywhere to view, there being nothing else upon which the police can fix their attention.
Quite another barrier, less well understood, but extremely thorough as a barrier, is time. Time debars your passage into the year 1776 and prevents your repossession of things which you had in your youth. It also prevents you from having things in the future. Time is an exceedingly effective barrier. The absence of time can also be a barrier, for here an individual is unable to execute his desires and is so constricted by the pressure of time itself.
Matter, energy, space and time can all, then, be barriers. An awareness of awareness unit, however, which is the personality and beingness unit of the person, and which is composed of quality, not quantity, can be anywhere it wishes to be. There is no wall thick enough, nor any space wide enough, to debar the reappearance at some other point of an awareness of awareness unit. In that this is the individual, and not some ghost of the individual, and as the individual is himself an awareness of awareness unit and not his machinery and his body, we see that as soon as one understands completely that he is an awareness of awareness unit, he no longer is restricted by barriers. And thus those who would seek entrapment for individuals are entirely antipathetic towards the idea of exteriorization, and the person who knows nothing but barriers is apt to believe that a condition of no- barriers could not exist. Yet a condition of no-barriers can exist, and this is itself Freedom.
Examining Freedom, then, we have to examine why people do not attain it easily or understand it. They do not attain Freedom because their attention is fixed upon barriers. They look at the wall, not the space on either side of the wall. They have entities and demon-circuits* which demand their attention, and, indeed, the body itself could be con sidered to be an attention-demanding organism. One might believe that its total function was to command interest and attention. It is so interesting that people do not conceive that behind them lies all the Freedom anybody ever desired. They even go so far as to believe that freedom is not desirable and that if they could attain it they would not want it. One is reminded of prisoners who occasionally go so sufficiently „stir-crazy“ as to demand after their release from prison confining walls and restricted spaces. Manuel Komroff once wrote a very appealing story on this subject, the story of an old man who had served twenty- five years in prison, or some such time, and who on his release asked for nothing more than the smallest room in his son’s house and was happiest when he could see someone on an opposite roof who had the appearance of a guard, and who actively put bars back on his window. One could consider that a person who has been for a long time in the body could have such a fixation upon the barriers imposed by the body, that once an auditor tries to remove them the preclear puts them back quickly. You might say that such a person is „stir-crazy,“ yet the condition is remediable.
The anatomy of entrapment is an interesting one, and the reason why people get entrapped, and, indeed, the total mechanics of entrapment are now understood. In Scientology a great deal of experimentation was undertaken to determine the factors which resulted in entrapment, and it was discovered that the answer to the entire problem was two-way communication.
Roughly, the laws back of this are: Fixation occurs only in the presence of one-way communication. Entrapment occurs only when one has not given or received answers to the things entrapping him. Thus we see the ARC Triangle itself, and most importantly the Communication factor of that triangle, looming up to give us Freedom.
It could be said that all the entrapment there is is the waiting one does for an answer.
Here we find Man. Basically he is an awareness of awareness unit which is capable of, and active in, the production of matter, energy, space and time as well as ideas. We discover that he is more or less fixated upon ideas, matter, energy, space and time and the processes and functions involving these. And we discover that these, being the products of the awareness of awareness unit, do not supply answers to the awareness of awareness unit, and thus the awareness of awareness unit supplies itself those answers.
Entrapment is the opposite of Freedom. A person who is not free is trapped. He may be trapped by an idea, he may be trapped by matter, he may be trapped by energy, he may be trapped by space, he may be trapped by time, he may be trapped by all of them. The more thoroughly a preclear is trapped the less free he is. He cannot change, he cannot move, he cannot communicate, he cannot feel affinity and reality. Death itself could be said to be Man’s ultimate in entrapment, for when a man is totally entrapped he is dead.
It is our task in investigation and auditing to discover for the individual and the group a greater freedom, which is the roadway to a greater ability.
The processes the auditor uses today are designed entirely to secure greater freedom for the individual, for the group, for Mankind. Any process which leads to a greater freedom for all Dynamics is a good process. It should be remembered, however, that an individual functions on all Dynamics, and that suppression by an individual of the Third or Fourth Dynamic leads to less Freedom for the individual, himself. Thus, the criminal, in becoming immorally free, harms the group and harms Mankind, and thus becomes less free himself. Thus there is no Freedom in the absence of Affinity, Agreement, and Communication. Where an individual falls away from these his freedom is sharply curtailed and he finds himself confronted with barriers of magnitude.
The component parts of Freedom, as we first gaze upon it, are then: Affinity, Reality, and Communication, which summate into Understanding. Once Understanding is attained, Freedom is obtained. For the individual who is thoroughly snarled in the mechanics of entrapment, it is necessary to restore to him sufficient communication to permit his ascendance into a higher state of understanding. Once this has been accomplished his entrapment is ended.
None of this is actually a very difficult problem. In the auditing done today this is very simple, but where the auditing is being done by a person who does not basically desire the freedom of the individual a further entrapment is more likely to ensue than further freedom. The obsessively entrapped are then enemies of the preclear, for they will trap others.
A greater freedom can be attained by the individual. The individual does desire a greater freedom, once he has some inkling of it. And auditing according to the precision rules and codes of Dianetics and Scientology steers the individual out of the first areas of entrapment to a point where he can gain higher levels of Freedom, either by further auditing or by himself. The only reason we need a regimen with which to begin is to start an individual out of a mirror- maze of such complexity that he himself, in attempting to wend his way, only gets lost.
This is Dianetics 55!