Scientology A New Slant on Life 1965 Chapter 17

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Confronting

That which a person can confront, he can handle.

The first step of handling anything is gaining an ability to face it.

It could be said that war continues as a threat to man because man cannot confront war. The idea of making war so terrible that no one will be able to fight it is the exact reverse of fact—if one wishes to end war. The invention of the long bow, gun powder, heavy naval cannon, machine guns, liquid fire, and the hydrogen bomb add only more and more certainty that war will continue. As each new element which man cannot confront is added to elements he has not been able to confront so far, man engages himself upon a decreasing ability to handle war.

We are looking here at the basic anatomy of all problems. Problems start with an inability to confront anything. Whether we apply this to domestic quarrels or to insects, to garbage dumps or Picasso, one can always trace the beginning of any existing problem to an unwillingness to confront.

Let us take a domestic scene. The husband or the wife cannot confront the other, cannot confront second dynamic consequences, cannot confront the economic burdens, and so we have domestic strife. The less any of these actually are confronted, the more problem they will become.

It is a truism that one never solves anything by running away from it. Of course, one might also say that one never solves cannon balls by baring his breast to them. But I assure you that if nobody cared whether cannon balls were fired or not, control of people by threat of cannon balls would cease.

Down on Skid Row where flotsam and jetsam exist to keep the police busy, we could not find one man whose basic difficulties, whose downfall could not be traced at once to an inability to confront. A criminal once came to me whose entire right side was paralyzed. Yet, this man made his living by walking up to people in alleys, striking them and robbing

them. Why he struck people he could not connect with his paralyzed side and arm. From his infancy he had been educated not to confront men. The nearest he could come to confronting men was to strike them, and so his criminal career.

The more the horribleness of crime is deified by television and public press, the less the society will be able to handle crime. The more formidable is made the juvenile delinquent, the less the society will be able to handle the juvenile delinquent.

In education, the more esoteric and difficult a subject is made, the less the student will be able to handle the subject. When a subject is made too formidable by an instructor, the more the student retreats from it. There were, for instance, some early European mental studies which were so complicated and so incomprehensible and which were sewn with such lack of understanding of man that no student could possibly confront them.

Man, at large today, is in this state with regard to the human spirit. For centuries man was educated to believe in demons, ghouls, and things that went boomp in the night. There was an organization in southern Europe which capitalized upon this terror and made demons and devils so formidable that at length man could not even face the fact that any of his fellows had souls. And thus we entered an entirely materialistic age. With the background teaching that no one can confront the “invisible”, vengeful religions sought to move forward into a foremost place of control. Naturally, they failed to achieve their goal and irreligion became the order of the day, thus opening the door for Communism and other idiocies. Although it might seem true that one cannot confront the invisible, who said that a spirit was always invisible? Rather, let’s say that it is impossible for man or anything else to confront the nonexistent; and thus when nonexistent gods are invented and are given more roles in the society, we discover man becomes so degraded that he cannot even confront the spirit in his fellows, much less become moral.

Confronting, as a subject in itself, is intensely interesting. Indeed, there is some evidence that mental image pictures occur only when the individual is unable to confront the circumstances of the picture. When this compounds and man is unable to confront anything anywhere, he might be considered to have pictures of everything, everywhere. This is proven by a rather interesting test made in 1947 by myself. I discovered, although I did not entirely interpret it at the time, that an individual has no further pictures when he can confront all pictures; thus being able to confront everything he has done, he is no longer troubled with the things he has done. Supporting this, it will be discovered that individuals who progress in an ability to handle pictures eventually have no pictures at all. This we call a “Clear”.

A “Clear”, in an absolute sense, would be someone who could confront anything and everything in the past, present and future.

The handling of a problem seems to be simply the increase of ability to confront the problem, and when the problem can be totally confronted, it no longer exists. This is strange and miraculous.

Man’s difficulties are a compound of his cowardice’s. To have difficulties in life, all it is necessary to do is to start running away from the business of livingness. After that, problems of unsolvable magnitude are assured. When individuals are restrained from confronting life, they accrue a vast ability to have difficulties with it.

Various nervous traits can be traced at once by trying to confront with something which insists on running away. A nervous hand, for instance, would be a hand with which the individual is trying to confront something. The forward motion of the nervousness would be the effort to make it confront; the backward motion of it would be its refusal to confront. Of course, the basic error is confronting with the hand.

The world is never bright to those who cannot confront it. Everything is a dull gray to a defeated army. The whole trick of somebody telling you “it’s all bad over there” is contained in the fact that he is trying to keep you from confronting something and thus make you retreat from life. Eyeglasses, nervous twitches, tensions, all of these things stem from an unwillingness to confront. When that willingness is repaired, these disabilities tend to disappear.