Scientology A New Slant on Life 1965 Chapter 20

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Past, Present and Future

There is a basic rule that a psychotic person is concerned with the past, a neurotic person is barely able to keep up with the present, and a sane person is concerned with the future.

This division could be more specifically made by realizing that the neurotic is barely able to confront the present, but that the very, very sane confront the present entirely and have very little concern for the future, being competent enough in handling the present to let the future take care of itself. Looking into the past and looking into the extreme future, alike, are efforts to avoid present time and efforts to look elsewhere than at something.

You have known people who would reply on an entirely different subject when asked about anything; when consulted concerning the weather, they would reply about a meteorologist. The inability to look at something becomes first manifest by thinking before looking, and then the actual target at which one should be looking is more and more avoided until it is hidden entirely in a mix-up of complications.

The avoidance of reality is merely an avoidance of present time.

An individual who will not look at the physical universe must look either ahead of it into the future, or behind it into the past. One of the reasons he does this is because there is insufficient action in the present to begin with; and then this thirst for action develops into an inability to have action, and he decides that all must be maintained in a constant state, and he seeks to prevent action. This also applies to pain. People who are somewhat out of present time have a horrible dread of pain; and people who are truly out of present time—as in a psychotic state—have a revulsion towards pain which could not be described. A person entirely within present time is not much concerned with pain.

The avoidance of work is one of the best indicators of a decayed state on the part of a personality. There are two common denominators to all aberrated personalities; one of these is a horror of work and the other is a horror of pain. People only mildly out of present time, which is to say people who are categorized as “sane”, have already started to apologize about work, in that they work toward an end reward and no longer consider that the output of effort itself and the accomplishment of things is sufficient reward in itself. Thus, the whole network of gratitude or admiration becomes necessary pay for energy put forth. The parental demand for gratitude is often reflected in a severely aberrated person who is given to feel he can never repay the enormous favors conferred on him by being worked for by his parents. Actually, they need not to be paid, for, flatly, if it was not sufficient reward to do the work of raising him, they are beyond being paid; in other words, they could not accept pay.

Taking the very, very sane person in present time, one would mark a decline of his sanity by a shift from an interest in present time to an overwhelming interest in the future which would decline into considerable planning for the future in order to avoid bad things happening in it, to, then, a shunning of the future because of painful incidents, to a shuddering and tenuous hold on present time, and, finally, to an avoidance of both the future and present time and a shift into the past. This last would be a psychotic state.

One holds on to things in the past on the postulate that they must not happen in the future. This sticks the person in the past.

Inaction and indecision in the present is because of fear of consequences of the future. In Scientology this condition in an individual can be remedied so that he can more comfortably face present time.