Scientology A New Slant on Life 1965 Chapter 3

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Two Rules for Happy Living

1. Be able to experience anything.

2. Cause only those things which others can experience easily.

Man has had many golden rules. The Buddhist rule of “Do unto others as you would have these others do unto you” has been repeated often in other religions. But such golden rules, while they served to advance man above the animal, resulted in no sure sanity, success, or happiness. Such a golden rule gives only the cause point or at best, the reflexive effect point. This is a self-done-to-self thing, and tends to put all on obsessive cause. It gives no thought to what one does about the things done to one by others not so indoctrinated.

How does one handle the evil things done to him?

It is not told in the Buddhist rule. Many random answers resulted. Amongst them are the answers of Christian Science (effects on self don’t exist), the answers of early Christians (become a martyr), the answers of Christian ministers (condemn all sin). Such answers to effects created on one bring about a somewhat less than sane state of mind—to say nothing of unhappiness.

After one’s house has burned down and the family cremated, it is no great consolation to (1) pretend it didn’t happen, (2) liken oneself to Job, or (3) condemn all arsonists.

So long as one fears or suffers from the effect of violence, one will have violence against him. When one can experience exactly what is being done to one, ah, magic—it does not happen!

How to be happy in this universe is a problem few prophets or sages have dared to contemplate directly. We find them “handling” the problem of happiness by assuring us that man is doomed to suffering. They seek not to tell us how to be happy, but how to endure being unhappy. Such casual assumption of the impossibility of happiness has led us to ignore any real examination of ways to be happy. Thus, we have floundered forward toward a negative goal—get rid of all the unhappiness on Earth and one would have a livable Earth. If one seeks to get rid of something continually, one admits continually that he cannot confront it—and thus everyone went down hill. Life became a dwindling spiral of more things we could not confront. And thus, we went toward blindness and unhappiness.

To be happy, one must be able to confront, which is to say, experience, those things that are.

Unhappiness is only this: the inability to confront that which is.

Hence, ( 1 ) Be able to experience anything.

The effect side of life deserves great consideration. The self-caused side also deserves examination.

To create only those effects which others could easily experience gives us a clean new rule of living. For, if one does this, then what might he do that he must withhold from others? There is no reason to withhold his own actions or regret them (same thing), if one’s own actions are easily experienced by others.

This is a sweeping test (and definition) of good conduct—to do only those things which others can experience.

If you examine your life, you will find you are bothered only by those actions a person did which others were not able to receive. Hence, a person’s life can become a hodge-podge of violence withheld, which pulls in, then, the violence others caused.

The more actions a person emanated which could not be experienced by others, the worse a person’s life became. Recognizing that he was bad cause or that there were too many bad causes already, a person ceased causing things—an unhappy state of being.

Pain, misemotion, unconsciousness, insanity, all result from causing things others could not experience easily. The reach-withhold phenomenon is the basis of all these things. When one sought to reach in such a way as to make it impossible for another to experience, one did not reach, then, did he? To “reach” with a gun against a person who is unwilling to be shot is not to reach the person, but a protest. All bad reaches never reached. So there was no communication, and the end result was a withhold by the person reaching. This reach-withhold became at last an inability to reach—therefore, low communication, low reality, lover affinity. Communication is time environment or situation.

One means of reaching others. So, if one is unable to reach, one’s ability to communicate will be low; and one’s reality will be low, because if one is unable to communicate, he won’t really get to know about others; and with knowing little or nothing about others, one doesn’t have any feeling about them either, thus one’s affinity will be low. Affinity, reality and communication work together; and if one of these three is high, the other two will be also; but if one is low, so will the others be low.

All bad acts, then, are those acts which cannot be easily experienced at the target end.

On this definition, let us review our own “bad acts”. Which ones were bad? Only those that could not be easily experienced by another were bad. Thus, which of society’s favorite bad acts are bad? Acts of real violence resulting in pain, unconsciousness, insanity and heavy loss could, at this time, be considered bad. Well, what other acts of yours do you consider “bad”? The things which you have done which you could not easily, yourself, experience, were bad. But the things which you have done which you, yourself, could have experienced, had they been done to you, were not bad. That certainly changes one’s view of things!

There is no need to lead a violent life just to prove one can experience. The idea is not to prove one can experience, but to regain the ability to experience.

Thus, today, we have two golden rules for happiness:

1. Be able to experience anything; and
2. Cause only those things which others are able to experience easily.

Your reaction to these tells you how far you have yet to go.

And if you achieve these two golden rules, you would be one of the happiest and most successful people in this universe, for who could rule you with evil?