Scientology A New Slant on Life 1965 Chapter 6

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The Reason Why

Life can best be understood by likening it to a game. Since we are exterior to a great number of games, we can regard them with a detached eye. If we were exterior to Life instead of being involved and immersed in the living of it, it would look to us much like games look to us from our present vantage point.

Despite the amount of suffering, pain, misery, sorrow and travail which can exist in life, the reason for existence is the same reason as one has to play a game—interest, contest, activity and possession. The truth of this assertion is established by an observation of the elements of games and then applying these elements to life itself. When we do this we find nothing left wanting in the panorama of life.

By game we mean a contest of person against person or team against team. When we say games we mean such games as baseball, polo, chess or any other such pastime. It may at one time have struck you as peculiar that men would risk bodily injury in the field of play just for the sake of “amusement”. So it might strike you as peculiar that people would go on living or would enter into the “game of life” at the risk of all the sorrow, travail and pain just to have something to do. Evidently there is no greater curse than total idleness. Of course there is that condition where a person continues to play a game in which he is no longer interested.

If you will but look about the room and check off items in which you are not interested, you will discover something remarkable. In a short time you will find that there is nothing in the room in which you are not interested. You are interested in everything. However, disinterest itself is one of the mechanisms of play. In order to hide something it is only necessary to make everyone disinterested in the place where the item is hidden. Disinterest is not an immediate result of interest which has worn out. Disinterest is a commodity in itself. It is palpable, it exists.

By studying the elements (factors) of games (contests) we find ourselves in possession of the elements of life.

Life is a game. A game consists of freedom, barriers and purposes. This is a scientific fact, not merely an observation.

Freedom exists amongst barriers. A totality of barriers and a totality of freedom alike are no-game conditions. Each is similarly cruel. Each is similarly purposeless.

Great revolutionary movements fail. They promise unlimited freedom. That is the road to failure. Only stupid visionaries chant of endless freedom. Only the afraid and the ignorant speak of and insist upon unlimited barriers.

When the relation between freedom and barriers becomes too unbalanced, an unhappiness results.

“Freedom from” is all right only so long as there is a place to be free to. An endless desire for freedom from is a perfect trap, a fear of all things.

Barriers are composed of inhibiting (limiting) ideas, space, energy, masses and time. Freedom in its entirety would be a total absence of these things—but it would also be a freedom without thought or action, an unhappy condition of total nothingness.

Fixed on too many barriers, man yearns to be free. But launched suddenly into total freedom he is purposeless and miserable. He needs a gradient.

There is freedom amongst barriers. If the barriers are known and the freedoms are known there can be life, living, happiness a game.

The restrictions of a government, or a job, give an employee his freedom. Without known restrictions, an employee is a slave, doomed to the fears of uncertainty in all his actions.

Executives in business and government can fail in three ways and, thus, bring about a chaos in their department. They can:

1. seem to give endless freedom;
2. seem to give endless barriers;
3. make neither freedom nor barriers certain.

Executive competence, therefore, consists of imposing and enforcing an adequate balance between their people’s freedom and the unit’s barriers and in being precise and consistent about those freedoms and barriers. Such an executive, adding only in himself initiative and purpose, can have a department with initiative and purpose.

An employee, buying and/or insisting upon freedom only, will become a slave. Knowing the above facts, he must insist upon a workable balance between freedom and barriers.

There are various states of mind which bring about happiness. That state of mind which insists only upon freedom can bring about nothing but unhappiness. It would be better to develop a thought pattern which looked for new ways to be entrapped and things to be trapped in, than to suffer the eventual total entrapment of dwelling upon freedom only. A man who is willing to accept restrictions and barriers and is not afraid of them is free. A man who does nothing but fight restrictions and barriers will usually be trapped.

As it can be seen in any game, purposes become counterpoised. There is a matter of purpose-counter purpose in almost any game played in a field with two teams. One team has the idea of reaching the goal of the other, and the other has the idea of reaching the goal of the first. Their purposes are at war, and this warring of purposes makes a game.

The war of purposes gives us what we call problems. A problem consists of two or more purposes opposed. It does not matter what problem you face or have faced, the basic anatomy of that problem is purpose-counter-purpose.

In actual testing in Scientology, it has been discovered that a person begins to suffer from problems when he does not have enough of them. There is the old saw (maxim) that, if you want a thing done, give it to a busy man to do. Similarly, if you want a happy associate, make sure that he is a man who can have lots of problems.

We have the oddity of a high incidence of neurosis in the families of the rich. These people have very little to do and have very few problems. The basic problems of food, clothing and shelter are already solved for them. We would suppose then, if it were true that an individual’s happiness depended only upon his freedom, these people would be happy. However, they are not happy. What brings about their unhappiness? It is the lack of problems.

An unhappy man is one who is considering continually how to become free. One sees this in the clerk who is continually trying to avoid work. Although he has a great deal of leisure time, he is not enjoying any part of it. He is trying to avoid contact with people, objects, energies and spaces. He eventually becomes trapped in a sort of lethargy. If this man could merely change his mind and start “worrying” about how he could get more work to do, his happiness level would increase markedly. One who is plotting continually how to get out of things will be miserable. One who is plotting how to get into things has a much better chance of becoming happy.

There is, of course, the matter of being forced to play games in which one has no interest—a war into which one is drafted is an excellent example of this. One is not interested in the purposes of the war and yet one finds himself fighting it. Thus there must be an additional element and this element is “the power of choice”.

One could say then that life is a game and that the ability to play a game consists of tolerance for freedom and barriers and an insight into purposes with the power of choice over participation.

These four elements, freedom, barriers, purposes and power of choice, are the guiding elements of life. There are only two factors above these and both of them are related to these. The first is the ability to create, with of course its negative, the ability to uncreate, and the second is the ability to make a postulate (to consider, to say a thing and have it be true). This, then, is the broad picture of life, and these elements are used in its understanding, in bringing life into focus and in making it less confusing.