Scientology A New Slant on Life 1965 Chapter 9

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Myths of the Mind

The curse of the past has been a pretense of knowledge. We’ve had a worship of the fable. We have had prayers being sent up to a myth. And man hasn’t been looking at all.

We in this modern age of science have not developed out of the field of humanities anything comparable to a scientific observation of the mind. The humanities—psychology, sociology, criminology and the various branching studies of the social sciences in general—can be said at this time and place to have failed.

Imagining that one can see is a condition worse than being unable to see. The humanities imagined too many things to see. They never cared to look. And so they have failed.

Scientology tells you quite adequately that there is an enormous Valhalla mixed up with Pluto’s realm, mixed up with fairy tales, mixed up with Menninger’s work, lying all over below the level of truth. The truth is a simple thing that anybody could see. Why don’t they see it? Because they live in this gorgeous wonderland which isn’t and never will be.

Let’s go into wonderland. The wonderland of syllables, the wonderland beneath the earth of never never. We know it as dispersal. An individual looks at something and it flashes back and he can no longer look in that direction. It kicks him in the teeth. So he mustn’t look that way. He must look somewhere else. And he eventually learns very well not to observe anything.

That is the exact mechanics of how a wonderland of pretended information, which became the social sciences, was created. The individual couldn’t confront man, so he turned around and developed a theory about man.

There are a lot of imaginary and legendary beings and beasts just like there were in the dark ages. Take the way the ancient mariners kept people from trading with the American Coast. Every mariner of Columbus’ day believed that you just sailed so far then fell off the edge and there were terrific monsters and beasts who would drown you if you sailed beyond the sight of land.

A great many beasts had been invented to debar careless voyaging into somebody else’s hunting preserves.

Now I’m not going to tell you that the field of the mind has been only inhabited by imaginary beings, but something of this order is done by the fellow who invents tremendous nomenclature of the brain or bone structure and then says “you have to know all these names before you can know anything about the mind” and then says “each one of these parts of the brain has a specific function.” And adds “nobody should tamper with the mind because it bites.”

I don’t say that that is the same thing the Spanish sailor did with the sea in order to keep guys like Columbus from discovering things. I don’t say that for a moment. I merely insist upon it.

All a person has to do is look—right where he is—and he will see something about the mind. But if he’s been told it’s very dangerous to fool with the mind and he doesn’t know that those raging sea beasts are really dummies to keep fishing preserves, why, he says, “Well, I’d better not look. I’d better go blind. “

Through the years I learned that they were supposed to do things with the mind across this basic premise—that IQ. cannot change and personality characteristics are unalterable. This is a defeatism.

Now, Scientology is defined as knowing how to know. But it could be better defined as “summated and organized information about you”. It’s everything that has been known about you for 2500 years at least. But it is summated so it is communicable, so that it is applicable and so that it gets some definite results. And way over and above all these other things it is capable of changes. It can create changes for the better, and it can make things look and act better.

Most of our data is on the firm foundation of having looked. And your ability to know the subject is your ability to look.

Man, before he gets up and looks to find where he is, before he starts to look in the proper direction, discovers he’s blind. Then he says, “Hey, wait a minute,” and takes the veil off his eyes, takes a look—and has the tendency to keep diving into complexities.

So there is only one continuing stress in Scientology and that is greater simplicity, and that means greater communication. By involvement in a complexity we create a mystery. We sink man into a priesthood, a cult.

The simplicity of observation, the simplicity of communication itself and only itself is functional and will take man from the bottom to the top. And the only thing I am trying to teach you is to look.