View source for Scientology A New Slant on Life 1965 Chapter 22

← [[Scientology A New Slant on Life 1965|Back to Scientology: A New Slant on Life]]

== Freedom vs. Entrapment ==
In Greece, Rome, England, Colonial America, France and Washington, a great deal of conversation is made on the subject of Freedom. Freedom, apparently, is something that is very desirable. Indeed, Freedom is seen to be the goal of a nation or a people. Similarly, if we are restoring ability to a person, we must restore Freedom. If we do not restore Freedom, we cannot restore ability. The muscle-bound wrestler, the tense driver, the rocket jockey with frozen reaction time alike are not able. Their ability lies in an increase of Freedom, a release of tension, and a better communication to their environment.

The main trouble with Freedom is that it does not have an anatomy. Something that is free is free. It is not free with wires, vias, by-passes, or dams; it is simply free. There-is something else about Freedom which is intensely interesting—it cannot be erased.

You may be able to concentrate somebody’s attention on something that is not free and thus bring him into a state of belief that Freedom does not exist, but this does not mean that you have erased the individual’s freedom. You have not. All the freedom he ever had is still there.

Furthermore, Freedom has no quantity, and by definition, it has no location in space or time. Thus we see the individual (spirit, soul) as potentially the freest thing there could be. Thus man concentrates upon Freedom.

But if Freedom has no anatomy, then please explain how one is going to attain to something which cannot be fully explained. If anyone talks about a “road to Freedom”, he is talking about a linear line. This, then, must have boundaries. If there are boundaries, there is no Freedom.

Talk to a person who works from eight o’clock until five with no goals, and no future, and no belief in the organization and its goals, who is being required by time payments, rent, and other barriers of an economic variety to invest all of his salary as soon as it is paid, and we have an individual who has lost the notion of Freedom. His concentration is so thoroughly fixed upon barriers that Freedom has to be in terms of less barriers.

Life is prone to a stupidity in many cases in which it is not cognizant of a disaster until the disaster has occurred. The midwestern farmer had a phrase for it: “Lock the door after the horse is stolen.” It takes a disaster in order to educate people into the existence of such a disaster. This is education by pain, by impact, by punishment. Therefore, a population which is faced with a one-shot disaster which will obliterate the sphere would not have a chance to learn very much about the sphere before it was obliterated. Thus, if they insisted upon learning by experience in order to prevent such a disaster, they would never have the opportunity. If no atomic bomb of any kind had been dropped in World War II, it is probable there would be no slightest concern about atomic fission, although atomic fission might have been developed right on up to the planet buster without ever being used against Man, and then the planet-buster been used on Earth, and so destroyed it.

If a person did not know what a tiger was, and we desired to demonstrate to him that no tigers were present, we would have a difficult time of it. Here we have a freedom from tigers without knowing anything about tigers. Before he could understand an absence of tigers, he would have to understand the presence of tigers. This is the process of learning we know as “by experience”.

In order to know anything, if we are going to use educational methods, it is necessary then, to know, as well, its opposite. The opposite of tigers probably exists in Malayan jungles where tigers are so frequent that the absence of tigers would be a novelty, indeed. A country which was totally burdened by tigers might not understand at all the idea that there were no tigers. In some parts of the world, a great deal of argument would have to be entered into with the populace of a tiger-burdened area to get them to get any inkling of what an absence of tigers would be.

The understanding of Freedom, then, is slightly complex if, then, individuals who do not have it are not likely to understand it.

But the opposite of Freedom is slavery and everybody knows this—or is it? I do not think these two things are a dichotomy. Freedom is not the plus of a condition where slavery is the minus, unless we are dealing entirely with the political organism. Where we are dealing with the individual, better terminology is necessary and more understanding of the anatomy of minus-Freedom is required.

Minus-Freedom is entrapment. Freedom is the absence of barriers. Less Freedom is the presence of barriers. Entirely minus- Freedom would be the omnipresence of barriers. A barrier is matter or energy or time or space. The more matter, energy, time or space assumes command over the individual, the less Freedom that individual has. This is best understood as entrapment, since slavery connotes an intention and entrapment might be considered almost without intention. A person who falls into a bear pit might not have intended to fall into it at all, and a bear pit might not have intended a person to fall upon its stake. Nevertheless, an entrapment has occurred. The person is in the bear pit.

If one wants to understand existence and his unhappiness with it, he must understand entrapment and its mechanisms.

In what can a person become entrapped? Basically and foremost, he can become entrapped in ideas. In view of the fact that freedom and ability can be seen to be somewhat synonymous, then ideas of disability are, first and foremost, an entrapment. I daresay that, amongst men, the incident has occurred that a person has been sitting upon a bare plain in the total belief that he is entirely entrapped by a fence.

There is that incident mentioned in ''Self Analysis'' of fishing in Lake Tanganyika where the sun’s rays, being equatorial, pierce burningly to the lake’s bottom. The natives there fish by tying a number of slats of wood on a long piece of line. They take either end of this line and put it in canoes, and then paddle the two canoes to shore, the slatted line stretching between. The sun shining downward presses the shadows of these bars down to the bottom of the lake, and thus a cage of shadows moves inward toward the shallows. The fish, seeing this cage contract upon them, which is composed of nothing but the absence of light, flounder frantically into the shallows where they cannot swim and are thus caught, picked up in baskets and cooked. There is nothing to be afraid of but shadows.

When we move out of mechanics, man finds himself on unsure ground. The idea that ideas could be so strong and pervasive is foreign to most men.

So, first and foremost, we have the idea. Then, themselves the product of ideas, we have the more obvious mechanics of entrapment in matter, energy, space and time.

The anatomy of entrapment is an interesting one, and the reason why people get entrapped, and indeed, the total mechanics of entrapment, are now understood. In Scientology a great deal of experimentation was undertaken to determine the factors which resulted in entrapment, and it was discovered that the answer to the entire problem was two-way communication.

Roughly, the laws back of this are: Fixation occurs in the presence of one-way communication. Entrapment occurs only when one has not given or received answers to the things entrapping him.

It could be said that all the entrapment there is is the waiting one does for an answer.

Entrapment is the opposite of Freedom. A person who is not free is trapped. He may be trapped by an idea, he may be trapped by matter, he may be trapped by energy, he may be trapped by space, he may be trapped by time, he may be trapped by all of them. The more thoroughly a person is trapped the less free he is. He cannot change, he cannot move, he cannot communicate, he cannot feel affinity and reality. Death itself could be said to be Man’s ultimate in entrapment, for when a man is totally entrapped he is dead.

The component parts of Freedom, as we first gaze upon it, are then: Affinity, Reality and Communication, which summate into Understanding. Once Understanding is attained, Freedom is obtained. For the individual who is thoroughly snarled in the mechanics of entrapment, it is necessary to restore to him sufficient communication to permit his ascendance into a higher state of understanding. Once this has been accomplished his entrapment is ended.

A greater freedom can be attained by the individual. The individual does desire a greater freedom, once he has some inkling of it. And Scientology steers the individual out of the first areas of entrapment to a point where he can gain higher levels of Freedom.