Scientology 0-8 1970 A Description of Scientology

← Scientology 0-8 (1970)

A Description of Scientology

i

My purpose is to bring a barbarism out of the mud it thinks conceived it and to form, here on Earth, a civilization based on human understanding, not violence.

That’s a big purpose. A broad field. A star-high goal. But I think it’s your purpose, too.

ii

While Scientology encompasses a broader scope than any previous Eastern or Western religion ever has, it should be realized that a great deal of what is known today in Scientology, with an added exactness of understanding, was already known and lost thousands of years ago.

What we are DOING with this data is NEW. The technology for bringing about a new state in man is new. But the basic hope of man as it appears today in Scientology is thousands of years old. And when we call Scientology a religion we are calling it a religion out of a much deeper well than only the last two thousand years. It is a wisdom in the tradition of ten thousand years of search in Asia and in Western civilization.

Scientology stands complete today, with the oldest philosophical tradition of man, with new discoveries about man, and with a technology of tremendous power and breadth which treats the livingness and beingness of man, and demonstrates to him a pathway to greater freedom.

Subjects which were consulted in over a third of a century of organization and development of Scientology include the Veda; the Tao of Lao-tze; the Dharma and the Discourses of Gautama Buddha; the general knowingness about life extant in the lamaseries of the Western Hills of China; the technologies and beliefs of various barbaric cultures; the various materials of Christianity; the mathematical and technical methodologies of the early Greeks, Romans and Arabians; the physical sciences, including the various speculations of western philosophers such as Kant, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Herbert Spencer and Dewey, and the various technologies extant in the civilization of both the Orient and Occident in the first half of the twentieth century. Scientology is an organization of the pertinencies which are mutually held true by all men in all times, and the development of technologies which demonstrate the existence of new phenomena not hitherto known, which are useful in creating states of beingness considered more desirable by man.

But the philosopher had ordinarily spent most of his working years in his ivory tower and was pretty well isolated from his subject. To know life you’ve got to be part of life, you must get down there and look, you must get into the nooks and crannies of existence, and you must rub elbows with all kinds and types of men before you can finally establish what man is. I lived with bandits in Mongolia and hunted with pygmies in the Philippines—as a matter of fact I studied twenty-one different primitive races—including the white race—and my conclusions were that man, regardless of his state or culture, was essentially the same, that he was a spiritual being pulled down to the material, and I concluded finally that he needed a hand.

iii

In 1932 an investigation was undertaken to determine the dynamic principle of existence in a workable form which might lead to the resolution of some of the problems of mankind. A long research in ancient and modern philosophy culminated in 1938 in the heuristically discovered primary law. A work was written at that time which embraced man and his activities. In the following years further research was undertaken in order to prove or disprove the axioms so established.

My first effort was to find a common denominator to all men. Having seen man in his more primitive states and his highly cultured states I knew that if we could isolate a common denominator that embraced all men, then perhaps from that we could unlock this riddle.

I discovered that the common denominator of existence was SURVIVE. Whatever else man was trying to do, whether he was cultured or primitive, he was attempting to survive. Well, what of such things as morals, ideals, love? Don’t these things go above “mere survival”? Unfortunately or fortunately, they do not. Ideals, honesty, love of one’s fellow man—one cannot find good survival for one or for many where these things are absent. Even the most esoteric concepts fall within this understanding. Survival is not a matter of being alive this moment and dead the next. Survival is actually a graduated scale.

The Dynamic was discovered to have eight sub-divisions with each single Dynamic then being the urge, thrust and purpose of Life—SURVIVE!—in any of one of eight manifestations.

The First Dynamic is the urge toward survival of self.

The Second Dynamic is the urge toward survival through sex, or children.

The Third Dynamic is the urge toward survival through a group of individuals or as a group. The Fourth Dynamic is the urge toward survival through all mankind and as all mankind. The Fifth Dynamic is the urge toward survival through life forms such as animals, birds,

insects, fish and vegetation, and is the urge to survive as these.

The Sixth Dynamic is the urge toward survival as the physical universe and has as its components Matter, Energy, Space and Time (from which we derive the word MEST).

The Seventh Dynamic is the urge toward survival through spirits or as a spirit. Anything spiritual, with or without identity, would come under the Seventh Dynamic. A sub-heading of this Dynamic is ideas and concepts such as beauty, and the desire to survive through these.

The Eighth Dynamic is the urge toward survival through a Supreme Being, or more exactly, Infinity.

Covering the first four of these Dynamics, Dianetics became, of all the past studies of man, the grandpa, the immediate ancestor of Scientology. Dianetics was the basic discovery which led to and was the reason for Scientology.

None of the postulates and early discoveries in this research outlawed any concept concerning the human soul or divine or creative imagination. The optimum survival conduct pattern was formulated and then studied for exceptions, and there were no exceptions found. It was understood perfectly that Dianetics was a study in the finite universe only and that spheres and realms of thought and action might well exist above this finite sphere. But it was also discovered that none of these factors were needed to resolve the entire problem of human aberration and irrational conduct.

The human mind and basic human character was found to have been most grossly maligned because man had not been able to distinguish between irrational conduct derived from poor data, and irrational conduct derived from another, far more vicious source.

The Reactive Mind was discovered. It had managed to bury itself from view so thoroughly that only inductive philosophy, travelling from effect back to cause, served to uncover it. The Reactive Mind is a portion of a person’s mind which works on a totally stimulus-response basis, which is not under his volitional control, and which exerts force and the power of command over his awareness, purposes, thoughts, body and actions.

Stored in the Reactive Mind are engrams, and here we find the single source of aberrations and psychosomatic ills.

These engrams are a complete recording, down to the last accurate detail, of every perception present in a moment of partial or full unconsciousness.

In all laboratory tests on these engrams they were found to possess “inexhaustible” sources of power to command the body.

The Reactive Mind comprises an unknowing, unwanted series of aberrated computations which bring about an effect upon the individual and those around him. It is an obsessive strata of unknown, unseen, uninspected data which are forcing solutions, unknown and unsuspected, on the individual—which tells you why it remained hidden from man for so many thousands of years.

The isolation and resolution of the Reactive Mind was a major breakthrough for man. The exact moment of the breakthrough is recorded at the public level with the book, DIANETICS: The Modern Science of Mental Health, and if people have not read this book, they just will not have broken through, whatever else they have studied. And when people are asking you questions about Dianetics and Scientology, no matter how obtuse or abstruse the questions are, your best answer to these is still my earliest answer and that was DIANETICS: The Modern Science of Mental Health. This book burst on the western world in May 1950, shot to the top of the leading “best-seller” lists and stayed there, and stayed there. It still sells more copies around the world than the average best seller in any given year.

Man had no inkling whatever of Dianetics. None. This was the bolt from the blue. Man was hacking and sawing and shocking and injecting and teaching and moralizing and counselling and hanging and jailing men with enthusiasm without any idea at all of what caused Man to behave as he did or what made him sick or well.

The answer, and the place where one begins, was and still is Dianetics. It is Man’s most advanced school of the mind. Though they hold in common certain basic tools, Dianetics and Scientology are not identical subjects and their technologies are not the same. But the early days of Dianetics were the early beginnings of Scientology. Dianetics is the route from aberrated (or aberrated and ill) human to a well, happy, high-I.Q. human being. This breakthrough had never before been achieved in Man’s history. Scientology is the route from there to total freedom and ability as a spiritual being.

Oddly enough, the step from a human being to a spirit had been achieved, if rarely— Buddhism, other spiritual practices, even Christianity—but it was not generally credited. Scientology really achieves it and for the first time with TOTAL stability, no relapse and invariably one for one. Nevertheless man had an inkling of the goals of Scientology even though he considered them almost beyond God. But man had no inkling whatever of Dianetics.

iv

There are two distinct divisions in Scientology. The first is philosophic, the second is technical. Under the philosophic heading one discovers the ways and means of forming new ways of life and evaluating or creating standards of livingness and beingness. By this knowingness alone and without processing (individual technical applications), it should be understood clearly that a new way of life could be created, or an old way of life could be understood and better endured or altered.

Under the technical division we have a long series of developed processes which, applied immediately and directly to life or an organism thereof, produce desirable changes in the conditions of life. This division comprises Applied Scientology or Scientology, Applied Philosophy and contains standard technology.

Scientology concludes and demonstrates certain truths. These truths might be considered to be the highest common denominators of existence itself. They have the aspect of precision observations rather than philosophic hazardings. When treated as precision observations, many results occur. When regarded as philosophic opinions, only more philosophy results.

I looked early and long at man to find out what methods he used to survive, how he adapted himself to environments in his attempt at survival, and what I found was that man advanced to the degree that he preserved his spiritual integrity, that he preserved his values, that he remained honest, that he remained decent—and I found that he disintegrated or deteriorated to the degree that he abandoned these things.

The average man is up against problems. He’s asking himself, how can I make more money? How can I make my wife faithful to me? How can I help my children grow up? These questions absorb a tremendous quantity of his energy. But he can’t do anything about it because he is so immersed in it. So in Scientology processing he resolves these questions, he understands what he’s doing, and he turns from a man who is simply a puzzled static being into somebody who is more than that.

We see governments and societies desperately trying to help man. They’re trying, however, to solve his problems for him and their efforts to do this have not resulted in any great advance for man.

Now the real work is to put an individual into a mental condition where he can confront his own problems and solve them—to put him in a position where he can confront life better, where his reaction-time is better, where he can identify the factors in his life more easily. And so he looks around, starts solving his own problems and betters his own life. That is an essential difference between Scientology and other efforts to help man.

We have in the technical division of Scientology basically two activities—processing and training. Scientology processing is done on the principle of making an individual look at his own existence, and improve his ability to confront what he is and where he is. An auditor is the person trained in the technology and whose job it is to ask the person to look, and get him to do so. There is a large technology for this but an auditor has to be able to get his questions answered and the individual who is being processed finally has to answer the questions. The question is asked until it is totally answered and the person is totally aware that he has answered it. The word auditor is used because it means one who listens, and a Scientology auditor does listen.

As people come into Scientology (and they’re coming in in very swiftly increasing numbers all over the world), normally what they do first is read a book, and then they may read quite a few books, and go around and about Scientology for some time. They attend some of the Introductory Courses, and then they will get some processing—often beginning with Dianetics. They begin to get along better physically, and then to make increasingly larger gains. Their I.Q. goes up, their abilities increase, they are more capable of handling their lives—and they are prepared for the gains of Scientology.

And when one then decides to be an auditor he or she goes to an Academy of Scientology and studies and learns how to audit and so help others. And here again, one can begin with Dianetics, the first training ground for an auditor.

You’ll find throughout Scientology that the gradient approach is a primary and regulating factor. And a gradient approach has been very, very important in this line of research. The principle is incidentally quite new. The essence of a gradient is just being able to do a little bit more and a little bit more and a little bit more until you finally make the grade.

v

We live in a world that is desperately in need of some good order—it isn’t, aberration on our part that we say some things ought to be changed. Actually I rarely tell you things should be changed—I simply tell you that a world has to be created. I don’t even assume one exists. I figure that this one’s on its way out and that somebody had better put one in its place. Just how we go about doing that is up to you and up to me. This is what we call Scientology: Applied Philosophy.

People think of professional practitioners as doctors, who, aloof from other concerns, practice on the sick. This is a very novel idea, however. It was dreamed up, probably, by the first lazy witch-doctor, and used forever thereafter by most mental specialists. I want to banish that idea from amongst us all.

If we are doctors (by which might be meant “repairers”) then we are doctors on the Third and Fourth Dynamics, the Dynamics of groups and of mankind as a whole, and we handle the First (self) and the Second (sex and family) only to achieve better function on the Third and Fourth.

The Third and Fourth Dynamics subdivide. Any Third breaks down into many activities and professions—a neighborhood, a business concern, a military group, a city government, etc. The Fourth breaks down, just now, mainly to races and nations.

So you see that the idea people sometimes have that a Scientologist must be an auditor who audits individuals in private sessions is too limited an idea.

We find ourselves for instance today with the job of cleaning up the whole field of mental health. That is at least what it calls itself. Mental “health” has been perverted for something over a half a century into an excuse for a Belsen or an Auschwitz. It’s an operating climate of danger and chaos. That field couldn’t even begin to clean itself up. It was unaware of or cold to human rights. It had no technology that worked, upon which to base any actual professional ethics. As we do in Scientology have the technology and the ethics, we inherited the job. It’s like trying to pull a wounded water buffalo out of a wallow, but we are doing it.

Where we have made the breakthrough in Scientology and where we have made progress, we have done so in accomplishing the goals which man has had as long as he has been man. What he has considered good and what he has considered desirable in the field of philosophy, we have accomplished technically. We have now arrived in Scientology at a point where man should have been for the last five thousand years. There has never been this technology before.

You are in a very fortunate position of not having to develop the technology of auditing. A good auditor has found this out. He uses the tools he’s got and he uses them well. There is a tremendous amount of understanding involved here. There are millions of words written on the subject of auditing technology. An auditor can be pretty staggered to suddenly realize how much he really knows.

Auditors are dedicated and sincere in getting this job done. There has never been a more sincere group on the face of the Earth than those who are in the ranks of Scientology auditors. We wouldn’t have started on auditing if we weren’t good people who wanted to help our fellow man. We are the first people to appear on Earth since its first solidification out of nebulous vaporings who can get this job done, and who really know what we are doing.

The very truth that we know, its simplicity and ease of grasp, the very honesty with which we approach our task, give us probably the largest barriers we have to overcome. Man has been defrauded so often, persuaded so wrongly, and has returned to the same old rut so inevitably and in such a defeated frame of mind, that he is not able to grasp easily the firm and friendly hand of the auditor which is being reached out to him.

The route to highest states of existence has been sought long by man in the fields of religion, mysticism, spiritualism, philosophy, mental arts, metaphysics, science and allied studies. Vast libraries could be filled with the scraps of information gathered in the course of this search. The great achievement of Scientology has been the culling of truth from this sea of data and finding that the truth was a tiny group of data possessed of the overwhelming power of changing all other facts in this universe and in livingness.

The opening of the road depended upon the success of codifying this information so that it could be relayed to others.

The philosophical and technical information of a Scientologist includes the following as basic material.