Scientology A New Slant on Life 1965 Chapter 4

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What Is the Basic Mystery?

In the general study of the world and its affairs, we find out that the only way you can make a slave—as if anybody would want one—would be to develop a tremendous amount of mystery about what it’s all about and then develop an overwhelming charge on the mystery line. Not only develop a mystery, but then sell it real good; sell some bogus answer to the mystery.

Man is so used to this that, when you come along and put a perfectly good answer in his hands, why, he drops it like a hot potato, because he knows what all answers are: All answers are carefully derived from mysteries with bogus answers, and all mysteries are going to cost you something sooner or later.

The development of the mystery itself stems from interpersonal relationships and Man’s general conflict with his fellows and his environment, and so on. And the basic mystery is— who is he? There’s no more basic mystery than that—”who is that fellow over there?” That is the beginning of individuation, of, not individualism, but individuation, of pulling back from everybody and saying, “I am me and they are ‘them’, and God knows what they’re up to!” And then, after a while, the fellow takes it out of the realm of near blasphemy and puts it into worship. And he says, “Well, God knows what they’re up to and he will protect me.”

So what do we basically have? We basically have a mystery on who the other fellow is. Now “science” originally meant truth, and now it means research revenue. Science has so far abandoned the basic mystery, that they think there’s a mystery on what is a floor, what is a ceiling, what is space. That is really a very cooked-up mystery—because that floor and that ceiling and that space is what thee and me agreed to put there, and that’s about all it is.

Wherever we have a mystery, we normally have had a disagreement or a misunderstanding or an out-of-communication-ness. And that’s all there actually is to it, basically. A fellow had to disagree with whom he was looking at. He knew about it originally and he didn’t want to know who that fellow was over there. He didn’t want to know anything about the situation, because he had learned a lesson: If he communicated with it, he would be proved wrong!

So we had some people in our midst—you amongst them—who would put up a “this” and say it was a “that”. And then you would get these things twisted somehow or another, and you’d say, “Why don’t you communicate with this?” and then say, “You communicated with that.” After a while a fellow says, “Aw, I don’t want to communicate with either one of them. Dickens with it. Who cares what those things are—I don’t want to know.” And after that, he’d had it. He said, “I don’t want to know,” and therefore he had a mystery sitting across from him someplace. And he went so far along this line of not wanting to know that after a while he conceived that he didn’t know. And then he went from there and said it’s impossible to know.

Wherever Man finds himself deeply instilled, engrossed, surrounded with mystery, he is actually in conflict with himself and himself alone. That is why processing works. THE ONLY ABERRATION IS DENIAL OF SELF. Nobody else can do anything to you, but YOU. That is a horrible state of affairs. You can do something to you, but it requires your postulate, your agreement or your disagreement, before anything can happen to you. People have to agree to be ill; they have to agree to be stupid; they have to agree to be in mystery.

People are the victims of their own flinch. They are the victims of their own postulates, the victims of their own belief that they are inadequate.

An individual has to postulate into existence his own aberration, his own flinch, his own stupidity, his own lack of confidence, and his own bad luck.