Scientology

Where I want to start

I want to start with the esoteric. The creation and the creator. What we call the Eighth Dynamic. This is not officially the purview (extent or range of vision or understanding) of Scientology. Yet Hubbard does define the spirit, and in Scientology this is the creative source.

  The THETAN (spirit) is described in Scientology as having no mass, no wavelength, no energy and no time or location in space, except by consideration or postulate.
  The spirit, then, is not a thing. It is the creator of things.
(From Scientology: The Fundamentals of Thought p66 in 2007 edition.)

In Scientology things are called MEST. This stands for: Matter, Energy, Space and Time. Thus, a created thing, or creation, has a physics. But the creator does not have a physics. The creator creates the desired physics for the things it creates. Thus, we come upon the interesting possibility, much discussed in modern esoteric circles, that different creations with different physics could be co-existing, either in this universe or as other universes.

From the Esoteric to the Practical

The early theory of Scientology has a lot to do with how the spirit handles its relationship with the things it creates, and with other beings in its environment. This material was being developed parallel to the development of improved methods for accessing spiritual memory.

Dianetics theory started earlier. It was based on a set of very practical techniques for improving the survival potential of the individual. In his first book on the subject in 1950, Hubbard introduced a numbering system for a person's ability to survive (or attitude towards survival) which became known as the Tone Scale. The original scale, which went from zero to four, adequately covered the experience of most people in social situations. But when Hubbard began to study people as beings, separable from both their bodies and their minds, a wider range of possible attitudes and abilities opened up, and the scale was gradiently expanded. The plus 40 to minus 40 scale in Figure 2 is considered final.

This scale traces the full descent of a being from knowing creator down into total unknowingness. Hubbard developed auditing as a way to reverse this process. It has been noticed that people rise and fall on this scale in session and in life, and the scale was based on Hubbard's experiences as an auditor and as an observer of life. Though he has discussed the more esoteric patterns that appear in this scale in various books and lectures, it remains a basic tool for auditors and Scientologists, who see it as something highly practical and not esoteric at all.

The best known pre-Scientology book about this scale is called Science of Survival which was written (actually transcribed from dictation) in 1951. In this book - basically a collection of short treatises on the subject - Hubbard shows how a tone level can be assigned to an individual, a group, or a nation, and its future behavior predicted assuming the tone level assessment is accurate.

The scale is also used by an auditor in session to help him judge the progress of a given process. (When the preclear starts a process, he commonly keys in and goes down in tone. As the process runs, it is expected he will key out and go up in tone.) But it can also be used socially, by Personnel Departments, by the police, and by business executives, parents, etc. An important part of using this scale is that the person using it is expected to take responsibility for what he observes, and not simply beat someone over the head with his evaluation, but handle the person or situation in a way that will raise the tone of everyone involved.

You may skip ahead here if you wish, while I return to some of the more esoteric ramifications of the defintion of the creator, the creation, and their relationships.

We see, then, that one way to look on the Tone Scale is as a measure of the extent to which any given creator (spirit, thetan = θ_n) is knowledgable of, in control of, taking responsiblity for, and generally comfortable with all that it has created.

Contrary to what one might suppose, Tone 40 is not most beings' favorite spot on the scale. Most beings tend to really enjoy the Tone 20 area, as long as the experience of being in action and playing games does not become too overwhelming. Before the era of solid bodies, games (per preclear recalls) consisted mostly of overwhelm contests (called glare fights among other things). The first being to get overwhelmed lost, and presumably had to slink off to a safe distance from its former space (or playground) and watch it being taken over by someone else. We can imagine that such a being would then attempt to create a new space for itself, but that this would be a place less high-spirited and more well-guarded than before. And so began the dwindling spiral which has brought us all, once mighty creator-beings to this planet of meat bodies, entrapment, and deception, where rebirth after death appears to be strictly enforced.

If one had the resources and time, one could theoretically use Hubbard's techniques to reconstruct the entire history of our universe. Such a history would presumably cover exactly how matter came to be invented, and then how energy and matter were used to fashion doll bodies for beings to use, then robot bodies, and finally biological bodies (meat bodies in the vernacular) which are now seen as the crowning triumph of divine (or otherwise) creative ingenuity.

Assuming the above discussion of our history (see Hubbard's A History of Man for his own words on the subject) is broadly accurate, you can see that all of us, at least in theory, have experienced lives as light beings, as robots, and as all sorts of meat body beings. Ultimately, the choice of a body is up to the individual. But this is certainly not the way most people experience life now. There is wide acceptance of the myth that one goes to heaven after one dies, meets with one's guides and is given one's next mission before being returned to a body already selected and just about to be born. The truth of the situation may be a little less grand, though the above regimen may indeed apply for some. Others, after dying, may simply wander around until they happen across a very pregnant women, then more or less blindly attach themselves to that unborn baby. Others may be programmed to return somewhere, receive programming and a memory wipe, and then be more or less forced to return to earth to find a baby about to be born or being born that isn't already taken. Fights could ensue. We can only imagine, to the extent that we can't yet remember, what happens routinely and what else might happen in what Hubbard came to call the Between Lives Area.

The Model

What came out of all this early research was a model (Figure 3) for a human being that LRH used in his training lectures and that Scientologists use to help them understand themselves and others.

I wrote about this on my blog (that's where this illustration comes from) so I will not go into great detail here. But you can see in the above, perhaps, how beings used mechanisms in the hopes of staying in games that they tended to fall out of. The mind itself was the first attempt to build something a being could use to carry his mechanisms around with him. When robots were developed, the idea arose of relegating a lesser being, or entity (known in some circles as an elemental) with its mind, to the job of operating the more mechanical aspects of the body, leaving the higher being free for more interesting activities. And so we see a spiritual hierarchy forming at the level of the body, then extending up beyond it to a greater or lesser extent. In such a wise, the robot being would be seen as spiritually superior to the meat body being, for it operates without the emotions connected to biology. And a doll body being would be seen as spiritually superior to a robot being, for it is capable of moving through MEST in ways that robots and meat bodies are unable to.

In such a hierarchy, the truth that we have all been doll body (light body) beings, or even freer than that in our pasts, would have to be suppressed in order to maintain order. And thus we have the game of suppressing spiritual truth. And thus we have the situation as it currently exists on earth.

The current focus: Ethics

Hubbard has demonstrated, at least to his own satisfaction, that it is unethical to suppress the truth. In particular, it is unethical to suppress the freedom of the spirit. He found that the truly free being operates at a higher position on the Tone Scale than any other sort of being. That means that not only will the being do better, but so will its family, its friends, it associates, its country, its species, and its planet. Many to this day would agree with this basic observation.

Our Founding Fathers, somehow, recognized this truth and tried to create a nation based on it. They failed not because they were wrong, but because they were insufficiently skilled at handling out-ethics. In Scientology we call extreme out-ethics suppression. The psychiatric term for this is psychopathy. A psychopath is a being that is very low, spiritually, on the Tone Scale, and stuck there. Socially, they tend to operate at 1.1 - covert hostility (known in some circles as passive aggression).

The more skilled psychpaths have the interesting ability to get higher-toned people to fight amongst themselves. See Figure 4. The psychopath's ideal scene (as long as he can protect his status as observer) is for everybody else to be fighting each other, and supporting him as a trusted advisor (or as a holder of potential blackmail material). The psychopath has little compunction to threaten those around him if he thinks he can escape punishment for doing so. A more up-tone psychopath will expend amazing amounts of time and energy to waste the time and energy of other people. A low-toned psychopath may be able to do little more than slowly destroy the life of some friend or relative who realizes too late that all efforts to help the psychopath will be fruitless.

Our protection against such beings relies almost entirely on our ability to notice them, understand their behavior, and deal with them without getting pulled downtone by them. However, a certain amount of tone level sag around such beings is inevitable, so it is well worth the trouble and expense involved to sequester such beings, when they are proven to be psychopathic, and to develop ways to rehabilitate them.