Ensifer

… is where you go.

That’s not Scientology Tech by the way. but then, you probably knew that already. Instead that’s one of the most basic understandings I have about life. But it kinda-sorta sounds like something L. Ron Hubbard might say. I can hear him now…

“Well, I was up in the Van Allen belt the other day… you know… ahhh… just having a look around… you know… ahhh…. and it occurred to me – why doesn’t a thetan see the implant stations, radiation screens and GPM’s that continue to make thetans act stupid and…. ahh… seemingly beyond repair? Ha. Ha. Then… ahem…. as I was observing Mercury rise from behind the sun… which, one ought to understand…. is really no more than a hidden base for the 5th Invader Force… hah, hah, not the sun… you know…. I’m talking about Mercury here! So… as I was saying… I was taking a bit of a thetan-stroll through the nearby planets… ha! Using the Van Allen Belt as my stable point – one wouldn’t want to misplace one’s body while traipsing through the solar system… now would one? Ha! So, why doesn’t a thetan have the sense to see what is right there to see? The answer, you see, is too obvious. It’s because he isn’t….ahhh… looking at it. It’s screened… just like the layers, upon layers of Reactive Mind… ah… goop that screens the thetan from his own endless past… the most simple of things are… screened. Just not there!!! Because… you see…. because thetans no longer have the presence… the attention, the wholeness… to just look!

“And that… that… that is a crying shame. And one easily fixed by just getting the preclear on the cans and going for the rock-slamm—-“

Yeah. Right. You get the point I hope. It’s pretty damned easy to take parts of life experience and jazz them up, throw in some murky-sounding, but impressive, words and come up with a stament that is so close to what the person already knows that they just feel… great about it!

Hubbard spent a fair amount of time talking and writing about attention. Pick any level of Scientology, any grade or training course, any “basic” like one of the triangles or scales he rolls out and you’ll see that what he is actually creating is an entire subject, pretty much out of whole cloth, that boils down to the little “axiom” I use in my life.

And I figure that you use it all the time as well. You just may have never vocalized it or given it enough direct thought to parse it into a sentence. Or maybe you have. Hell, I don’t even know you! But I’ll bet you that the idea of going where you are looking isn’t exactly a revelation to you. But suppose I wanted to sell you the idea that I knew something you didn’t… that I, through painstaking research at great personal expense and sacrifice… had unearthed heretofore unearthed truths, around which all of life’s great mysteries could be unraveled.  If I wanted you to buy that “thing” from me then I sure as hell would need to dress it up, add some earrings to it, slap on some lipstick and make it appear as if you were going to transform from your pitiful state of aimless, desperate stuttering through life, headed inexorably to a horrible and tragic end and onto a Bridge that would lift you up and away from the very pits of hell!

Anyone who is already certain they don’t know how to feel better is part of my target market at that point. And there are a ton of folks who don’t actually know how the process of feeling good works. Scientology and L. Ron Hubbard are certainly not the first, the worst or the last who work this angle. It’s as old as human experience.

Like this one crazy woman I was married to during part of the 1990’s. She was an angel-crystal-mantra-fluffy-marijuana-new-ager. I didn’t actually know that when I married her. Mainly because I was looking at something else she possessed… but that’s not uncommon for a man who hits his 40’s and starts casting around for a little excitement in life. Anyway, when the relationship went sour (which is something I can always count on) she was convinced the answers to “us” were to be found in the world of mysticism, crystals, places-of-power and getting in touch with her angels. I say “her angels” because she never actually accused me of having any angels. So, probably out of desperation on my part, I agreed to meet her in Sedona Arizona to talk about us. She wanted to visit some Places of Power with me and also get a reading.

Okay. That’s one of the places we went, there on the left. It’s a known place of power. But to me then, and still to this day, this place will always be firmly etched in my memory as a large red rock in Arizona.

We also got that “reading”. In Sedona there are tons of people who sell special stuff that you can’t get anywhere else. Ahem. The guy who did the reading was pretty good though. He observed us intently, asked just enough seemingly innocuous questions to line all his ducks up, and then laid out a pretty good story. My estranged wife was impressed. I didn’t smirk. Which is saying a lot for my self control. See? Those TR’s in Scientology do have their uses.

Essentially, all the fortune teller did was what any fortune teller or good salesperson does. He asked questions, figured out who the decision-maker was, provided a product that met the needs and wants… while subliminally suggesting the product possessed the features needed… and then said thank you.

I find it difficult to understand why anyone can be fooled by this scam. Scientology, on the other hand, is a little deeper than a card reader sitting on a patio in the desert evening. It’s elaborate. It has millions of spoken and written words that make it up. It’s had charts and graphs and volumes and tools and buildings and so much more appeal than gypsies have. And, if you listen to about a million people who are either currently involved or who have been involved… it works.

I call bullshit. At the same time I say yes, it does work. It depends, like pretty much all human interaction, on the circumstances, the people involved and what people are giving up to attain what they imagine they are going to attain. And, I suppose this might be important, whether there is actually anything being attained.

So, back to my axiom – where you look is where you go.

Wanna know when I learned that little problem-solver? You do? Okay. I learned it when I was about 7 years old and learning to ride a bicycle. You know when you’re a kid and you have a bike and you’re not real good riding it… that you can crash pretty easily? I did that a lot. But crashes I could handle… my real problem was the sidewalks I rode on. Back then, in the 50’s, they didn’t have weed-whackers to edge the lawns. Men went out and bought these edger machines, the kind with a cutting wheel attached to a gear-driven shaft that was powered by a small engine. And they edged their lawns, turning the edge along the sidewalk into little trenches that were between a half inch and an inch wide.

Perfect size to snag a bicycle tire and pitch a 7 year old head first over the handlebars.

I know they still make these malevolent machines, but I suspect only Suppressive Persons actually use them. The type of men who enjoy sipping on a beer and watching little kids get brain damage from high-siding their bikes.

So anyway, what I was doing was focusing on the thing I feared. I knew it was going to hurt, knew that if I drove my front tire into the trench it would pitch me off. But none of that mattered. In order to avoid the little trench I had to know where they were at! Right??!! Which means I had to look at them in order to avoid them!!! Right!!!??

Finally someone took pity on me and taught me that when you’re driving something you tend to steer that something in the direction you are looking. It may seem pretty basic – and it is – but realize, I was 7 years old. And not a particularly bright 7 years old… more like a Texas 7 years old. if you know what I mean.

The reason I bring all this up is to try and relate to those who believe that Scientology Tech is actually some sort of special knowledge that it really isn’t.

For the most part it’s just a rephrasing of stuff we all pretty much know, or at least understand, but don’t think about when we’re crying, scared, depressed, mortified or otherwise fucked up. It makes sense not because Hubbard was some sort of insightful immortal thetan from the stars… but because we pretty much already know this stuff, we just don’t always use it. Which is also understandable because things can get frantic and confusing from time to time. Mistakes get made, common sense and principle get set aside and before you know it – you’re a mess. Or at least you believe you’re a mess because you feel like a mess. And then along comes this pert young thing handing out fliers for a free personality test and then when you’re getting the results the person (salesperson) says something that seems so right, so on target, so close to what you are thinking… or would be thinking if you’re weren’t being sold something… and there is this *CLICK* in your head and you go, “Woah! That sounds awesome!”

And you know the rest.

I’m not exactly attacking the “tech” of Scientology here. All I’m saying is this – 1) it’s not actually “tech” in the sense that most people understand “tech” and 2) there are no actual revelations in it.  Strip the “tech” of all the nomenclature and crazy acronyms, take all the Scio-Speak out and rephrase it in words that normal people understand and you end up with something along the lines of most popular self-help books of the last 30 or 40 years. Even the auditing session, the engrams, the whole “process” of guided self-introspection isn’t novel, unique or even particularly innovative.

Okay, before I go… last thing – Scientology Tech claims to offer up truths and insights unattainable in other religions or practices. The method used to lay in the belief that these “datums” are special is to dress them up in special language and to insist on special techniques to bring about an understanding (cognition) about the true meaning of these precepts. But when you strip out the Scio-speak you end up exactly where I was the day I learned to look at where I wanted to go rather than where I didn’t want to go. here’s an example – actually, two examples:

What’s true for you is true for you.

Reality is the agreed upon apparancy of existence.

Both these statements are observably false. Reality is NOT something we agree upon. It’s what actually is. Here’s the definition, which is in direct contradiction to Hubbard’s useful tool of a definition:

Reality is the state of things as they actually exist, rather than as they may appear or may be thought to be. In its widest definition, reality includes everything that is and has being, whether or not it is observable or comprehensible.

So what the hell was Hubbard talking about that Scientologists seem to be so agreeable about? That definition above is a direct contradiction to what Hubbard says. That’s because he wasn’t talking about reality, instead he was talking about something entirely different, something totally subjective. Here’s what is an apparency:

On a much broader and more subjective level, private experiences, curiosity, inquiry, and the selectivity involved in personal interpretation of events shapes reality as seen by one and only one individual and hence is called phenomenological.

Oh, I see what he did there. He has people believing that subjective reality is actual reality so long as they believe it to be true and… this is important… others agree that it’s real. Damn! If you could package that up and sell it… shite! There’d be no end to the money you could make. Now, if you throw in the whole “true for you” bit you end up with someone who not only believes some very odd things… but they believe that if you don’t agree with them it’s because you aren’t yet enlightened. Or worse, that you’re living in one reality and they in another. Or that you’re actually the one who doesn’t understand words because you haven’t done a clay demo or read the definition while holding the cans until your needle floated.

Crap. There I go again… using Scientology to try and explain Scientology.

Bottom line is this – the reason people stay in Scientology is that they are not looking to go anywhere else. It’s that simple. Where you look is where you go. Now, if someone could just convince Scientologists to not look at anything except what they are told to look at… well… then you’d have a captive audience and a steady cash flow.