Arthur Ronald Conway Hubbard

Scientology 1.0.0 (1952) – Parts 1 and 2

“One of the main functions of organised religion is to protect people against a direct experience of God.” – Carl Jung

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What do I know about anything? Not a whole lot, depending on your definition, but then again, nobody else does either, and for several very important reasons.

As far as Scientology goes, let’s look first at what some people think they know, or at least, what one might find out from the mass media or the internet:

You find a group that believes in space aliens, past lives, and lots of other “utter nonsense” and likes to dress in strange uniforms. Their leader was a bad science fiction writer turned messianic charlatan who apparently announced one day that the way to get rich was to start one’s own religion, which he then did. These people are xenophobic and extraordinarily litigious. They break up families, friends, and businesses over matters of faith or practice. They demand huge amounts of money from their followers in the form of donations or in exchange for the bizarre and obscure services laid out as something called “The Bridge,” and this money seems to flow into buying up an ever increasing portfolio of real estate. Their seriously underpaid employees must sign a billion-year contract and, if you try to leave, you will be under a cloud for all eternity. And when you do leave, because of old age or illness, then you’re turfed out to defend yourself without a job or a résumé, health insurance or a pension.

Sum it up? Got it in a nutshell? Okay, those aren’t my words but it’s quite a bundle of fact, fiction and pure slander.

It’s a pretty good overview of what you’ll find the “experts” saying, though; it’s simple, it’s really dark, and, most importantly, it’s controversial as all get out. To be told that, even if your own life is hard, dysfunctional, and meaningless, it’s not nearly as dysfunctional and sad as those people! It is a very comforting thought. Sort of the way villagers used to think about heretics being burned at the stake back in the day, “I may be a drudge, but at least I’m not as crazy as that person!”

Okay, now let’s check the headlines: Wow, things are surely in a mess! And those Republicans/Democrats (your pick), what a bunch of losers, and that guy that shot up that school! And the rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, and the earthquake that vaporised 200,000 people, and Trump! And Trump! Whew! Again, at least my life isn’t that bad! Or… maybe it explains why my life is that bad.

Then, you might check out other stuff on the internet, TV, or The New York Times. What do you find usually? The planet has never been more violent or dangerous. The environment is circling the drain. Women, blacks, gays, and transgenders, in fact, all minorities have never been more suppressed. If you’re black, the chances that the cops will mow you down are a near certainty and just a matter of time. Immigration will destroy democracy; slave labour is on the rise; education is getting ever worse; China is poised to take over the world if A.I. doesn’t get us first, and Kim Jong-un, or, now, Biden, wants to start WWIII. Then you think, well, what do you think? Now you know why your life is so hard; all this chaos explains everything! Maybe. If you go to that well on a daily basis, you should at least know that you’ve got a strong stomach. 

It’s all one-sided and simplistic as hell. What is all this stuff? It’s… it’s, well, entertainment for sad sacks!

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Most importantly, I think, is what you can “find out“ about religion: 

“Religion! My oh my, don’t get me started! It’s insane that sooo many people believe in God, that Moses parted the Red Sea, Jesus raised people from the dead, Mohammed flew around on flying horses!” And so on, and so on, and so on. You are told, “What complete nonsense!” In this rational, sensible time, how is it possible that there could be so many idiots out there? And, as the pundits sanctimoniously pile it on, they, as card-carrying so-called realists (usually atheists), are, of course, the only reasonable and balanced arbiters of worldview, unlike all these other nut-jobs.

From this materialistic worldview, all religion, all cults, all anything that is not an object you can hold in your hands or a formula on a chalk board is pure idiotic superstition. If you can’t touch, taste, hear, smell, or see it (that is to say, measure it), it isn’t true, by golly by gosh!

Actual truth is so much more interesting because it is, at its core, non-material. It’s also non-dualistic, that is to say, not black and white. Things in life, politics, and economics have gotten so confused and mixed up in these modern times, that any narrative, so long as it’s simplistic and super uncomplicated (dumbed-down), can seem like quite a relief, perhaps. We are especially fond of ye olde “us vs. them” paradigm, or some arbitrarily tribalistic variation, because being firmly on one side or the other is sort of like a warm bath, as Tom Wolf put it. We can sink luxuriously in, relax, and go comfortably into a hypnotic trance.

The problem here is that life is way, way more multi-faceted.

I read somewhere once that the West, specifically these United States, is philosophically impoverished, and I think that’s true; we go to school and learn algebra and the Periodic Scale, but nobody is teaching us how to think. We see an object as an object, but however we measure or categorise it, it won’t tell us what the meaning of it is. Meaning is another dimension. Meaning is all about how to think, how to act.

The job of science is to strip all the meaning away in order to get an accurate measurement. These two things, the objective (science) and the subjective (religion), have gotten all tangled up and confused, and we don’t seem to have the tools to untie this Gordian Knot. (In the old story, Alexander was supposed to untie the knot, but being a warrior (read: knucklehead), he just cut it with his sword – probably to Aristotle’s shame. Materialists and physicalists are our modern-day Alexanders.¹

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Back now to what is easily found out about Scientology.

I am not going to try and build a narrative to refute what you can find out about Scientology (although, in some cases, I will). Nor am I arguing in favour of any specific religion, or any other practise in particular. What I really want to get at is destroying the current, easily accessible story, because all these stories are, really, way, way too two-dimensional, too simplistic, and, to be perfectly honest, childish.

See, here’s the thing: what we should all really try to do is try not to adhere to any ideology that makes the world too simple (dualistic). That’s the strategy of the mass media and all the most easily accessible information and entertainment sites.² Their reality is simple: it’s all bad, dangerous, and hopeless, so stay safe at home, watch all our ads, click on all that click-bait, and get yourself further into debt by buying lots of stuff you don’t need, and whatever else you do, DON’T THINK!³

What worries me most about the pop-media story of Scientology is its two-dimensionality. The same thing worries me about most everything in the world of infotainment: it’s designed to distract people who are tired, maybe a little discouraged, and just want some mindlessness. Therefore, it needs to be punchy, simple, and, above all, controversial. I’m not against entertainment, but if it’s being paraded around as information, then I think that’s a real problem for our society.

I’m also trying to say, let us attempt to learn a philosophy that’s not too complicated but is mostly, and most importantly, useful. That’s not an easy thing to do; nearly impossible maybe, but it’s vital that everyone eventually learn how to do that. And that, right there, is the actual and true point of Scientology. That is, Scientology version 1.0.0.

So maybe some of the stuff about Scientology is true. Was L. Ron Hubbard a bad science fiction writer? That depends on your taste in reading material, so it’s up to you, I guess. Was he a charlatan? Time will tell, but maybe it’s actually a little too early to pass that judgement, especially if one doesn’t know anything about it.⁴ Did he say that awful thing about creating his own religion? No.

On the other hand, is the institution litigious? Yes. Do they wear uniforms (so what if they do)? Yes, etc., etc. But why?

It’s my intention to lay out a little of what I know about these things here on this site. But I’m going to do it in little sections over time because I am not a writer, but a painter, and I spend most of my time on that, so if and when I progress, I hope to show how fascinating this subject actually is and why, in its original form, it could be so useful.

I will not try to convert anyone. I’d rather simply argue my own obvious biases, ideas, and points of view. If I can, I intend to set a few things out on the table, things you may already know, but perhaps not have considered in the particular light I might shed. Or maybe things you didn’t know. We shall see. Rather, what I hope to argue is that Scientology is not some anomaly in the world but an intrinsic part of a universe that is mind-bogglingly complicated and wonderfully weird.

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At the beginning, I said I didn’t know a lot. I said that because when one ever thinks seriously about what there is to know, you quickly realise that there is an awful lot, and you’ll never know even a fraction of it. But, if you try, you can get hold of the Wonder. Such is the real story of Scientology and, as I said, the world. A story that is much more interesting, much more nuanced, and much, much older than is generally known, and contains fundamental truths so wild and dangerous that the whole pop version becomes utterly boring (unless gossip is your thing).

And by dangerous, I refer to what Jung said, “One of the main functions of organised religion is to protect people against a direct experience of God.”

Why the hell would he say that?! Because, if you’re not careful, such an experience could happen to you, and then, as they say, God help you.

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¹ All materialists and physicalists claim to be scientific but science is not materialistic. The new cult of scientism is, though.

² A good book on this is The News: A User’s Manual by Alain de Botton

³ By the way, whereas in the old days of TV, when you were the consumer, now, because you are giving away all your information for free on social media and all those apps, you are the product. Welcome to the zombie apocalypse!

⁴ Gosh. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard someone criticising Scientology only to find out that they’ve never read any of it. If I had a nickel….

Scientology 1.0.0 (1952) – Continued

“I am nobody contemplating nothing” – 4th century B.C. gymnosophist

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Zeros and ones

Here’s a good book, Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea by Charles Seife. It’s got nothing to do with Scientology, but it sure gives a great overview of zero, and zero is one of the keys to Scientology 1.0.0.

Zero. Nothing. No thing?! No wonder Scientology is sometimes thought of as confusing. I mean, what has “nothing” got to do with anything? Well, everything, actually.

Search for Scientology on the internet. Surf the hits you get on Google and you will find here and there someone saying, “Ask anyone about Scientology and they can’t give you a simple answer.” In other words, those who are supposed to know either don’t know what it is or there is no answer because, well, “Scientology doesn’t mean anything, it’s a scam after all.”

“Knowing how to know” is the first usual definition of Scientology. It’s from scīre, to know and –logy, the study of, which comes from logia, from logos, which means, word. (Also, Logos which means, the word of God or communications of divine knowledge.)

This definition refers to the problem of ontology and human consciousness and what consciousness does: know. But not only knowing, because everything possibly does that to some degree, but knowing that you know.

Now. Maybe other living things do this trick too, knowing that they know, but here’s the kicker: knowing that you know, being aware of one’s awareness, leads eventually and inevitably to one day knowing you won’t know anything, because you’ll be dead! This can get one all tied up in knots; just ask Kant or Camus; they, and others of their ilk, get really into this problem, and it’s a bear!

In Scientology, this strange business of knowing that you know is discussed at length, and it’s discussed like this: viewpoint and the dimension point. You are the viewpoint, of course, which in Scientology is assigned the mathematical symbol 0, and the dimension point is assigned 1, (or whatever number you like, depending on what’s being looked at). “0” is a no-thing, and “1” is a some-thing.

The postulate in Scientology is that, as long as the 0 is actually being a viewpoint and isn’t collapsing into the 1, the dimension point (the thing being viewed), then all is well. But if the 0 gets confused with or collapses into the 1, or 1s, in any way, then you’ve got a problem. Without some distance, without some space, there’s no room to think. Man is distinguished by his ability to think and reason.Reason is the main tool. Without it, mankind, being without claws and fangs, is lost.

This is, at the core, what the Stoics are talking about when they say that no matter what happens outside of the self, the self can remain at a sufficient distance to keep perspective, to be clear-minded, and thus behave responsibly.

So then, how the heck does a viewpoint get confused with a dimension point? Well, it’s when the bottom drops out of your life for any of a million reasons and you don’t put it back together quite as nicely as it once was. Or maybe you don’t recover at all if the confusion is severe enough. Many, many people don’t; talk to a veteran with PTSD, for instance, or any of the legion of homeless people, who are mostly so shattered they can’t support themselves even if they had all the money needed to do so.

Anyway, on the surface, it’s all pretty obvious. Here are a few dimension points you might see right now if you looked around: your computer, the floor, a window, perhaps, or an item of furniture. It’s clear and obvious that you are not these things (points or objects) because you are looking at them, but the question is, who or what, exactly, is doing the looking? Nobody knows. At least not in the way one knows about objects. The subject of human consciousness is a deep, deep mystery to this very day. It can’t be quantified, or measured, tasted, touched, or anything else. No square nor compass can get at it. Hence the assignment of 0 to it. Then there’s an earthquake and all these dimension points go into chaos. After the after-shocks, you will probably recover and be fine, but for a few minutes there, you didn’t know where you were or what was happening to all those things; they got confused with you and you got confused with them.

Back to that zero. 0 means no wavelength, no space, no time, no anything. 0 is how mathematicians get to the really big numbers. Before the Wests’ discovery of 0, there could be no computers. If you don’t get a weird feeling after thinking seriously about this for about five minutes, then that would be weird.

The 1 factor, or any quantitative, is the objective measure of anything or just any thing in the physical universe that could be looked at by the 0. This includes mental image pictures too. Ah, it gets weirder and weirder. Make a picture in your head of the computer, or the window, or any object you can think of. Who or what is looking at it? Then place this object anywhere and then ask yourself, who or what put it there? Think of a cat. Put it on the floor. How did it get there? Now make it walk around. Who’s doing that?

As an aside, there’s a fellow by the name of Sam Harris. He’s a neuroscientist and philosopher and also a grave critic of my father and Scientology. He actually does a wonderful job of demonstrating these peculiar phenomena in his podcasts and a meditation app. He might be surprised to know that this whole business of viewpoints and dimension points is at the core of Scientology 1.0.0 thinking, rather than the sensationalised Sci-Fi stuff described in some documentaries and that he likes to refer to.

He will have also discovered by now that a lot of people have trouble meditating, and it’s partly this problem that the therapies and exercises in Scientology are designed to address. I don’t mean the exercise of meditation, by the way. Generally most forms of meditation have the practitioner looking inward, which is a no-no in Scientology 1.0.0.

Since I brought up meditation, I should make a few things clear. Ideally, the product of meditation is to leave the meditator feeling calm and alert. This isn’t often what happens, though. Rather, it may leave one feeling calmer but not always very alert because the meditator has been sitting for ten, twenty, or thirty minutes with their eyes closed and with themselves sitting inside their heads. Just as one is not an object, one is not their head, nor the inside of their head.

This is another form of introversion, and, as everyone knows, introverted is not the state one should be in in a fast-paced, busy world. I mean, it’s okay for a bookworm type who stays home all day, but not for most people.

Okay, back to zeros and ones. To finish making the point, if these two factors, 0 and 1, remain separate enough from each other, all is well. If they get too jumbled up, woe. From this, you could get a scale that goes sort of like this:

Level 1: The viewpoint thinks it’s a dimension point. This is where a person, at the lowest point of the level, feels apathetic and depressed (get out the Zoloft). Or, at the top part, sad, or often afraid, or in “flight mode” (pop those Xanax).

Level 2: The viewpoint is somewhat separate from some dimension points, but confused with too many other dimension points. Such as happens when you fight crime, or fight anything, all the time. This is where the person is often in that “fight mode,” often on guard, worrying about dimension points (like other people) not strictly under his or her control. This is your average cop or politician. Level 2 people self-medicate a lot, often with alcohol, more recently with pharmaceuticals.

Level 3: The viewpoint thinks it is some of the dimension points. A lot of people identify with what they own, for instance. “Hey! Lookit my new car!” But these dimension points can still be managed somewhat. This is the level where a person isn’t overly interested in life, tends to be too cautious and takes things a little too seriously. He or she can get bored easily.

Level 4: The viewpoint is being a viewpoint, knows it’s a viewpoint, and is interested in looking at dimension points, knowing it’s not a dimension point. This would be the level of a person who is interested in life and feels pretty optimistic about most things, where and when justified.

(For a more in-depth view of these levels, see the next article, Space, Emotion and Well-Being.)

The experiences of Levels 1–5 are all because of too great a confusion of the 0 with the 1. That is to say, the viewpoint with the dimension point, the person with the object, the subjective with the objective, you with others or you with stuff, and so on.

Note: Materialists are always Level 2s and Level 1s, as are quite a few atheists and fundamentalists of any stripe. It’s mostly these levels that have the most problems with things like mysticism and other people’s religions. For Level 2s, the world is a dangerous place where one must fight for survival by attacking and stopping things that they don’t understand and can’t control. For Level 1s, the world is a frightening place, requiring refuge from reality in cults, drugs, or, most often, the giant, all-powerful state and their armies of police.

Excessive/obsessive control is the name of the game for the Level 2 person. They seek control by dominance, usually using force or the threat of force. Level 2s tend to be predatory.

Level 1s obsess about leadership and things that can protect them from a dangerous world. Level 1s tend to be prey. Ironically. Level 1 people always choose Level 2 people to be their protectors. Talk about inviting the fox into the henhouse!

Because they, the people at Level 2, are collapsing into dimension points, and because dimension points, that is to say, objects, are made up of force (we live in a force-based universe: everything is either held together with it or is drifting away, or flying away, because of it), they come to believe that the use of force, domination, is the only method by which to control life. These are the people who always need there to be a “war” on everything: the “war on terrorism”, the “war on poverty”, the “war on drugs”, and on and on ad nauseam. There are always, always better ways to handle problems than the use of excessive force.

For Level 1s, it’s worse, because they can’t use force very well (they can and do if it’s safe enough to do so), so nothing can be dominated. The main operation, therefore, is to pretend there isn’t any force in the world. This is where negation, as different from domination, is used as a means of “control”. Then, in the lower half of Level 1, one behaves like an object, easily pushed around. That’s apathy. In the upper half of Level 1, one is frightened all the time but also acts somewhat like an object, as any and all action taken is wholly in response to imagined stimuli. Sometimes the object of fear is real, but for a person stuck at Level 1, usually not.

This last level, Level 1, is more dangerous to society because it will support authoritarianism. Authoritarian groups and governments destroy societies, such as has been done by the U.S. federal state for over a hundred and sixty years, since the war of 1861-1865/66. (Actually, most people who’ve studied this see the point at which the federal government stepped away from its duties to the people, as being the Wilson administration (1913–1921). The truth is, all large groups, such as the state, with the usual  government monopoly on violence, inevitably walk down this path, step by small step, to full authoritarianism. And, if not stopped, it will eventually devolve into totalitarianism.)

On the lighter side, Level 3s are your parents telling you to get a good job, get a 401k, find yourself a nice boy or girl, get married and settle down, raise a family, and don’t make waves (if you don’t absolutely have to).

Level 4s are more capable of reason. Level 3s don’t like change, but the Level 4 individual knows that change is the only constant in this universe and so it is the height of folly not to learn more about it and learn to work with it. This is a primary interest of the Level 4 person, along with a strong interest in things like beauty, truth, etc.

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The aha!

So there it is, zero, or 0. This is very weird stuff, not being stuff, especially where it eventually leads.

Even though this 0 idea has been around for thousands of years and many, many religions and philosophies revolve around it, it’s relatively new to the West, which didn’t have a 0 to think about until around 500 to 600 years ago, which was approximately when Western civilisation began to progress into the Modern era. Coincidence? Maybe, but I don’t think so.

But. But “where it eventually leads,” I said, and there’s the rub. I mean, why bother with the whole complicated business in the first place? Why say “0” and not say “the self” or “the I” or just “the viewpoint” like I did above? Why deal with this zero idea.

Because one of the goals of Scientology is something called pan-determinism. Actually, the goal is be a pan-determined individual.

There are three basic types of determinisms in Scientology 1.0.0: Other-determinism, self-determinism, and, the brass ring, pan-determinism (for more on this, see the fourth article, Pan-Determinism at Last). This is the state of being where you can connect all the dots of all the things everywhere and find no fault. For “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

Other-determinism is the determinism of others and things. This type of determinism, you either just let it be, or work with it through the use of reason. It’s the determinism of the “it” universe, the universe you’re looking at, the dimension of people and objects.

Self-determinism is the determinism of the self, obviously. It’s the universe of you, yes, but a version of you operating inside of space and time and using energy and matter.

Pan-determinism is the determinism that stands outside of both of the above-described universes. It’s the universe of no matter, no force or energy and stands outside of space and time, hence “0.”

Obviously, there are good things and bad things like love and pain, but if you think hard about it, all these things are, at their centre, states of mind, what could be called considerations. Naturally, Pan-Determinism would be a near impossible accomplishment, but all one needs to do is get to that height of perception just once, just enough to know that it’s true and real, and then, once back on earth, get busy connecting all the dots of all the things, as much as one possibly can. By means of this process, individual by individual, we could create the true brotherhood of man, organise, or allow, the coordination of all living things, and achieve balance with the material and natural world. We’d still have earthquakes, get eaten by tapeworms, get frightened, have fights, and difficulties, but we’d be able to see the good as well as the bad and stitch it all back together again without being broken for too long, if at all.

So in Scientology 1.0.0, there is a whole series of therapies and exercises invented to work with an individual to get to the aha! of the matter. The “aha!” [cognition] experience happens at Level 4. If a person is at the bottom part of Level 1, it’s pretty difficult to help them up. But if you’re in the upper part of Level 1, through 3, various of these therapies and exercises are designed to help you there. If you are already at Level 4, it’s easy for you to get this experience of new awareness, but you still need to study how things work so that you don’t drop to a lower level.

You see, pan-determinism is the state wherein a person can really experience the phenomena represented in Scientology as the infinity symbol, ∞. As any mathematician will tell you, calculate with 0s long enough (as described in that book, Zero) and you get to the inevitable infinity equations. Infinity doesn’t go on forever, by the way, or is just really big, like the whole universe. It’s an idea that stands outside of time and space, it’s an experience.¹

This full-on experience, the state of pan-determinism, is the goal of Scientology 1.0.0, as it is the goal of many other practises and disciplines. It is designed to be a fairly reliable method of eventually “seeing God,” as they say (a bit dramatic to put it this way, but there it is). Scientology 1.0.0 is the technology for achieving this state, and it is all written out in such a manner as to be acceptable and understandable by the Western mind. The steps as laid out are designed to take you there gently, so you don’t end up an ego-maniac, or bouncing off the walls of a padded cell. That’s what’s new in Scientology 1.0.0; all the steps and procedures, the therapies, and the exercises. They are completely unique.

Maybe you are now thinking that this guy, me, is just another Scientology apologist, and maybe you’re right, but if you read my first article (Introduction), you’d know that I’m not selling to you, or trying to convince you, that it works, or that it’s true. I’m making an argument for people to take the time to effect a closer inspection rather than just going with the usual “write-off” of many other articles to be found.

Because “seeing God” (dramatic, I know), or experiencing true infinity, ∞, or becoming pan-determined, will save us all no matter how we get there. So long as it’s under our own steam (self-determined).

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Carl Jung said, “One of the main functions of organised religion is to protect people against a direct experience of God.” I don’t know if he was kidding, or being cynical, or what, but it grabbed my attention because something about what he was saying rings true. I think he said this because having this experience all at once can be so damaging to the average psyche.

But what if, if, it were possible for most of us to have this experience without such a risk? What then?

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¹ Psychotropics sometimes deliver a mimicry of this experience, but every adept will tell you that the real deal comes from processes, therapies, and dealing with zero, not an exomolecular compound (although molecules are involved, it’s just that they must be nudged and nudged gently by the viewpoint without the violent introduction of neurotoxins).