Arthur Ronald Conway Hubbard

Mysticism

Scientology 1.0.0 – part 10

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Now here’s the subject that plays the biggest role of all in Scientology 1.0.0.

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First, for additional colour, some personal background:

In the mid to late 1970s, after eight years of travel at sea, my parents moved, with their small administrative staff, to a place called La Quinta (Spanish for “the fifth”— always wondered why it was called that) in the Coachella Valley, located in Southern California.ocated in Southern California.

The property was actually several small parcels of land situated quite near to the La Quinta Resort and golf course, which, though somewhat run down by this time, like much of the U.S. (the 70s were a period of financial austerity, inflation, highest ever crime rates, gas shortages, and rapidly crumbling infrastructure — hey! sort of like today!) It was still a fairly exclusive neighbourhood and had a special 1930s feel about it. All in all, it was a quiet, private place, perfect for my father’s continuing projects and research.

It may seem strange to some people, but our family, by the mid to late 1960s, had been more or less absorbed into the larger goings-on of the slowly forming Scientology 2.0, the institution of the Church of Scientology. By the time we all moved aboard the Royal Scotsman (later renamed the Apollo, a 327-foot twin-screw motor “yacht” -keel laid in 1927)¹, we had effectively become more a part of the crew than a family, although we had special privileges, such as our own living quarters, and, for a short while, even a tutor. I tell you this because it wasn’t until that move to La Quinta that circumstances contributed to my forming a much more personal relationship with my parents, if not the other members of the family. The result was that, over the course of two and a half years, from 1976 to 1979, I got to spend a great deal of time with my dad.

I was 18 and in terms of experience, it was a real turning point for me. From the earliest days on the ship, I felt “swept up” in matters beyond my control, and as a result, I had lost any real interest in Scientology. I wanted to be a painter, and all this other activity just seemed to get in my way. But now, as I was spending time with my father, I was getting an understanding of all the things that had happened up to that point. As it turned out, this would set me on a completely different path than I might have taken otherwise. I’ll get into more detail about this in a later article, but for now I am mentioning this because this is when my dad told me that Scientology was, in fact, a mysticism.

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Mysticism – the ultimate in being

In Scientology 1.0.0, there are three things that are very clearly defined. Although not necessarily exactly separate in any actual sense, as if they were each in a sealed box, like many subjects, they are separated in the abstract so that they may be studied. These are: spirit, mind, and body.

In life, one wants two things: physical (body) survival for as long as possible and the opportunity to expand. To expand physically, the person would accumulate, let us say, more and more stuff, or space, or even influence (power). The mind wants more and more experience and knowledge. The spirit, what might it want?

Mysticism is the belief that union with or absorption into the Deity or the absolute, or the spiritual apprehension of knowledge inaccessible to the intellect, may be attained through contemplation and self-surrender. (From Middle English, from Old French mystique, or via Latin from Greek mustikos, from mustēs ‘initiated person’ from muein ‘initiate’, akin to myein to initiate, teach. (This definition dates from the late 17th century.)

This, my friends, is immortality! Not of the body, certainly, nor perhaps the mind even, but of the “sacred of the most sacred thing most intimate”, the only thing that can know God… you.

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So. There is art, and there are rituals; there is magic and myth, but only a very few fortunate souls are also aware of this experience that transcends all things.

Those things, art, etc., are both personal and shared to varying degrees, but there is an experience that cannot be shared and is only personal, and that is the mystical experience, a direct connexion (or re-connexion) with the Whole Show.

Now, I’ve been pitching my views and arguments in favour of this particular experience and against those who say that all reality is matter: materialism. Materialism is as silly an idea – albeit less amusing – as the one where the world literally sits on the backs of elephants, the elephants stand on the backs of turtles, and then it’s turtles all the way down, forever. At the end of the day, it’s the spiritual experience that matters, and this experience, the mystical one, matters in particular.

Also, how to manifest that experience in a difficult world.

The materialist experience is, at best, a pretty beige and vanilla sort of thing, when it’s not leading us to the prison camps or even the Gates of Hell (there are levels below materialism such as determinism and nihilism). However, there is another way of looking at the world that opens the door to so great a degree of passionate and compassionate understanding as to permit a person to actually reorder their reality, their whole lives, in such a way as to possibly bring about a much improved existence for us all.

This understanding and experience that transcends all time and space is described in the Vedas, specifically the Rigveda, I believe, with a description of disciplines and exercises to help the adept achieve this level of consciousness – or supra-consciousness, actually. Many, many beings have achieved this through the eons, but it is generally not available to the main population due to the levels of dedication it demands. But imagine a world so advanced that ordinary people could gain this ability, or even a glimpse of it (without the use of chemicals²); it would transform the world!

In reference to recent times, there were a number of mystical movements in Europe in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, chief among them Rosicrucianism, and many of the same, or similar, in North America as the British North American colonies became the United States (no coincidence here, seriously). In the 1860s, though, the world’s first truly industrialised war was fought. More than 785,000 souls were carried off in a scant four years, which was a massive shock to the young country (and deeply interesting for many other nations wishing to become empires – uh oh). Partially as a result of this holocaust, new mystical orders came into existence (along with an “occult” revival; more on this later), not very surprising after so much death.

This period served to bring into stark perspective a phenomenon often referred to as the “death of God” (announced by Hegel in his Phenomenology of Spirit and later, warned of by Nietzsche in The Gay Science). This crisis of meaning was an unfortunate side-effect of the Enlightenment, resulting in the rise of the Counter-Enlightenment (Rousseau and Kant, et al.), then materialism (and its weak-tea sister, “rational atheism”). By no coincidence, and possibly even in order to fill this yawning cultural vacuum (“God-shaped hole”), there was a revival of mysticism.

As Eastern Mysticism was being discovered (actually rediscovered to some degree³) by the West in the 18th and 19th centuries, it increasingly came to be seen, by certain individuals, as the only answer to bringing true meaning back into the Western experience before it was too late.

Many of the people involved in these groups understood, more than the average person, that this level of mass killing, as witnessed by the War of Secession (usually misnamed the American Civil War), could only occur if there was a crisis of spirit – for what else could allow murder on such a scale – and if not corrected, could possibly result in events so inconceivably horrible as to be impossible to imagine. (Events as horrendously unimaginable, perhaps, as WWI, the Soviet Union, Italian Fascism, Japanese Militarism, Nazi Germany, WWII, Communist China, Pol Pot, Twitter…)

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Mysticism is essentially man’s deepest need to know. Not as knowledge used to gain any kind of dominance over anything, but for its own sake. In other words, wisdom. (However, wisdom, when applied, also means knowing how to use technologies properly and intelligently, whatever they may be.)

A life lived with wisdom doesn’t look anything like what is depicted in pop culture, movies, and television as a grim responsibility to be born regardless; to walk, usually alone, in a grim world doing “good deeds,” (usually using lots of force) or something equally foolish.

What a life lived with wisdom looks like is when one is enthusiastically engaged in living.

Enthusiasm comes from late Latin enthusiasmus ‘inspiration, frenzy’ from Greek enthousiasmos, from enthousiazein “be inspired or possessed by a god” (based on theos “god”).

This is how you know you are getting to know God.

When this way of looking at the world falls away, it’s life telling you you are sinning.

Enthusiastically embracing the world is the essence of wisdom and will lead one eventually, if managed well, to even higher levels of experience.

This is a whole different thing from happiness, though. All one’s life, one is told that happiness is something that you should seek, that you should do this or that, and as a result, you’ll be happy. For what it’s worth, happiness happens at any level; you can be happy being miserable (average teenager), bored out of your mind (average married couple), or even happy hating (average “progressive” politician). On the other hand, interest, cheerfulness, and enthusiasm are levels of perception, not happiness. At these levels, one can actually see what’s there to be seen rather than trying to peer through some fog, as is done at the lower levels of perception (see the article, Space, Emotion and Well-being).

Ultimately, man is a seeker, a seeker after knowledge, knowledge for its own sake. Again, not just the sort of knowledge that provides improved survival on the physical plane of existence, but the knowledge of knowing itself. In other words, knowing how to know. This is what Scientology 1.0.0 is about. This begins at the top part of Level 4 of the tone scale and is the adventure that awaits above that. This, then, is your mystic.

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Most mystics throughout history pursued their quests apart from society, and as a result, society had only a hazy understanding of what they were up to. Even though he or she will “return” from this experience, if achieved properly, with a completely different and more fulfilling way of being, it won’t necessarily manifest in the larger society in any miraculous way. Every so often, though, the mystic returns from their experiences with culturally, socially, and politically explosive information, such as Jesus famously did and Moses before him (this is the dreaded “x-factor” authoritarians have nightmares about). But, more importantly, it is the type of knowledge that, by definition, benefits everyone by allowing individuals, one at a time, to come into complete alignment with all that is true, bit by bit, more and more, gradually changing not only society but its very interface with reality. It is pure wisdom to do this, even if you don’t return with anything in particular to teach, and it is also something that is impossible to achieve by bad or confused people. Ever.⁴

This level of perception and awareness, this state of being, enthusiasm, is achieved through Scientology 1.0.0 techniques designed to first bring the self under control. If you don’t have the correct level of control over the things in your life that are yours to control (such as yourself and your stuff), then the result is chaos for you and all the misery that goes with it.

Also, no one can achieve any lasting benefits from this experience if they do not also lead the mystic life, which is a level of self-control and personal organisation that is very sophisticated and very rarely achieved in the West (or anywhere else, really). If one mismanages money (endless debt), or work (“I hate my job; I’d be doing something else if I didn’t have bills”), or the mind (screen fixations), or the body (“I just can’t live without sugar, cigarettes, alcohol, sex, etc.”), or life (always fighting against this or that rather than for anything), then there is absolutely no way one can get there. And there are also no short cuts, as with chemicals. Seeking a shortcut short-circuits the process.

It is my firm belief that achieving and living the mystic life by as many people as possible as soon as possible is ultimately the only way forward.

Unfortunately, many people are disappointed in their efforts to attain this, either because they haven’t been shown how to properly achieve the experience or, if they have gotten a tiny whiff of it (usually by means of chemicals), they are not trained in how to hold on to the experience by learning the inevitable new rules that come with it (new to them, the rules have always been the same since the very beginning).

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To sum up. Art, ritual, magic, myth, and mysticism are steps to getting – here.

Like all such foundational rungs in the ladder of progress, they are not dropped but incorporated into the rungs above. Civilisation, though, being very much more complicated than what preceded it, sometimes breeds people who attempt to cut away these rungs and then find themselves collapsing very quickly, such as happened with Rome in the first century B.C. and such as we are doing right now.

But wait! Here’s the good news:

After that time I spent with my father, I continued looking into mysticism. I began to study Scientology 1.0.0 in earnest, and I began to study more and more all the subjects leading up to it and connected to it, such as art, religion, philosophy, logic, ethics, physics, psychology, and on and on. It was quite hard to find materials in those days, back in the 70s and through the 80s, that were both comprehensive and understandable so that I could make the connexions between all these seemingly disparate subjects. However, as time went on, I noticed that finding old works and discovering new works became easier and easier. And then came the internet.

With the internet, I could sift through vast catalogues of books to select what I thought was relevant and eventually come to access articles, blogs, podcasts, and whole conversations that could be streamed featuring increasing numbers of people who are interested in the same sorts of subjects in the same sort of way, particularly as they deal with order versus disorder and enlightenment.

In the past seven years, since 2014, and the acceleration of ideas designed to wreck Western civilisation, there are now new voices who, though almost entirely ignored by mainstream media channels, are rapidly putting many of the pieces together and giving out their ideas and sources in a way that one needn’t waste a lot of time trying to find them. This way, people are countering the proliferation of bad ideas and, I think, laying more firm foundations that will ultimately allow more and more of us to take the mystic path, so long as we are able to “clear the decks” of our lives enough to do so. The ultimate payoff: understanding life better and getting to have not only the peace of mind that may come with that, but the absolute pleasure and enthusiasm with which it goes hand in hand.

This information and these conversations have been around for thousands of years and are finally, for the time being, available in easily accessible forms on the internet. Getting a clear idea as to how to achieve a markedly better life has never been easier if one is willing to do the research.

But then you probably already know this, because otherwise how did you find and read this whole blog?

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Next up: more stuff

¹ The Royal Scotsman was the third of a number of sea-going vessels purchased to be used as bases of operation for the recently created Sea Organisation. The Sea Organisation was the group originally created to operate the ships and boats that the senior management of the Church of Scientology relocated to after conflicts with the U.S. and U.K. governments. The S.O. was to eventually take over management of the Church of Scientology.

² As I may have mentioned in a previous article; the use of entheogenic chemicals, like psilocybin and lysergic acid diethylamide, creates an experience that is generated chemically within the body rather than the other way round. Some people may benefit from using these chemicals. However, I’m talking about a completely different way of thinking about how to make long-term changes.

³ Sumer, Babylonia, Egypt, and other civilisations, all of which would in turn inform Greek culture, seemed (possibly) to have absorbed mystic information from the Indus Valley Civilisation.

⁴ Evil is always a fraction, whereas good is always the whole. The whole is so necessary to the mystical experience. Unlike evil, which rejects the good, the good always embraces evil but chooses not to do any. True good never “can not” do evil; beware the “good” person who so righteously insists they “never hurt a fly.” There’s your future informant or prison camp guard.