Arthur Ronald Conway Hubbard

The Wild Mind – Part III

Scientology 1.0.0 – chapter 10

“The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Enthusiasm is one of the most powerful engines of success. When you do a thing, do it with all your might. Put your whole soul into it. Stamp it with your own personality. Be active, be energetic, be enthusiastic and faithful, and you will accomplish your object. Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Spirit, mind, body

In Scientology 1.0.0, there are three things that are very clearly defined. These are the spirit, mind, and body.

Definitions:

Spirit: a thetan, after the Greek symbol of thought ( θ ) and spirit — theta.

Thetan: the awareness of awareness unit, which has all potentialities; it is the being who is the individual who handles and lives in the body; it has no mass, no wave length, no energy, and no time or location in space except by consideration or postulate (from the technical bulletin of 3 July 1959).

Postulate: a self-determined thought that starts, changes, or stops past, present, or future efforts; it is also a prediction (from the book Advanced Procedures and Axioms).

Mind: the communication and control system between the thetan and its environment; it is a network of communications and pictures, energies, and masses that are brought into being by the activities of the thetan versus the physical universe or other thetans, the purpose of which is to pose and resolve problems relating to the survival of the organism (from the book The Fundamentals of Thought).

Body: the body is an identifying form (for the thetan) that facilitates control of, the communication of, and with the experience of the masses and pressures of the physical universe; it is the thetan’s communication centre (from the technical bulletin of 3 July 1959). That is, think of the body as a set of virtual reality goggles used to experience actual reality rather than virtual, and, along with haptics, audio, and optics, you also get taste and odour perceptions.

By the way, “thetan” and “theta” have replaced the terms “spirit” and “spiritual” in Scientology 1.0.0, not due to an obscure need for a coded language or an attempt to “be different.” Scientology is a new subject that discusses old topics, but in a unique way, in order to present new procedures by which people can rid themselves of past upsets and get into good shape. Avoiding the garbled baggage of loaded, and usually misunderstood, words like “spirit” is very helpful in order to do this.

So. In life, one wants three things: a physical body that survives for as long as possible, a well-functioning mind, and the opportunity to expand. To expand materially, the person would accumulate, let us say, more and more stuff, space, or influence (social power). The mind wants more and more experience and knowledge.

For the spirit, though, what might it want?

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Mysticism – the ultimate in being

Mysticism is one of these garbled and loaded terms. Scientology is a form of mysticism, but we cannot refer to it as such because of the widespread misinterpretation of mysticism in the West, which is often associated with pseudo-swamis, woo-woo, and similar nonsense. But the truth is that, at its core, it is a mystic discipline. This subject’s relegation to the dusty attic, filled with b-movies and fringe kitsch, is one of the greatest losses to Western civilisation.
 
If you are one of those inclined to dismiss such things as mysticism or a person who feels I have invalidated Scientology by calling it such, I hope you will bear with me as I describe what mysticism actually is.

Mysticism is the union with or absorption into the Deity or the absolute, or the spiritual apprehension of knowledge inaccessible to the intellect, as may be attained through contemplation and self-surrender and by which means true wisdom is obtained. (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.)

In Scientology 1.0.0 terms, this is getting into complete communication with the 8th dynamic.

This entails more than just understanding and discussing the 8th dynamic or coyly acknowledging it with a nod or wink, as some people do. Rather than approaching the 8th dynamic as a deity, assuming the role of a god, or engaging in egoistic or narcissistic discourse, communion with the 8th dynamic embodies complete unity, a comprehensive understanding of reality, and the accompanying serenity that goes with that understanding. Complete communication with the 8th dynamic involves fully embodying it, that is, being the 8th dynamic. It is a return to “home.” It is an experience that is neither humbling nor “empowering”; it is simply known as isness across all dynamics (see Chapter 4).

This level of being, or, in Scientology terms, beingness, is immortality, folks! This immortality does not pertain to the body or the mind, but rather to the “sacred of the most sacred thing most intimate,” which is you, the only entity capable of knowing God.

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Spirit versus materialism

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 with others 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 Glorious 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’s most important, and it’s the mystical experience in particular that is most significant.

Additionally, if we are lucky or hardworking enough to have any mystical experience, then the trick is how to manifest the mystical experience in everyday practical life, especially in a challenging and chaotic world.

The materialist experience is, at best, a pretty beige and vanilla sort of thing, that is, 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 such a degree of passionate and compassionate understanding as to permit a person to actually change up their reality and reorder their whole lives in such a way as to possibly bring about a much improved existence for not just themselves but for the whole of society.

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The “death” and “rebirth” of God

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 aeons, but it is generally a road not navigable 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 using chemicals.

Side note about “better living through chemistry.” As I have mentioned in a previous chapter, the use of entheogenic chemicals, like psilocybin and lysergic acid diethylamide, causes experiences that are generated chemically by means of molecules produced externally rather than the other way around. In other words, there are exercises and disciplines that produce these chemicals, or their correlates, in the body as part of natural processes. It is thus a very different experience for those undergoing chemical changes exogenously than for those experiencing chemical effects endogenously due to the degree of cause. One can be said to be at the cause of self-induced chemical changes but at the effect of ingested chemistry. Some people may benefit from using these chemicals if they engage with them in a true and honest quest for a better understanding of life, but it still won’t be the same as getting to these perceptions under their own steam. Sadly, most people lazily take ayahuasca or psilocybin and get visions, but then resume life as if nothing transformative occurred, returning to the habits and routines of a non-optimum existence. Here, I am referring to the actual mystic experience that one attains through hard study and dedicated contemplation. It is a completely different way of thinking about how to make long-term life changes.

To continue. In modern times, a number of mystical movements emerged in Europe during the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, with Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry being the most prominent. Many of these movements existed in North America during the time before the British North American colonies became the United States. The British crown then lost its foothold in the New World in no small part because of them. However, in the 1860s, the U.S. fought the first truly industrialised war, where material produced in factories will arguably outweigh strategies and manpower as factors in fighting and winning. In a scant four years, more than 785,000 souls were carried off, which was a massive shock to the young country (as well as deeply interesting for many other nations wishing to become much bigger 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), which is not very surprising after so much death and destruction, clearly the result of very unenlightened, materialistic behaviour (despite the fact that both the Northern Union and Southern Confederacy claimed they had “God on their side”).

This period served to bring into stark perspective a phenomenon often referred to as the “death of God.” Hegel announced this in his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), and Nietzsche warned of it in The Gay Science (1882).

The death of God, at least as far as Nietzsche was concerned, is a warning that when man begins to view his ability to reason as the soul cause in the shaping of reality, this will lead only to intellectual hubris and disastrously unhinged ideologies, such as Marxism, which posits power as the only dynamic in society, and postmodernism, which holds that subjectivity and, as a result, feelings are the only reality.

In addition to these paradigm shifts, one can see that when two armies fight at such a profound cost to both sides, each claiming God is on their side, some degree of spiritually existential chaos must ensue, leading to the conclusion that God must indeed be dead. That is to say, if such horrors can occur on Earth, then God must not exist.

This crisis of meaning, which lasts to this day, was an unfortunate side-effect of the Enlightenment, which emphasised rationalism, resulting in the rise of the Counter-Enlightenment (Rousseau and Kant, et al.), which emphasised metaphysics but often in a perplexing and confused way only comprehensible to the devout academic. As a result, the whole issue of higher power became tangled and enigmatic, giving rise to the spread of materialism and its weak-tea sister, “rational atheism” (there has to be no more stupid concept than rational atheism, because to be a rational atheist, one has to literally know everything, or at least assume such is possible). By no coincidence, and possibly even in order to fill this yawning cultural vacuum (“God-shaped hole”), there was a revival of mysticism.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, as the West was discovering Eastern theology (Hinduism) and psychology (Buddhism) and the mysticism inherent in them, some began to view it increasingly as the only way to restore true meaning to the Western experience before it was too late. Actually, rediscovered is the more correct term. Sumer, Babylonia, Egypt, and other civilisations, all of which would inform Greek culture (which is the origin of Western culture), all absorbed mystic information from the Indus Valley civilisation.

Many of the people involved in these mystical 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 picture. Events as horrendously unimaginable, perhaps, as WWI, the Soviet Union, Italian fascism, Japanese militarism, Nazi Germany, WWII, Pol Pot, North Korea, Communist China, Facebook, TikTok… Good thing none of that stuff ever happened.

But they did happen because materialism won the culture war, has won until this day, and will continue to win unless…

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Enthusiasm

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 sadly in a dark world doing “good deeds” (usually stupidly using lots of force like in the old TV show, Kung-Fu) 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” activist or 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). When one can perceive things with this degree of clarity, then they can become truly useful.

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 higher level of understanding leads to true utility for oneself and society. This is what Scientology 1.0.0 is all about. This begins at the top part of Level 4 of the tone scale and is the adventure that awaits for one above that. This, then, is your mystic.

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Concrete benefits

Most mystics throughout history pursued their quests apart and away 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, a mystic who is charismatic and particularly talented at teaching or leading returns from their experiences with the power and ability to convey the culturally, socially, and politically explosive information they obtained, 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’s perception of reality but all the improved systems and technologies that go with that shift.

The mystical journey, though, is something that is impossible for bad or confused people to achieve. Ever.

A quick note about bad apples. Evil is always a fraction, whereas good is always the whole. Another way of saying this is that evil is evil because it invalidates and denies good, while good embraces evil. To further elucidate, the perception of evil people limits them to the belief that destruction and failure are the only possible outcomes in life and that they pursue all forms of creation solely to manifest chaos. The enlightened adept, on the other hand, always seeks order and creation but retains the ability to be destructive, recognising that all people are both good and evil. Destruction is not the go-to solution for the adept, as it is for those who are not just unenlightened but bad. The mystical experience requires the whole of both good and evil; one must be both the light and the darkness; there is no such thing as an enlightened person who “couldn’t hurt a fly.” Such a “gentle” soul is, in fact, guaranteed to be deadly: there’s your enabler, future snitch, prison camp guard, or authoritarian dictator for sure. The adept, on the other hand, is quite capable of astounding levels of destruction but simply chooses instead to be creative.

Anyway, to continue. 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.

Furthermore, no one can achieve any lasting benefits from this experience if they do not also lead the mystical 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 so many bills”), or the mind (TV and smart phone screen addiction), or the body (“I just can’t live without shopping, 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 for most people, there are also no short cuts, as with chemicals; seeking a shortcut short-circuits the process. It is my belief that achieving and living the mystic life by as many people as possible as soon as possible is ultimately the only way forward out of the levels of social degradation we are suffering right now.

Unfortunately, many people are disappointed in their efforts to attain this level of awareness, 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 slew of absolutely new and hard rules that come with it. New to them, that is. Since the beginning of time, the rules have remained constant; they are known as morals.

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In summary

In conclusion, ritual, magic, myth, and mysticism are steps to actually getting here, “in the now.” This means being in the present moment, right here, on Earth. People who are suffering too much are not present, a concept that popular culture refers to , somewhat sloppily, as “mindfulness.”
 
Like all such foundational rungs in the ladder of progress, mysticism should not be dismissed as some strange anomaly of the past but rather integrated into the thinking of modern civilisation. However, because modern civilisation is significantly more complex than its predecessors, it naturally produces overwhelmed individuals who attempt to eliminate elements such as art (observe brutalist architecture), magic (“Get real, kid, there’s no such thing as Santa Claus”), and religion (replaced by the worship of hedonism, money, the state, and Marxist ideologies: “wokeism”). These individuals often find themselves collapsing very quickly, as was the case with the people of Rome in the fifth century B.C., and as we are doing now.

But wait! Here’s the good news: the mystic journey is now available to more people than ever before.

Back in the 1970s, when I first began looking into mysticism, I also began to study Scientology 1.0.0 in earnest. As I began to study Scientology more seriously, I realised I had to study more and more of the subjects leading up to and connected to it, such as art, religion, philosophy, logic, ethics, physics, psychology, and so on. It was quite hard to find comprehensive materials in those days, back in the 70s and through the 80s, that were both accessible 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 ones became easier and easier. Then came the internet.

With the internet, I was able to sift through extensive book collections to find what I deemed pertinent. Eventually, I was able to access articles, blogs, podcasts, and entire conversations that streamed, featuring a growing number of individuals with similar interests, particularly those addressing order versus chaos and enlightenment in a world that is becoming increasingly unglued.

In the past seven years, since 2014 and the acceleration of ideologies designed to wreck Western civilisation, there are now new voices who, though entirely ignored by mainstream media channels, except to be excoriated, 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. That is, 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 comes with that, but the absolute pleasure and enthusiasm with which it goes hand in hand.

For those who are studying Scientology, I advise getting more deeply educated about all the subjects that connect to it once you’ve achieved enough stability to designate vital resources to the endeavour. For those studying those other subjects, I advise looking into the works of my father because he brings not just great clarity to the table but processes and procedures that put one in much better shape to practice the art of good living ”the mystical life.”
 
All this information and all these conversations have been around for thousands of years and are finally, for the time being, available in easily accessible forms on the internet. For the time being, anyway, don’t believe that the powers that be aren’t just itching to shut it all down. Getting a clear idea as to how to achieve a markedly better way of living has never been easier if one is willing to do the work.

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