Arthur Ronald Conway Hubbard

The Wild Mind – XX, The Final Part

Scientology 1.0.0 – chapter 27

“To know that we know what we know, and to know that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.” – Nicolaus Copernicus

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I’ve been around, and I’ve met and talked with many people. It’s not surprising when the subject of Scientology comes up, and it does come up because, of course, there aren’t that many famous Hubbards. Usually people know they don’t know what it is and ask, so I tell them. If, however, they have, for some reason or another, an upset with or about Scientology, it’s me that then asks them, “Well, what is it?” and every time they don’t know.

I’ve also asked this question of some quite well-known antagonists, who you’d expect to be better informed, but they didn’t know either. What many enemies of Scientology all appear to have in common is that they’re sure they know what it is. But when failing to offer a definition, unlike normal people, they will insist on going on and on about their upsets with it. Whatever “it” is.

Apparently, a permanently upset person, regardless of whether there is something to actually be upset about or not, will usually not realise that they don’t know something. The very fact of the upset’s persistence in some way seems to block the necessary insight that there is something more to know and that the upset may, at least in part, be grounded not just in not knowing something but, more seriously, not knowing that one doesn’t know.

Or perhaps they just don’t care that they don’t know, which is also often the situation, because their main point, after all, is that “Scientology is bad and should be stopped.” In any case, I’m suggesting that maybe not merely ignorance but the ignorance of ignorance could itself be the source of a serious degree of upset; after all, “burn it all down!” is the universal cry of all angry people everywhere. That being said, I’m not against changing things for the better; I’m just saying that maybe if so-called “activists” were better informed, they might be less destructive and more creative.

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Not knowing

Knowing one doesn’t know is the beginning of wisdom.

I believe that to come up with the most effective solutions to life’s problems, one must first become keenly, even painfully, aware of what one doesn’t know. Discovering you don’t know something is a fantastic leap forward in one’s treasure trove of personal knowledge, paradoxical as that seems. The man who knows that he doesn’t know is light years ahead of the guy who doesn’t know he doesn’t know. This fabulous discovery might be the first step in true learning; it’s the only way to really find out about anything.
  
Luckily, how to spot one’s own ignorance is pretty simple: things aren’t going well.
 
That’s it; that’s all. If you’re doing pretty well and life is calm and good, it’s because you know what you need to know—for now anyway.
 
If, on the other hand, you’re having a tough time, then your job is to find out what you don’t know. Sure, if you’re in the occasional tight spot and things get rough, well, that’s just life. But constantly getting into dire situations, perpetually having a hard time, or always “living in your upset,” something many activists seem to think is a virtue, means only one thing: you don’t know something. Maybe quite a few somethings.

A quick trick in the Making Things Better playbook is this one: if you ask yourself what’s wrong and you come up with an answer but then nothing gets better, well, it was the wrong answer. People can go years and years thinking their answer is correct while nothing changes and remain completely sure that’s because there’s no more to know, which is sad because the right answer will always make things better, even if you’re in chronic pain or on your deathbed.

One can also be prevented from or blocked from discovering information, as in the case of, for instance, the lockdowns. Anyone trying to investigate ran into constantly altered data, obfuscation, and even outright obstruction to finding out about anything: somebody didn’t want us to have the correct and relevant information. That right there—alterations, obfuscations, and deflections? Those are themselves vital pieces of information, as was the strident authoritarianism of the “experts,” because now you know the situation is definitely not what it is presented to be. People might be uninformed, but they are not stupid, and it is true that if they have the correct data, they will usually act accordingly, and the lockdowns would have ended far sooner than they did.

For whatever reason, the failure to know what you can and could know will always result in things not going as smoothly as they might.

So, the first step towards wisdom would be the discovery that there is something to know.

Knowledge, however, is not wisdom.

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Language and words

But wisdom does begin with knowledge.

For there to be any knowledge, though, there must be a precisely defined system for conveying it.

As everyone knows, language is the principal method of human communication, consisting of words used in a structured and conventional way and conveyed by speech, writing, signal, or gesture.

The purpose of language is to get across to others concepts, information, ideas, and meaning over distances of both space and time, whereby goals and purposes, actions and motivations, emotions, and opinions appertaining to conditions of both the self, the group, and the environment may result in improved survival for all.

Of course, language and words can, and all too often are, used for achieving the polar opposite, the immolation of society and the extinction of everything good, especially as it is often taught—or not taught, as the case may be. A way civilisation may lose everything is by not understanding words enough to know they’ve become weapons or, perhaps worse, gibberish.

Today, clearly defining terms have become an absolute necessity, a vital prerequisite for any serious discussion (or debate) regarding just about anything, especially if there is an upset of some kind with the subject at hand. Once the words are defined, though, there’s a chance a conversation may take place that will actually improve things.

All of the topics in the Wild Mind chapters have undergone redefining—or alteration by means of association—in mainstream culture. For instance, when “art” is put to work as propaganda, ugliness ensues. Create “philosophies” that are of dubious utility (unwise) or make them too hard to understand, and voilà! “Philosophy” becomes useless. Use the word mystic to refer to charlatans, and the word “mystic” becomes “con artist.” Do this with enough words, and whole subjects become dissonant piles of bunkum. This decay of meaning happens somewhat as a matter of course as a culture inevitably deteriorates (as it goes through its evolution), but it is also one of the primary tricks of ideologues: simply associate or redefine the word with the depressing or cynical idea you want to convey, and boom! Sayonara, high civilisation and its fragile liberties, and hello, Mister or Madam Despot.

The fact that our society has become so sloppy with and confused about words has made it all too easy for thoroughly anti-social personalities—and whoever (or whatever—read Dianetics) is pulling their strings—to hijack our minds through their falsification and manipulation. Philosophy, art, myth, etc., each a mighty pillar of civilisation, are now all words that require extensive discussion of their proper meanings before any serious conversation can be undertaken. I mean, it’s exhausting, like having to completely reboot the industrial revolution every time you just want a pencil. This certainly goes for magic and alchemy too. As for mysticism and occultism, well, these are both utterly queered and garbled and have been for a long time.
 
Then, when you hear people use a word like “religious” and mean it as an insult, I think this is when you know that the game, in its current iteration anyway, is all but finito.

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The Logos

“Logos” became a technical term in Western philosophy, beginning with Heraclitus (535–475 BC). He used the term for a principle of order and knowledge.
 
For Heraclitus, logos provided the link between rational discourse and the world’s rational structure (as mentioned at the end of the previous chapter talking about the Cosmos). This indicates that in order to align with Natural Law there needs to be a language code that makes this vital link. Misalignment with Natural Law equals pain and, eventually, depending on how serious the misalignment, untimely death.
 
There are other ideas that go even further: thinking is speaking, and speaking is thinking, and how one thinks creates the world as it is experienced; another way of speaking—thinking—could reveal, or create, a different experiential reality. This is, in part, the most basic of philosophies: what you think, you become, and who you are determines your experience.
 
So, basically, if one wants to destroy civilisation, simply hamper the ability to think. And to wreck thinking, just ruin the language. One can easily accomplish this through various manipulations. For instance, things like “personal pronouns” are not created to “respect” certain peculiarly self-absorbed individuals but to individuate us, divide us so we cannot cooperate with one another, and thereby destroy the cohesion necessary to a functioning society. It’s no joke, and only a childish or uneducated person would fall for this.
 
Wrecking the language could set man back thousands of years to the fantastic levels of violence experienced in the tribal days of old; it’s a form of the extremely workable “divide and conquer” gambit: bust society up into competing groups, such as blacks versus whites, LQBTQ versus nuclear families, or radical feminism versus men and women, thus causing unrest and chaos, and eventually a комиссáр (commissar) or Führer-type authority will be necessary “to bring order!” The question being, who stands to benefit, who wants to be our “President for Life”? Or, more seriously, what sorts of people or which of our neighbours want such an entity to be conjured into existence? Worth pondering.
 
Language is sacred. Language is not a shuffle box of interchangeable bits redefined and rearranged at anyone’s leisure to reflect somebody’s “personal truth.”

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Knowing proper definitions

In these Wild Mind articles, I have described a smattering of the developments in the history of civilisation, not because people don’t know of them—of course everybody does—but because too many people either don’t know or are not using their proper definitions. Each one of these subjects has helped raise mankind into an ever more evolved state by binding him to higher power, enlightening him, and edifying his efforts at creating an ever more advanced civilisation. But how they are often defined and discussed today by the corporate media and much of academia usually makes the important task of knowing and discussing them difficult, if not impossible. Especially by making them seem b-o-r-i-n-g, which I hope I didn’t. Make them seem boring, I mean.
 
So, to recapitulate, the following are the correct definitions of the subjects on the ladder in the Wild Mind chapters.
 
Awe is the feeling of expansive wonder one gets when one connects with the Infinite. (“Infinite” also referred to as “the Divine” or “Absolute,” etc.)

Art: the expression or application of human creative skill combined with imagination, typically as music, painting, sculpture, architecture, literature, dance, theatre, etc., producing enlightening works to be appreciated also for their emotional power and aesthetic innovation and their ability to inspire awe.

Magic: the power of influencing events by using invisible forces (such as conjuring wonder and awe).

Myths are stories that describe the early history of life on Earth and the archetypal human experience of being in the world that includes answering the “call to adventure” and descriptions of successful (heroic) behaviours such as persistence and constancy.

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.

Religion: a set of concepts concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe, especially when understood to be the creation of an omnipotent agency, usually involving devotional and ritual observances and containing a moral code governing the conduct of human affairs as well as binding them to a higher power, resulting in improved survival.

Philosophy: the pursuit of practical wisdom through the love and study of the fundamental nature of knowledge; reality (the state of things as they actually exist—Natural Law—as opposed to an idealistic or notional idea of them); and existence, especially as it can be applied to practical living in order to improve survival by means of reasonable (ethical) thought.

Alchemy: the field of the processes of transformation, creation, and combination both of matter and spirit and how they interact with the Absolute.

Occultism: rituals or practices or ceremonies involving or relating to hidden forces, esoterica, or phenomena that, when exercised, open doors to higher consciousness, resulting in the emergence of alternate realities with practical applications.

Science: the systematic study of the evolution, structure, and behaviour of the physical and natural worlds through observation, experimentation, and the testing of theories against the evidence obtained, resulting in improved survival by means of advanced technologies. This means that to be a true scientist, one would almost certainly need to have a good working knowledge of every one of the above subjects, as all the great scientists before the rise of materialism actually did.

So, to my point (at last):

Scientology is the study and handling of the spirit in relation to itself, universes, and other life and consists of a set of axioms based on ten thousand years of accumulated wisdom from Asia and the West (all the subjects listed above), producing procedures designed to help rehabilitate awe and to further realise and assist the sovereign individual.

Sovereign means acting or done independently and without outside interference. An individual is the basic unit of any group of any size.
 
In a truly advanced civilisation necessarily consisting of sovereign individuals, there are no authorities or leaders (except as assigned in an actual emergency and only for the duration of the emergency), but only duly elected executive coordinators (administrative managers) and, in the case of the occasional dispute, a form of judiciary to act as disinterested negotiators (because nobody ever will agree on everything, not even sovereign individuals). This is because the sovereign individual, being independent in body and autonomous in mind, does not desire or require authority of any kind in order to accomplish right action.

The sovereign individual is wise in that he or she knows when they have the correct data and can therefore be trusted to use it properly, resulting in improved conditions.

And that’s wisdom. Having the right knowledge, knowing it’s right (because you checked), and then knowing what to do with it will lead to better conditions for all.

Has that been your experience with Scientology? Because that, my friends, right there, will tell you if Scientology 1.0.0 is being used or, instead, misused, misunderstood, altered, or ignored.

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The Wild Mind in summary
 
I’ve asked people who consider themselves ex-Scientologists about their involvement, those who had actually engaged in it, and every one of them said that, yes, they had had at least one, if not several, experiences that, if not always actually rehabilitating awe, came close to it using Scientology processes. Sadly, many of these also still do not know what its definition is well enough to discuss it cogently. What “ex-Scientologist” therefore actually means is that they are just no longer members of the institution, which is perfectly fine; no one should have to belong to any group if they don’t want to (and any group that coerces membership is just an unethical group). As for other people who want to discuss the institution of Scientology but who have had no experience with the subject, well, all right, fine, let’s have that chat. But first, let’s agree on its correct definition, because if one doesn’t know what it is, then what in tarnation are we really talking about?

These last twenty chapters have been my not-so-humble attempt at putting the Church of Scientology in some kind of historical context so that my description and discussion of it going forward don’t have it dangling outside of life and history, as if anomalous. It might seem like a mighty grind to some because we live in a world where scholarly challenges are usually to be avoided, but the road from not knowing to knowing is precisely the opposite: it’s hard, frequently distressing, and, often, it can be just a plain old slog. At least, at first.
 
Only with all the above subjects rendered simple and clear, studied, and understood, though, could there be a truly lucid discussion as to the merits or liabilities of something like Scientology 1.0.0. Without the subject being understood, how can anybody then intelligently talk about Scientology 2.0, the institution? Lacking that sort of clarity, it’s just a rant—litanies of upsets and injustices, perceived or real—leaving everyone firmly entrenched in their grief, fear, and anger; nothing changed.

Before the 1950s, it was usual to know some of these subjects, but by the ’60s, more and more people were exhibiting not just near total ignorance but no interest in them at all. Why? One theory is that education has been compromised, and many investigators have since verified this.¹ Today, as a result of this all-too-pervasive omission, many people feel that these topics simply don’t seem to have anything to do with contemporary life. But they do. They do. More than ever, actually.

Misinterpretation, literalism, and mangling or changing definitions are the banes of civilisation. By the mid-1960s, my father began to insist that his students not deviate from Scientology processes, but this is much like trying to herd cats; the human condition is indeed the absolute knottiest of all Gordian knots. And this does not just happen only with the subject of Scientology but happens with literally everything, including science, as we have all recently witnessed (“&%$#@ you’re ‘freedoms,’ just take the &%$#@ jab!”).
 
What some people may not know is that my father felt that people who only study his works might do okay in life, but not stepping up and properly familiarising themselves with the subjects on which Scientology is based or correlated puts them in danger of eventually making the same mistakes that his work was attempting to resolve in the first place, such as preferring to be lorded over by this or that authoritarian.

One of the main purposes of his techniques was to help clear the way so people could reinvigorate their desire to study and learn about any subject, and so go on to discover and understand more of the dots that make up reality and how they connect. In other words, do their own research, think for themselves, do away with authoritarians and—if and when they disagree with his ideas—be able to debate them as they are, not as what somebody thinks they are.

Knowing or receiving the processes of Scientology is not enough; one needs to know how they work and why, thereby helping to make it easier for people to go on to discover and understand the world on their own, which is quite the opposite of brainwashing, no?

But it only works if that is what people actually do.

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Conclusion
 
Maybe it would be an easier world if people simply relied on experts to tell them what to think and do, and no one had to be responsible for anything. But the world is fantastically complex, and the ease with which fools and miscreants come to dominate in the halls of power makes ignorance a dangerous plan indeed. The failure of so many of us to think in a nuanced and critically thoughtful way about the world, as Natural Law dictates, is to simply open the door to the Devil, invite him in, and kiss his ar… um, hooves.

I’d say the magic sauce in everything—the key to the secrets of the universe—is that to truly know how to handle the spirit in relation to itself, universes, and other life, one has got to make understanding these subjects their own personal business. Actually, not just make it their business but their number one priority. Not to have a career or a job just to make money, but to make money so one has the time and resources to study life as if one’s life depended on it, which in fact it does. That’s when this stuff—things like religion, philosophy, and mysticism—starts to make some sort of real sense. And Scientology too, for those who haven’t experienced it.
 
Actually, it might be especially important for those who have had the experience so that they might be better at discussing Scientology with those who haven’t.

There seems to be only one choice: learn the correct definitions and order of language, and then learn as much as one can about how life actually works. Or be a slave to those who, in their perfidy, would take advantage of that omission.

To discover that one doesn’t know takes a lot of courage.

To learn and then to know is an act of faith (and a lot of hard work).

It’s a big job, a huge project, often a slog, but, at the end of the day, in my opinion, there’s no getting around it if one wishes for things to get better.

To learn and then to know is an act of faith (and a lot of hard work).It’s a big job, a huge project, often a slog, but, at the end of the day, in my opinion, there’s no getting around it if one wishes for things to actually get better.

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¹ For an example, read Who Killed Homer?: The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom by Victor Davis Hanson and John Heath; The Age of American Unreason by Susan Jacoby; Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress plus Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters both by Steven Pinker; and any talk or article on education by Sir Ken Robinson.