Spells of Manifestation, Persistence, and Disappearance
Scientology 1.0.0 – addendum 2
In the article The Wild Mind, Part XI, I mentioned certain aspects of natural law as being based on or expressed by invisible physical forces. I also brought up the fact that the internal workings of certain systems may cease to function when examined too closely. The following is what I was referring to.
First: you are not your mind. You own your mind.
Invisible forces
I’d guess there are few greater invisible forces to reckon with than the mind.
It is traditional among certain people to see the visible world as utterly separate from the mind. Perhaps they are convinced of this because the physical world readily affects our bodies, whether we like it or not, often quite painfully (there’s nothing like pain to make things seem truly real). While wholly understandable, this idea risks rendering the mind a causative factor in shaping reality, something of an afterthought. The mind gets perceived as something discardable in any computation regarding physical reality. I don’t mean to offend anyone, but this viewpoint could be considered the epitome of ignorance, especially considering that it serves as the foundation for modern education in the Western world. If we are to remain unenlightened as to the mechanics of the mind, then it’s not unreasonable to assume that we shall forever remain mere pawns in some monstrous game controlled by the mindless ogre named Corporis Universi.
Of course, Corporis Universi, the physical universe, has an effect on our bodies; that’s because our bodies are, well, physical. The mind, on the other hand, isn’t exactly physical, much like a virus isn’t exactly alive. It appears to function as an interface between you and the entire universe, a deep mystery that I don’t claim to fully understand, but I do have some knowledge about its functions, so I’ll plod away nonetheless.
It appears that it can be run and managed just like an object—possibly even more so. I mean, an eight ball in the mind, which looks and seems like an actual pool ball, can be quickly transformed into the Eiffel Tower, which can also appear quite real; not so with an actual eight ball (or Tower). This mutability is a feature that fulfils a distinct function.
The mind, apparently, is there to help us work out how to negotiate all these other physical forces. Most of the time, when the mind is used properly, it is used to modify the environment to suit our own purposes, thus cities and such. Perhaps more crucially, we can use it to envision futures that, once conceived in our minds, swiftly reveal their feasibility or unfeasibility. In this manner, our minds can bear the consequences of unfeasible events, relieving our bodies of the burden.
To wit, some guy accidentally starts a fire, looks around, and sees two buckets, one marked for water and the other for petrol. His mind tells him, Don’t use the bucket of gasoline to put out the fire; use the other one. He follows this advice, which prevents him from dying. But the scenario in his head, when he imagined what would happen if he threw a bucket of gasoline, did. Die, I mean. The idea died, so he didn’t have to.
Therefore, running the mind, that is to say, controlling it, ought to be one of the most important skills taught, at least from where I’m standing. Most of the time, though, we are enthusiastically encouraged to leave it on a sort of default setting (whirr clank groan).
Mind magic
The facts of manifestation, persistence, and disappearance are evident everywhere one looks. Place a kettle on the stove, bring it to a boil, then turn off the heat, and the contents will cool to room temperature. Steam was produced, it rose into the air, and then was gone.
Obviously, these cycles are everywhere. Literally, everything comes, stays awhile, and then goes away (disappears). These cycles can take less than a second or longer than a dozen billion years. No matter what, though, anything that comes into being is “on the clock.” They exist in the mind too: think of a tree, there it is; think of a cat, there goes the tree. By the way, people ask, “What is time?” One answer might be: “Time is the thing one needs for anything to last long enough to get noticed.”
On the material plane, these cycles can be manipulated in limitless ways, as is also obvious. Less obvious, for some reason, is that these cycles are even more controllable, indeed, infinitely controllable, in the mind, and learning to work with them could produce noticeable improvements in life. Potentially, anyway.
Theoretically, as postulated by some deep thinkers, the mind is the one thing that can actually be more or less completely controlled by the self. Obviously, other things can also have a big impact on it, but someone else’s ability to control your mind against your will or without your knowledge rather depends on your inability to control it yourself. In other words, if you are not actively in control of your mind, it becomes pretty easy for others to step in and control it for you (hello, Mr. Spin, hello, Mr. Sales, hellooo Mr. Covid Lockdowns).
For instance, one can create anything in the mind, have it persist as long as one wishes, change it around any which way if so desired, and then have it disappear.
Other minds exist as well: other people’s minds, group minds, minds in nature (herds, schools, hives, forests), the mind of mankind, and so on. But these minds, although influenceable, are typically difficult to control. However, the personal mind appears to be the only thing that can be almost wholly controlled by oneself. Perhaps this is because it is also the only thing you nearly completely own—more or less—or should, anyway, if you’re in good spiritual shape.
Or a true magician.
Possession and Control
Of course, all of this can be hotly contested, especially by people who are afraid of other people’s minds. But think about it: you actually own nothing materially, as can be demonstrated by how all things physical seem to always be doing their own thing, including your body. Even if your body never sustains an injury or illness, it ages and becomes weaker over time, eventually succumbing to either the worms or the flames (or the embalmer, depending on the situation). Consider your house as an example; it perpetually deteriorates and requires near-constant maintenance. After a hundred years, so many parts have been replaced that it’s unclear if it’s the same house.
Your body and your estate both appear to be your property, in a practical sense, but there are so many different forces acting on them, many of which are completely mysterious, that you can’t really own them as such (ouch!).
Your mind, however, is the most intimate object in your possession and is therefore infinitely more controllable than other objects. There are those in the world who manage their minds to fantastic levels, which proves the point. Indeed, mind management was taught for centuries in the Western world, up until the Renaissance, when adepts learned to memorise at astonishingly high levels using mnemonic devices such as the “method of loci” or “memory palace.” Which begs the question: why do so few people manage to keep it under control these days? I mean, the degree to which one can own anything is the degree to which you have control of it, right?
(Control, as defined in Scientology 1.0.0, is simply the ability to start something, change it, and stop it at will. You stand up, move around, and then sit down. You get in the car, start it up, put it in gear, steer it to where you want it to go, park it, and turn it off. You start a business, grow it, and then sell it, and on and on.)
So. In some mysterious fashion, you, as a spirit, generate (or have, or experience) concepts and ideas. Then, for them to materialise in the world, you initially organise them in your mind, refining them until they lead, hopefully, to appropriate actions on the physical plane. If one can’t do this smoothly, then there will be, to a greater or lesser degree, confusion. In many ways, thinking is the process of working out correct actions before you act (when the facts are known), so that if one’s formulation is wrong, the thought can die instead of you. The fact that you are still alive and reading this proves that you have discarded most of your truly bad ideas.
Thinking about where thoughts come from in terms of concepts and ideas, their mysterious genesis, could certainly open some doors, but in the meantime, since thoughts are “arriving” in any case, what if you could completely control your mind? What would that look like?
Well, for one thing, you’d never be bored. Unless you wanted to be, of course. But before I get to that:
Existence and reality
A reminder before proceeding. Hermeticism teaches that the greater the truth, the more profound the paradox. Despite their perplexity, we postulate that these paradoxes are reconcilable, which potentially renders them useful. Already having touched on such conundrums as “what comes first, the mind or the universe?” (answer: neither/both), the paradoxes march on.
There are four considerations resulting in conditions of existence in Scientology 1.0.0.
The word “condition,” as it is often used, is defined as: a state; a particular mode of being.
The following is the definition of “state” in Webster’s original dictionary: the circumstances of a being or thing at any given time (emphasis mine).
(For those reading this who aren’t familiar, these conditions are extracted from the Axioms of Scientology and are the 11th axiom (there are 58). Check them out for a more precise understanding; they can be found in the volume, Scientology 0-8, the Book of Basics.4)
So these four conditions are: as-isness, alter-isness, isness, and not-isness.
These terms were coined by my father and do not appear in any dictionary of the English language that I know of. They are defined:
As-isness is the condition of immediate creation without persistence and is the condition of existence that exists at the moment of creation and the moment of destruction, and is different from other considerations in that it does not contain survival (persistence).
People in Scientology therapy experience this routinely by reviewing a moment of trauma with such accuracy that it ceases to “contain” any physical pain or emotional discomfort when later recalled to mind. For example, a soldier, when remembering the explosion and the loss of his comrades, re-experiences the event as if it were actually happening all over again, resulting in him doing everything he can to forget it, usually by using drugs and alcohol. But if he is gently guided to see the “whole” of the incident, from its true beginning all the way through to its actual end, then all the physical suffering ceases and the event can be recalled to mind without a devastating somatic reaction.
The idea of as-isness in therapy is simple, and it parallels exactly an axiom in Natural Law, which is: anything that can be perceived fully can therefore be known, anything known fully can be understood, anything understood completely can be owned, and anything actually owned can be controlled.
This perceiving, knowing, understanding, and controlling is the very opposite of “what you don’t know can’t hurt you.” What is in fact yours to know, such as your mind, not being known, can thus cause you all sorts of problems.
Alter-isness is the consideration that introduces change, and therefore time and persistence, into an as-isness to obtain persistency (survival).
For things to exist, they have to persist. For things to persist, they have to change. Time is the strange thing that prevents anything from being the same thing from one moment to the next, just as the river once stepped in is not the river stepped in a moment later. Even the most solid things in the universe, like granite or gold, are in flux.
Isness is an apparency (seemingly real or true, but not necessarily so) of existence brought about by the continuous alteration of an as-ness. This is called, when agreed upon, “reality.”
Reality is simply what it is, and reality is “real” because it is corroborated. In other words, we agree it exists, and therefore we can experience it as reality (see addendum, The Triverse). All this theorising that reality exists independently of us is complicated confusion since its “independence” can’t be proven in any way and results in nothing useful. Unless you want something really “interesting” to talk about while at a bong party, that is. Another interesting party topic is exactly how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Just saying.
Not-isness is the effort to handle isness by reducing its condition through the use of force. It is an apparency and cannot entirely vanquish an isness.
One example is the circumstance sometimes referred to as “the elephant in the room” and the like. People know so-and-so is a thief and a liar, but everybody is too afraid of doing anything about it, so one day, poof, all the money is gone, or some other disaster occurs. Not-ising is what people do to keep things from going smoothly. Another example: even though the soldier just mentioned keeps looking the other way (not-ising), the horrible memory just keeps jumping back anyway, making him feel worse and worse, with or without gallons of cheap booze or mountains of expensive pills.
Also, most everything gets sort of not-ised, or ignored most of the time because if one noticed everything constantly, they’d go crazy. However, this is selective, i.e., prioritising one’s attention. What you should know, is there to be known, oughtn’t be not-ised if you desire a peaceful life. Or, even, to stay alive.
As-isness, alter-isness, isness, and not-isness form a sequence: start, change, and not quite stop. I’d guess that to get a full stop, it would end with as-isness. There is creation (as-isness) at the beginning, followed by persistence (alter-isness and isness) until not-isness, which is also a form of continued persistence, and then that can be as-ised in turn: the end. The nuances are pretty great here and bear some thought, I’d say.
Note: These conditions are the 11th axiom (out of 58) in the Axioms of Scientology. You can find them in the volume, Scientology 0-8, the Book of Basics, for a more precise understanding.
Truth
So. There are these four conditions: as-isness, alter-isness, isness, and not-isness. To control your mind, you need to work with them all the time, consciously; nothing on automatic, no “default setting.” Just like a car, leave off steering it and it will always end up in a ditch, even a Tesla (at the time of writing, AI has a long ways to go).
All one’s mental trauma and all one’s upsets, if they persist, are based on one unnecessarily altering the events that led to them. This is also called, though rudely, “lying.”
The truth, as they are always saying, shall set you free (from needless pain and unnecessary suffering). But what the heck is the truth anyway?
Truth: the quality or state of being true. True means in accordance with fact or reality. From Old English trēowe, trȳwe ‘steadfast, loyal’; related to Dutch getrouw, German treu. Fair enough, fair enough.
But here’s the Scientology definition: truth is the exact time, place, form, and event. With this additional definition, I think one can get a more complete idea.
In the fields of psychology and philosophy, there are two important concepts: “intellectual honesty” and “authenticity.”
Intellectual honesty is, per Wikipedia, an applied method of problem solving characterised by an unbiased, honest attitude. Authenticity, from the same source, is the degree to which a person’s actions are congruent with their values and desires, despite external pressures to conform to social norms.
The article goes on to say: In human relations, a person’s lack of authenticity is considered bad faith in dealing with other people and with oneself; thus, authenticity is in the instruction of the Oracle of Delphi: “Know thyself.”
This honesty and authenticity business can be incredibly difficult to achieve, though, even if one were in tip-top spiritual and psychological shape. On the other hand, it is somewhat easier to find out if one is lying, not telling the truth, whether they are doing it consciously or not.
This honesty and authenticity business can be incredibly difficult to achieve, though, even if one were somehow in tip-top psychological shape. On the other hand, it is somewhat easier to find out if one is lying, whether they are doing it consciously or not.
Lying: Lying introduces arbitraries into the mind, and arbitraries can often be very difficult to detect, especially after prolonged use (old habits die hard), but they can so mismatch objective reality that certain of them can be quite easily uncovered, especially with a bit of help.
But first, how can one know if one is lying? One is experiencing boredom, unhappiness, unnamed anxieties, and so on, or, to put it succinctly, misery. That’s how. Unless you are actually struck by some horrible circumstance, such as the loss of a loved one, or stuck in a terrible situation, like being physically trapped in some place like North Korea or a war zone, etc., there’s absolutely no justification for such wretchedness other than lying to yourself. (In Scientology, “misemotion” refers to the distinction between appropriate and inappropriate emotions.)
Lies
Here we go with more apparent paradoxes: Why authenticity and honesty are so difficult to achieve may be explained in part by the fact that in reality, everything must be “lied” about, that is, altered, or it will not last long enough to help or bother anyone, or even get noticed. Too much truth, and you’ve got… nothing. On the other hand, too much lying creates a terrible mess of misery and confusion resulting also in… nothing. Well, sort of nothing, nothing good, anyway. You get what I mean.
How the mind is actually engineered, that is to say, constructed, is barely known. The whole point of Dianetics was to help open this object up to proper investigation. But there are yet some rules that can be known, such as these four conditions of existence.
Objectively, alter-isness is mostly automatic, owing to the fact that it is impossible to perceive everything at once, no matter how small or simple the object. You can’t see both sides of a coin simultaneously, not any room, nor the inside of anything while peering at its outside, and vice versa; nobody has ever seen an atom, and as for larger things, you can only perceive little, teeny-tiny bits of the whole universe (normally). On top of all that, ask anyone to accurately and thoroughly describe anything, and you will find they will always see it differently, no matter how slightly, from how you do. Ask them to describe it at a later point in time, and their description will change yet again, and so will yours. The question is, how much truth does one want? Theoretically, too much truth could make things cease to exist, as mentioned. Or drive you bonkers.
This plain observation that nothing gets fully perceived and also never gets fully perceived in the same exact unit of time postulates these four conditions as relevant for anything to exist. But, as our friend Mr. Kant demonstrates exhaustively, and correctly, this can get very perplexing to contemplate objectively, so let’s stick to the subjective “objects” in the mind. Especially since the purpose of therapy is to examine the isnesses in the mind, such as the alter-isnesses of as-isnesses that have been unhelpfully not-ised, resulting in their unwanted persistence.
Unwanted persistencies
Alter-isness is something that you do in your mind all the time. It usually happens automatically, but it doesn’t have to, especially when it comes to undesirable states. One must take it off of the automatic default setting if you want to causatively change an undesirable condition, both in the mind and in one’s environment.
Everything you perceive that doesn’t immediately cease to exist in your mind is altered by you in some way—a kind of re-creation. When you remember something, you change it slightly so you can remember it again. Some may perceive this as a glitch. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, but it’s the cause of memories’ transformation over time.
This is also why it’s a good idea to immediately record special events or contracts; the parties involved, including you, may inevitably remember the original event or agreement differently. Many legal disputes occur not due to intentional misrepresentation by the parties involved but rather due to the automatic alteration of their memories of the original event or agreement. Beware the unwitting fool or outright cad that may insist, “Oh no, we don’t need to put anything in writing; don’t you trust me?” Put everything important in writing, especially when dealing with a group (groups are always notoriously simple-minded, although no group member or die-hard collectivist would ever admit this).
An additional note regarding memory is that years of lying, unnecessary (arbitrary) mind alteration, and providing wrong or incorrect data to other minds could very well result in memory problems for oneself over time, possibly even leading to complete memory loss. Here, the Eastern concept of karma comes to mind. The West frequently misunderstands the concept of karma. It does not imply that “if you do good things, then good things will happen to you” or that “if you do bad things, then bad things will happen,” although there is some truth to that. It means you are the sum total of all your actions. As you act, so shall you be, and as you are, so shall your actions be. Your actions influence what happens to you. (It’s deeper than that, but that’s the gist.)
To put it bluntly, lying, whether automatic or conscious, is what alter-isness entails. Knowing this, one can actively lie about what one wishes to persist while being as truthful as possible about those things one does not wish to persist, such as anger or anguish. (Constantly feeling upset about something or someone or experiencing continuous mental pain can significantly harm the body; this is known as stress.)
A typical example of an unhelpful alteration is what can happen in a relationship: people only persist in being upset when one or both of them are lying, knowingly or unknowingly alter-ising the situation. Often, it is not understood that this is all that is happening. If one or both parties are acting in bad faith, it intensifies the situation, but that’s a topic for another discussion.
Another example: If an individual has a long-lasting upset, such as “I hate, am angry about, or am afraid of _ (fill in the blank),” they are likely lying about it or altering it, whether consciously or unconsciously. Long-term grievances give us the classic victim’s mental state. Believing that the other person or thing will resolve one’s anger by taking responsibility is akin to relinquishing one’s own control over the situation, which will only intensify their distress (a phenomenon known as victim syndrome).
Then there are individuals who are coping with long-term pain or a disability, experiencing both physical and emotional distress. It is not helpful to oneself to also be emotionally upset when one is managing a physical disability.
Many times, what exactly the lie or lies (alter-isnesses) are is incredibly difficult for an individual to discover, if not totally impossible, and that’s when the therapist comes into the picture. Or, better yet, a scientologist therapist (also known as an auditor or listener).
Knowing exactly what the truth is can be incredibly difficult (often even impossible, especially when others are involved, particularly one’s enemies), so it is best to not knowingly lie. This is straightforward if one isn’t too afraid or too evil, but it also isn’t always possible. The hard-bound policy, however, is that you should never lie to yourself, regardless of the personnel involved or external circumstances that lie beyond your control.
Speaking of evil and fear, sometimes, many times, a person knows exactly what the lie is but won’t come clean, and that’s when they’re just going to have to lump it and suffer. Keeping in mind that if the lie is dangerous enough to society, like hiding theft or harm, that’s when justice comes into play and the cops (or avenging angels) come looking.
The recent lockdowns come to mind. Thousands upon thousands of medical practitioners knew that lockdowns, masks, and “social distancing” do not work and are even more risky than any virus, but they said nothing for fear of losing their jobs. Despite knowing that over-the-counter remedies could easily treat the virus, thousands of other doctors chose to remain silent. The costs of this self-censorship, known as “lying by omission,” will mount higher and higher in the years to come, and will prove, I am sure, far more deadly than COVID-19 ever was.
Another interesting note is the fallacy of “compartmentalisation,” often taught to the twits in the “security” industry. You know, spies, informants, and the like. The mind is a network; it doesn’t have “compartments,” at least not sealed ones. Lie in one area of the mind, and it eventually spreads everywhere like a drop of black ink in a glass of water, making mud of the whole thing. In this instance, the mind becomes muddy and murky, severely undermining the credibility of the “intelligence community.”
The only “lie” that doesn’t corrupt the mind is lying to an enemy, like, “No, Anne Frank does not live here.” However, it is crucial to confirm that the adversary is indeed an enemy. Not only have our security agencies wrongly labelled many non-terrorists as terrorists, a profession they largely created themselves, but they have also vindictively classified all of us as “persons of interest” for round-the-clock surveillance, at a significant cost to us, the taxpayers. This is what eventually prompts “pre-emptive security measures”: attack the sheep before they turn into wolves! Etc. Or the endless withholding of vital public information under the guise of “national security.” Trust me, it’s not another virus, WWIII, or AI coming for us; it’s our own governments! Dear, oh dear.
Anyway, moving along. Surprisingly, after being completely honest and authentic, the truth is what remains: beauty, joy, and intense interest are all true. It’s a natural law that moments of pleasure, beauty, and the like can never be as-ised no matter how hard one tries; only the lies seem vulnerable. Interesting, no? This appears to be unknown to “mind control” advocates. Of course, they know nothing of aesthetics, so it makes sense that they’d be in the dark—poor souls.
Still, understanding that getting to the truth, the truth that in fact does exist somewhere in one’s mind, can be so fantastically difficult to discover, even when one is completely on board and willing to uncover it, means that special and precise procedures are required to drill down to it. This is the whole point and design of Scientology auditing, also called “processing.”
If you think that you know the whole truth about yourself and you don’t need to discover it, certainly not with that horrible cult’s help, and you are anything less than satisfied with your life or having a hard time in any way, well, you’re lying to the one person who ought to be your closest friend and ally, you. My advice is to be honest and authentic, regardless of the cost to your pride or the risk to your prejudices.
This journey to “know thyself,” which is a very hard thing to do, quite likely the hardest and most perilous of all adventures one can undertake, could start with the decision, “Do not lie,” at least not to yourself.
Just a note here. There is one nearly insurmountable thing that can thoroughly get in the way of the truth project, and that is the all-too-human need to be “right.”
Sometimes being right seems to be so much more important than being true that lies are justified because to be wrong would be “lethal” in some way. I suppose this is where humility might play a vital role. “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.” However, admitting one’s mistakes to one’s enemies can frequently be a fatal tactical error. All I’m saying is, don’t lie to yourself or your allies if possible. Certainly not to yourself.
Oh, and one more thing—a simple rule of life: if someone, or a group, insists on remaining upset, outraged, or self-righteous—anything but calm or pleasant—about anyone or anything, then they are harbouring lies. Period. Full stop. This is something to remember when listening to rhetoric that concentrates on being against things rather than for anything (whoops, there go all the politicians and activists).
“Disappearing” the mind
There are those of us who, for some reason, set about the project of as-ising the mind itself. Perhaps this is to get it to “shut up” or something.
All chatter and noise in the mind is its own attempt to handle all the accumulated arbitraries and lies and get back in harmony with you and the environment. While telling a lie here and there doesn’t create this sort of feedback, years and years of lying and nonsense definitely do. But even if you have managed to straighten it out, the mind will often still cutely mutter away with “streams of consciousness” and so on. The quiet mind is actually not a “silent” mind so much as one extroverted from. Your mind wanders, murmuring, you don’t want to hear it so you focus on something else and then it goes “silent.”
But trying to get it totally as-ised, utterly “silenced,” is another thing altogether. The noise that can result from this undertaking would make the 150 decibel feedback from a rock concert’s sound system sound like a sweet lullaby by comparison. Attempting to make the mind disappear, like attempting to as-is the body (such as people with body dysmorphic disorder try to do and end up getting horrible surgeries), or any other object disappear, is dangerous at best and simply indicates that one does not have these things sufficiently under control and is instead attempting to un-own them. This could be the very definition of irresponsible: suicide by as-isness. It’s just not going to work. If your mind does get too loud and you can’t get it to shut up, then “take a walk” (see article, Space, Emotion, and Well-Being). If that doesn’t work, consult a professional.
Attempting to get rid of the mind can be dangerous. I am aware of a story involving a man who started experiencing terrible thoughts, such as, “I despise my wife.” This shocked him because he didn’t hate his wife, so he set about trying to get rid of this thought, and, of course, it only got worse. Not only that, but the thought metastasised into all sorts of terrible things, such as “I should kill my wife.” He went insane enough to attempt suicide, until some wise person told him to just ignore them and showed him how to divert his attention elsewhere. And, poof! No more awful thoughts.
Anyone may have all the “horrible” thoughts they like; it just doesn’t matter. The process is as follows: first comes the thought, then comes the decision to act upon it. This is the sequence, unless you consider thoughts to be solid matter and omit the decision step, as postmodernists frequently do and go straight to action, stimulus response style.
A symptom of postmodernism is when one stops thinking that words describe reality and starts thinking that phrases and words are reality. This shift is characterized by the rejection of words as descriptive, leading to chaos. You may think, “I want to kill,” but then decide not to, and all is well. Postmodernists dare not entertain such thoughts, fearing they might be condemned to the electric chair. This might explain why they’re always desperately messing around with the language or trying to get people to shut up. When one’s mind is under control and relatively “cleaned up,” unpleasant thoughts are rare.
Attention
This brings up another rule: You get what you put your attention on. Except, paradoxically, in regards to as-isness.
Only when the mind breaks, typically due to trauma, does it stop functioning. Alternatively, disruptions to the body, such as damaged or missing brain parts, can cause the mind to malfunction. Or if you know too little about how it works, then it can go haywire just as if you didn’t read the user manual for some home appliance. This last reason is the one that causes the most problems for most people and could give us the most important dictum: direct your attention towards that which you desire.
Just like with a car, if you don’t direct your attention, your mind will end up in a ditch.
Moreover, a truly “busted” mind is frequently repairable, such as with Scientology procedures. Learning how it works, though, can be a lot of fun, and we would all be a lot better off if we made it important to know.
The point
So. Imagine having this information about these four conditions of existence and being in excellent enough shape to use it. What might life look like?
Well, first off, as I mentioned before, you would never be bored. Unless you wanted to be. Or hardly ever upset. Unless you wanted to be. Every time you experienced any unwanted discomfort, any upset, any pain, or any “glitch,” you could look into it the same way you’d fix a computer: where is the virus, the lie? You could resolve the issue and, voilá! bounce right back to being cheerful about things. One could become so adept at this that simply recognizing the existence of a lie could resolve it without needing to delve deeper. A sane human naturally settles into cheerfulness when they handle their mind properly.
For example, someone comes up to you and treats you rudely, even punching you in the nose. This would be upsetting for most of us. Some of us would be upset about it for a long time. Years later, when we recall the incident, we might experience the same level of upset. Discovering the truth about the situation, on the other hand, could potentially alleviate all our emotions, perhaps even instantaneously. Potentially, the situation could resolve so quickly that the initial blow never occurs (a lesson for martial artists).
The rule is that you remain upset only so long as you don’t know, or are lying about, your part in any situation. Grumbling, worrying, and anxiety are like the little red lights flashing on the control board telling you, “Houston, we have a problem!” One does not need to know the other’s part to get over being upset. Unless one is stuck in a relationship; if that’s the case and they’re insisting on lying, then get out of it. There’s no “contract” to stay with those of bad faith. Be sure you’re not lying, though.
Now, there is one great lie that we accept almost unconditionally, and that is that as long as any injustice remains, we must persist in being upset about it (grr, grr!). This is the great burden of the joyless activist who cannot even crack a smile until all (racism, inequality, crime, drug misuse, police misconduct, illness, terrorism, ____________fill in the blank) are completely and totally gone from the face of the earth.
This could be why such people almost always succeed in making everything worse. Not only because there are no absolutes (another axiom of natural law is that absolutes are unattainable in reality), but also because their insistence on remaining upset indicates some sort of lie in their thinking—a lie that, if undiscovered, will only add another lie in the form of a “solution” already based on the earlier ones. Adding lies to already existing lies “does not a solution make” (Congress, take note).
All the heavy, serious, scowling, oh-so-important actors “solving all our problems,” if they are solving anything at all, are just stuck in their heads, rolling around in the night soil of their own lies. This doesn’t preclude growling threateningly when actively confronting one actual evil or another, but it could. Imagine being so insouciant about life that when, say, one is set upon by an enemy, one spots the truth of the situation so quickly that the danger immediately dissipates. This high level of thinking can happen and is probably what Jesus actually meant when advising us to “love your enemies” (Luke 6:27).
I’d guess that to properly solve the problems of life, one must do so with cheer. To achieve this, I think one needs to know and use these four conditions as well as the definition of truth above: exact time, place, form, and event. You see this with honest and authentic people all the time.
Obtaining at least the attitude of being cheerful, if not the emotional or perceptional states that lie above it, is a prerequisite to the proper operation of the mind and, by extension, one’s environment.
Understanding these conditions can enhance our quality of life by providing an explanation for why our minds “don’t work properly,” which they actually do (most of the time); we are simply not using them correctly.
Isness: is what is.
Not-isness: try not to do this.
As-isness: do this for those things you don’t wish to persist.
Alter-isness: do this for those things you wish to persist.
These are the four conditions that, if known and used, render the mind understandable enough to be properly controlled by you, the owner/operator. They are among the most important tools in every true magician’s tool chest.
Regarding my father’s work, a serious debate on the validity of Dianetics and Scientology must first establish the veracity of this fundamental idea: is it possible to influence the mind in a positive manner? Then one can check to see if using their procedures had any effect in this direction, as experienced by those who used them.
One is not their thoughts. Your mind is your property and, if owned and understood properly, it can be controlled in endless wonderful ways.
Arthur Ronald Conway Hubbard 