Spells of Manifestation, Persistence, and Disappearance
Scientology 1.0.0 – addendum
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.
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 it so readily affects our bodies whether we like it or not, often quite painfully (nothing like pain to make things seem really real). This idea, while wholly understandable, risks rendering the mind something of an afterthought, something discardable in any computation regarding reality. Not to be insulting to anyone, but this perspective could be the very definition of ignorance, possibly a forgivable view taking into consideration the fact that this idea forms the bedrock of modern education almost everywhere in the Western world. If we are to remain unenlightened as to the mechanics of the mind, then what else is there to think?
Of course the physical world has an effect on our bodies; that’s because our bodies are, well, physical. The mind, however, isn’t exactly physical, maybe in a similar way a virus isn’t exactly alive; it seems to be a kind of interface between you and the entire mind network that constitutes the whole universe (it’s a deep mystery, the mind; I don’t claim to know much about it but I’ll plod away nonetheless). It appears that it can be run and managed just like an object—possibly even more so. Whatever happens with our bodies, 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 (I can hear the eco-kids howling about this, but these are early days and we are actually working on getting the balance right regardless of what they say).
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).
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 in the mind, and learning to work with them could produce noticeable improvements in life. Potentially, anyway.1
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).
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.2 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 shape spiritually.3 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. Your body, even if it never acquires some injury or illness, gets older and older, becomes feebler, and then… it belongs to the worms or the flames (or the embalmer, depending). Take your house as another instance; it is forever falling apart and needs nearly constant attention. After 100 years, one has replaced so many bits and pieces of it that it begs the question if it’s even the same house or not. This is observed by wits who remind us that for all our efforts, nothing goes with us when we die, despite what inspiration we may get from the burial chambers of pharaohs and emperors.
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, in order for them to manifest in the world, you first put them in a mental format and work with them there until they are sorted enough to result, hopefully, in proper action 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, so that if one’s formulation is wrong, the thought can die instead of you. That most of your really bad ideas were discarded by you can be proven by the fact that you are alive and reading this…
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. As taught in hermeticism, the higher the truth, the deeper the paradox. Though perplexing, these paradoxes are postulated as reconcilable, rendering them potentially useful. Already having touched on such conundrums as “what comes first, the mind or the universe?” (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, as in ignored, most of the time because if one noticed everything constantly, they’d go crazy. But this is selective, as in one is prioritising one’s attention. What you should know, is there to be known, oughtn’t be not-ised.
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.
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 ways to go).
All one’s mental trauma and all one’s upsets, if they persist, are based on one 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.” Although authenticity is frequently associated with a morbid version of existentialism5, it is in fact directly related to the goal of individual sovereignty, which many Enlightenment philosophers and Freemasons sought after.
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 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, unnameable anxieties, etc., etc., or, in a nutshell, misery. That’s how. Unless you are actually struck by a situation, such as the loss of a loved one or 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. (There is a difference between appropriate emotion and inappropriate emotion, called “mis-emotion” in Scientology.)
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. 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.
Alter-isness is also 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.
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. This is what happens consistently with memory: every time you remember something, you alter it slightly so that you can remember it again. This might be thought to be a glitch, but it is not, and it is the reason why memories can so easily change. Which is also why it’s a good idea to make an immediate record of special events or contracts, for when the parties involved, including you, inevitably remember the original event or agreement differently. Many legal disputes arise not because the parties involved are knowingly misrepresenting the case but because their memories are being automatically altered, that is, changed from the original event. 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 (the group mind, being a blunt-force instrument, is always notoriously simple-minded, although no group member or die-hard would ever admit this.6)
An additional thought regarding memory is that years of lying and unnecessary (arbitrary) altering of one’s mind and providing wrong or incorrect data to other minds could very well result in problems remembering things, possibly even loss of memory altogether. The Eastern concept of karma comes to mind here.7
Anyway, as I put it impolitely, alter-isness is lying, whether it is done automatically or consciously. Knowing this, one can actively lie about what one wishes to have persist while being as truthful as possible about those things one does not wish to persist, such as anger or anguish, for instance, being upset about something or with someone, or mental pain that can be tremendously devastating to the body (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. Often, it is not understood that this is all that is happening. (This is exacerbated if one or both parties are acting in bad faith, but that’s a discussion for another time.)
Another example: someone who has an upset that has been going on for years, as in “I hate, am angry about, or am afraid of ___ (fill in the blank),” means they’re lying about it, knowingly or unknowingly. Thinking that your rage will be solved by the other person or thing getting better is to abdicate your own agency in the matter, and that will only lead to even greater upset for you (the victim syndrome). This includes having to deal with long-term pain or a disability. It is not helpful to oneself to also be emotionally upset (assuming one has the tools to get to what exactly the alter-isnesses are).
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 come looking.
An 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.
The only “lie” that doesn’t have any negative effect on the mind is when one lies to an enemy, as in, “No, Anne Frank does not live here.” Make sure that the enemy is in fact an enemy, though. The reason our security agencies are confused is because they not only have most terrorists incorrectly labeled as such (which they mostly created themselves, by the way), but all of us as well. This is what eventually prompts “pre-emptive security measures”: attack the sheep before they turn into wolves! Etc. Dear, oh dear.
Surprisingly, after being completely honest and authentic, the truth is what remains: beauty, joy, and intense interest are all true. It’s also 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 to be vulnerable. Interesting, no? This is one of the things the mind control folks seem to be unaware of. Of course, they know nothing of aesthetics so it makes sense.
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, murmering, 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 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 or any other object disappear, is dangerous at best (this is perhaps when certain types of ghouls and banshees start “appearing”) 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 then see somebody.
I am reminded here of a story of a fellow who began to think horrible thoughts, something like, “I hate my wife.” Well, 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 louder. Not just that, but the thought metastasised into all sorts of terrible things, such as “I should kill my wife.” He nearly went mad enough to commit suicide until some wise person told him to just ignore them and showed him how to put his attention elsewhere. And, poof!
This brings up another rule: You get what you put your attention on. Except, paradoxically, in regards to as-isness.
The mind only “doesn’t work” if it’s been busted, or if the mind’s correlate, in other words, the body, is broken in some way (like what happens sometimes when bits of the brain go missing), or if you know too little about how it works. Have all the “horrible” thoughts you like; it just doesn’t matter. It goes as follows: first the thought, then the decision to act upon it, and then action. This is the sequence unless, that is, you think thoughts are solid matter and drop out the decision step like the postmodernists do.8 You may think, “I want to kill,” but then decide not to, and all is well. Postmodernists dare not have such thoughts for fear they will go to the chair. This might explain why they’re always desperately messing around with the language. If one is pretty “cleaned up,” though, one rarely has unpleasant thoughts.
Besides, a “busted” mind is often repairable, such as with Scientology procedures that as-is unwanted persistencies. 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
Earlier, I asked, if one had this information about these four conditions of existence and was in good enough shape to use it, what might that 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, any “glitch,” you could look into it the same way you’d fix a computer: where is the virus, the lie? You could fix it and, voilá! bounce right back to being cheerful about things. One could get so very good with this that just knowing there’s a lie could sort it out, without having to get any further into it. Being cheerful is the sane human’s natural state; it’s where one will settle if the mind is handled properly.
For example, someone comes up to you and treats you rudely, even punching you in the nose. Without getting into the whole scenario, this would be upsetting for most of us. Many of us would remain upset about it for at least some time, or maybe even for a long while. Perhaps years later, whenever the incident is recalled, we’ll be upset about it all over again. Find the truth of the situation, however, and all upset would be gone, possibly within moments of the occurrence, possibly instantly. Possibly so instantly that the punch never gets thrown in the first place (martial artists take note).
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, damn it!
This could be why such people almost always succeed only in making everything worse. Not only because there are no absolutes,9 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 to any ostensible “solution” already based on one. 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.
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.
Knowing these conditions well can make life much more pleasant because they explain why our minds “don’t work properly,” which, of course, they do (a lot of the time anyway).
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.
1 If one is going to seriously debate the validity of Dianetics and Scientology, one first has to establish the veracity of this very idea: can the mind be changed in positive ways? Then one can check to see if using their procedures had any effect in this direction as experienced by those who used them.
2 According to quantum physicist Erwin Schroedinger, when all the minds are added together, they actually equal… one. But yours is your node; to do with as you wish.
3 People don’t “own” themselves; they are themselves. They own things that are not themselves. You are not your mind, so you own it.
4 “0-8” means zero to infinity. The number “8” represents infinity, ∞. This is predicated on the fact that you are your own universe. Zero and infinity signify one’s beginning and one’s journey: from a universe you have not yet created to a universe of infinite size that you are creating.
5 Existentialism is, in a nutshell, a philosophical theory or approach that emphasises the existence of the individual person as a free and responsible agent determining their own development through acts of the will. For some reason, this idea made some famous existentialists feel lonely and depressed, possibly because they were also devout atheists.
6 This is a reference, in part, to the glitch of contemporary “tribalism,” the dumb idea that one’s own group is always more relevant and often even superior to all other groups. I’d guess that tribalism wasn’t one at first (a glitch), because for 99.99% of history, one’s own group was slightly less likely to eat you, no matter how stupid it was.
7 Karma is often misunderstood in the West. It does not mean “if you do good things, then good things will happen to you,” or bad things, etc., although there is something 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.
8 A symptom of postmodernism is when one stops thinking that words describe reality and starts thinking that words create reality. Both are true, but this strange “turn” indicates the rejection of words as descriptive and thus ensues mayhem.
9 Another axiom of Natural Law is that absolutes are unattainable in reality.
Arthur Ronald Conway Hubbard 