From anon@squirrel.owl.de Fri Aug 21 12:25:54 1998 Path: newscene.newscene.com!novia!dca1-hub1.news.digex.net!digex!feed2.news.erols.com!erols!cpk-news-hub1.bbnplanet.com!su-news-hub1.bbnplanet.com!news.bbnplanet.com!news.alt.net!anon.lcs.mit.edu!nym.alias.net!mail2news Date: 21 Aug 1998 19:25:54 -0000 From: Secret Squirrel Comments: Please report problems with this automated remailing service to . The message sender's identity is unknown, unlogged, and not replyable. Subject: FZ BIBLE 6/13 ROUTE TO INFINITY TAPES Newsgroups: alt.religion.scientology,alt.clearing.technology Message-ID: Mail-To-News-Contact: postmaster@nym.alias.net Organization: mail2news@nym.alias.net Lines: 539 Xref: newscene.newscene.com alt.religion.scientology:515153 alt.clearing.technology:62536 FREEZONE BIBLE ASSOCIATION TECH POST THE ROUTE TO INFINITY TAPES (TECH 80 LECTURES) 6/13 Our purpose is to promote religious freedom and the Scientology Religion by spreading the Scientology Tech across the internet. The Cof$ abusively suppresses the practice and use of Scientology Tech by FreeZone Scientologists. It misuses the copyright laws as part of its suppression of religious freedom. The writings of LRH form our Old Testament just as the writings of Judiasm form the Old Testament of Christianity. We might not be good and obedient Scientologists according to the definitions of the Cof$ whom we are in protest against. But the Christians are not good and obedient Jews and yet are allowed to have their old testament regardless of any Jewish opinion. We ask for the same rights, namely to practice our religion as we see fit and to have access to our holy scriptures without fear of the Cof$ copyright terrorists. We ask for others to help in our fight. Even if you do not believe in Scientology or the Scientology Tech, we hope that you do believe in religious freedom and will choose to aid us for that reason. Thank You, The FZ Bible Association ************************************************** DECISION A lecture given on 20 May 1952 (original title "Decision: Maybes, Time, Postulates, Cause and Effect in Relation to Dynamics" T80-2A) I would like to talk to you about decision. Decision is, you will discover, one of the fundamental points of indecision, and one of the fundamental reasons why people are sane or insane. Decision. You see, decision is a short way of saying choice. And choice, of course, is the keynote of self-determinism. To determine anything, you must have the choice to determine. Choice to determine means that you must have the power of decision. Automatically, you will discover - automatically, in any case - that the one thing that is holding up beingness is indecision, a maybe. In any engram that presents itself to be run - in any engram that presents itself to be run - there is a maybe: two choices which are relatively balanced, and their even balancing makes an irresolution. Now, there's a great deal to do with time in decision. Decision and time have a lot in common. When we have clean, clear decision, we have clean, clear time. And when we have an indecision, there is an unclarity about time. if you are trying to decide anything and having a difficulty in trying to decide that thing, the root of its trouble is time. Not even necessarily data; it's time. There's a time hangup there somewhere. And if you look for that back of the data, usually the data becomes needless. Decision: The basic decision that life makes, that theta makes, is "to be or not to be." Shakespeare's famous line: "To be or not to be: that is the question." Hamlet was in very, very bad condition that day. He was hung up on the squarest maybe that anyone can be hung up on. If you see someone facing a new job, a choice of whether or not he's going to continue with his old job or take a new job, you may think that he is resisting change or a lot of other things, and so on. Re's not anything. I mean, he is hung up until he decides one way or the other on a beingness situation. So that any beingness situation where you had a "to be or not to be" on a case becomes itself the most aberrative situation. Running an engram is really, basically, only necessary until the preclear has reached, of his own volition and evaluation, the decision he didn't make. He's found the maybe in his life. He's found that maybe. And having found the maybe, it is clearly enough in view so that he can resolve it or evaluate its importance, and the rest of the engram will blow. It'll disappear-become completely unaberrative. Postulates are important only because postulates are the root material of decision. That is to say, you have the decision and you make the postulate to reserve the decision. "To be or not to be" is action or inaction, existence or no existence. Actually, there is no such thing as a black-and-white decision. Aristotelian logic would like you to believe that there is such a thing as a syllogism: A is to B as B is to C, then A is to C, or something of the sort. This is very easily confused into A equals B, and B equals C; therefore A equals C. This isn't true. But it was a desperate effort to see if one couldn't get over the awful hurdle of yes-or-no. Syllogism: It gave you a way to reason so that everything didn't keep coming out in the middle. Aristotelian logic is based upon black-and-white solutions, really. You'll find today the mighty and powerful churches of the world believe in black and white for their people. They tell their people it's black and it's white; it's sin, it's good. There is no intermediate step here. It's one or the other. Well, it would be very fortunate for all of our sanities if decisions could be made like that. If we could say it's a black decision, which is to say "not to be," or a "to be" - a "to be," a "not to be" - if we could say just those two and resolve them very cleanly and clearly, we'd be fine. Unfortunately, if you will look under the Logics in the first section (they are printed in the "Handbook for Preclears" and some other volumes) you'll find that gradient scale of logic, and it demonstrates to you that there is only relative decision. Relative. Just like there's only relative self-determinism. And there's only relative yes and no. There are a million grades, a billion grades, of yes. There are a billion gradient points on the scale of evil, and a billion on the point of good. Things are only relatively bad and relatively good. Relative beingness, then, is what we are trying to decide. And when a person comes close to the center of the scale and hangs up, that is what happens: he hangs up. Now, why does he hang up at that point? It's very simple why he hangs up at the point. Decision has much to do with time. if you have decision, you have time; if you do not have decision, you do not have time. Now, it doesn't matter whether you decide "not to be" or decide "to be." If you're hung up in the middle between "to be" and "not to be," you have immediately forfeited time, because the middle of the scale is zero time. "To be" or "not to be" - and in the center there, zero time. So when a person hits a maybe he starts worrying about it. What is worry? Worry is constant, irresolute computation - constant computation on a certain point or a certain problem. That's what worry is; that's what anxiety is. Anxiety, you see, is fear added in. "I'm not going to be able to resolve this." Then worry becomes anxiety. "I can't resolve this," is just worry; "I'm not going to be able to resolve it" - well, that's anxiety. If you want to treat worry and anxiety, you can slug into a case with just these points, these tenets I'm giving you right now, and just tear the case to pieces. And the fellow, oh, he feels good afterwards. He's got everything all resolved. Trouble is, the most aberrative decisions were generally made when a person was in very bad shape - the worst ones. There is the decision of going on living or not going on living in this body. You can find the places where he makes this decision. "All right, I won't give up. I'll go on living, I . . . guess. No, I'll give up. Uh ... there's no reason to go on living. Yeah, I'd better go on living. No, I guess I can't go on living." "To be or not to be," you see? It'll hang up a whole operation. "Now let's see, to go on living I have to have this operation. If I have this operation, it'll probably kill me." He never gets a chance to decide this. Somebody takes him by the scruff of the neck and lays him out neatly on the table and puts the mask over his face. That's why your childhood operations - tonsillectomies and so on - are particularly grim. They affect the individual terribly because a child never has a choice. They can go around and say, "Now, Johnny. . . now, Johnny, you want your tonsils out, don't you, Johnny? Now, it's up to you to decide now, Johnny, whether or not you want your tonsils out. But of course, if your tonsils don't come out, you'll keep on having these nasty old colds. But you've got to have 'em out now, and I just want you to decide . . ." All they're trying to do is get him to agree, they're not getting him to decide. And the eventual thing is that poor little Johnny goes on the table. By the way, the first thing that happens to him is his central control post, that stands up above the other two, generally flicks out during one of these operations. If you want to find somebody's control post, you generally go back through his childhood operations. Because he didn't have any power of choice over the thing. It's my belief that in a good society every child ought to be equipped with and taught to fire a sawed-off shotgun. It's like the hunter: He goes out and he shoots a doe or a duck or something of the sort. He gets a big - he feels big about this, you know? The thing to do is to give the duck or the doe or something, you see, give them a shotgun too and then teach them how to use it, and it'd come up to a parity level. Well, it ought to be that way with kids. They ought to have a chance. But they don't have a chance, so there isn't any chance of deciding this until we've solved this body problem, and we can solve that so we don't have to worry about this anymore. But the point I'm making is, is decision is sanity and indecision is aberration. Now, you can't say "to be" is necessarily sanity or "not to be" is necessarily insanity. You see, those aren't the scale of sanity to insanity. Because you see, you can always make the decision to be insane. You see, it doesn't say what you're deciding to be; it says that you're deciding. But what is aberrative is whether or not one is able to decide, and the degree that he's capable of decision establishes his sanity, self-determinism, power of decision. Many people have gotten hung up on the idea of willpower. It was very fashionable a few years ago, particularly, to go around telling people they didn't have willpower, they should use their willpower, or something of the sort, without defining willpower. Wonderful operation. Actually, if you said that these people should rehabilitate their decisional power, you would have a much different picture. Willpower, decisional power: now you'd have a point there. Any time an individual is put under duress, it is the individual's effort to make a decision about the duress. If the duress is very heavy and makes only one decision possible, well, he falls into that category. It's not terribly aberrative. He's been overcome, he will feel degraded, he'll feel a lot of other things, he isn't free, but somehow or other he can struggle out of this sooner or later. The way to drive somebody insane is to convince them that they should have a yes, and then convince them equally they should have a no. And then convince them they should have a yes. "Now, Bessie, you've got to make up your own mind, it's your own free choice of whether or not you get these new shoes. Now, do you want black shoes or white shoes? Of course, the white shoes are going to get dirty a lot faster then the black shoes. Now, which do you want? The black shoes or the white shoes? Oh no, Bessie, you don't want the white shoes, you want the black shoes. The black shoes are much easier to keep polished and they'll go with your new dress. Hm-hm, yes. Oh, they're how much? Oh, uh, huh, well, you want the white shoes, Bessie. Uh . . . Bessie!" It's a wonderful mechanism. I recommend it. I recommend it to governments and sergeants. It reduces individuals to just complete weakness because it's chaos! We used to draw this tone scale, you know, straight up and still draw it straight up, and it's very, very easy to graph that way, but it's not quite true. It's a curve, if you add decision into the line. Actually, the point of 1.5, if you want to know the truth of the matter, is the center of the scale. Because if you make a person make a decision and then unmake the decision, then make the decision, then unmake the decision and make the decision, you'll eventually make MEST out of him. And 1.5, you've got him holding there, you see? You've got enough confusion so he's holding there, and you'll stick him there. And then there's a method of dropping the whole curve down to apathy and he becomes MEST and he's part of the material universe and you don't have to worry about him anymore! All right. There's an actual scale, though, on decision itself. And this is something for you to remember and something for you to use in processing. Never forget to ask your preclear where the indecision is in the incident. Never forget to ask that preclear that. "Where's the indecision here?" Now let's put this in terms of motion. We can understand it a little easier. Now, all of the first Axioms have to do with a static called life and counter-efforts and efforts. You have this chain-fashion affair whereby in comes the counter-effort, the fellow turns around and uses it as an effort. In comes the counter-effort, he turns it into his effort and uses it. That is what life is doing. That's what you're doing. You get a counter-effort and you use it - counter-effort and you use it. And as long as you can use these counter-efforts, why, you're fine. I mean, it isn't aberrative to get shot at. What's aberrative is not to - yeah, to get hit! - not to shoot back. It isn't even aberrative to get hit, actually; I mean, so you get killed. So what? You know, at Pearl Harbor there was - I think it was a tug, lying across from Battleship Bow. And the Jap planes came in, and the high command up there, you know, they were all on the ball and everybody was on the qui vive and FDR was on the qui vive and the War Department, Navy Department - everybody was on the qui vive - and they're all ready for these planes. So the planes came in and knocked the fleet out. And they had made a decision, by the way. They were not on a maybe. They had decided they could lick the Japanese fleet in five weeks. Huh! So they didn't go any further than that. Making a decision prematurely sometimes is quite effective in destroying oneself, but it's not aberrative. All right. Here came in these Japanese planes over this little tug and into Battleship Bow - wham! wham! wham! And actually, these planes were passing close enough over this little tug so that they were almost knocking its stack off. And the officer in charge had a full crew aboard. And naturally, a tug, it was on a standby, it wasn't on liberty like everybody else had been sent. So here sat this small tug with a full crew. The percentage of psychos and war neuroses and so forth who turned up out of Pearl Harbor was enormous, because they had received a motion they couldn't use, you see? They couldn't do anything about it. And this officer grabbed a few bins of potatoes as his crew came on deck. And he grabbed these bins of potatoes and he had his men standing there throwing potatoes at the Zeros. And he didn't have a single psychotic aboard. The crew was perfectly cheerful. And immediately after the action, they patched up a few bullet holes in themselves and went to sea merrily to pull things off the bars and the reefs, and so forth. Why? They were getting a motion, you see? They were getting attacked and they were attacking back. And even though it was just a token attack, it was quite effective as far as morale was concerned. Now, if you receive a motion, you should be able to use the motion. Your indecision comes only when you refuse to use the motion you have received. And anybody who has an engram in restimulation (including the human body, which is after all just an engram) - and mark this well - you have in that person simply this: a motion which he will not use. That's the only one he's stuck with - the only one he gets stuck with. A counter-effort comes in - wham! "Well," he says, "so they hit you in the jaw. Well, that's something." And - doesn't matter when - a few days, a few weeks from then, a few years from then, a few lifetimes from then, he all of a sudden remembers getting hit in the jaw, and a fellow's standing there and it seems to him that's the motion he's supposed to use. So wham! He hits the fellow in the jaw. He's healthy. The fellow that isn't healthy is standing there, you see, and the fellow hits him in the jaw. And he says, "Shouldn't do something like that to me," and he goes on for a few weeks or months or lifetimes (short span of time). Guy comes up - here's a situation where he's supposed to hit somebody in the jaw - and he says, "I think I'll hit him in the jaw! Nah, I wouldn't do a thing like that." After that he gets a somatic. Why? He's called the facsimile up to use and then he hasn't used it. He has a counter-effort which he is unwilling to use. And when he has a counter-effort which he's unwilling to use, it attacks him. The only way you aberrate people is keep them from using their counter-efforts. You get them out and you do things to them, and then you don't permit them to do it. You say, "Under no circumstances should you be able to do this." You take little Oswald and you take him down and you kick him a couple of times and you say, "You little brat," and so forth. "Now get out of the house." And little Oswald comes in a few days later - you notice children will do this - and he'll take a look at you and he'll say, "You brat!" And you say, "You should not say that, Oswald. You must treat your grownups with respect." You fixed him, right there. He's all set; he's going to use this counter-effort - it wouldn't bother him very much and he's going to use this - but you don't let him. That's the way you aberrate him. The way you can aberrate a whole society is take and put a police force over the top of them that permits them to be arrested and manhandled, given traffic tickets and sent to jail and pushed around and taken into courts of law and everything else, and then you don't let the guy do it himself. He then has a sensation of being handled, pushed, handled, pushed, censured and so on. And he gets all of these counter-efforts and he can't use any of them. Because the police object to being shot and pushed. I don't know why, it's only sporting. But this country out here was a good, solid, healthy country until they got their first reformer. It was. Everybody used to carry an equalizer - called it an equalizer. But somebody came up to you and said "You blankety-blankety-blank," you just shot him! I mean, it was simple, justice, so on. So people after that were careful about calling you a blankety-blankety-blank. Till one day you called somebody else a blankety-blankety-blank, he drew faster than you and you're dead. But, it's an interesting game. They played it with wild abandon. Down to the south, down here at Tombstone, they've got a whole hill there where people played it with abandon. But at the same time, the country was pretty healthy. Guys walked tall, they walked very tall. They didn't drive down the street saying "I wonder if that cop saw me pass that traffic light," see? Big difference between that. I'm not, by the way, beating the drum for uncontrolled, unlicensed action in an aberrated society. The society gets into a big maybe. It comes down tone scale to a point where an individual may or may not be ethical. And the second the society gets to a point where it looks at an individual and doesn't know where he is on the tone scale and whether - or whether or not he is going to be ethical, that society has to muster unto itself morals and police power, and suppress all individuals because some might not be ethical. And the second this happens, you get an aberrated society, because everybody is hung up on a maybe. "Is this fellow honest or isn't he honest?" "Is he going to be irrational about the thing or isn't he?" I mean, it's just maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe. So people start thinking. Thought could be said to be the resolution of maybes. Computation and its purpose depends upon the resolution of maybes. As you go way up tone scale, you get less and less and less maybes, and you actually do less and less and less computing, and you do more and more and more knowing. That's quite important. There is a scale here of decision, which I will draw here. Unaberrated conduct to a marked degree is the making of decisions which can be put into effect, as opposed to making decisions which cannot be put into effect, and down to indecision, and lower to irrational decision to force irrational decision into effect, down to indecision, and down to the decision not to be. The Tone Scale of Decision, in other words, is that scale. [See Ron's handwritten notes on the Tone Scale of Decision in the Appendix.] Now I'll draw that scale for you. Up here we have "to be." Up here, when you make a decision you put it into effect: decision equals effect. When you're making decisions to put them into effect, believe me, you're cause. (I'm going to talk the second talk this evening on cause and effect and how it applies to "be" and "not to be," how it applies to going up the whole dynamics.) But this is very simple. If you put things into decision, you're going to be a cause and you're going to make an effect, very quickly. Now, as you come down scale, you just simply come down to this level: You make a decision here - this is well down scale - that can't be put into effect. So you get a decision that can't be effected. You're making decisions, see, but they can't be effected. It's irrational, you see? The fellow says, "I'm a - I think I'll be president." Well, he can think he'll be president all right. He's made a decision that he's going to be president, but he can't put it into effect. In other words, he has not evaluated the rationality of his decisions. Up here, he makes a decision, it's a decision that can be put into effect. He doesn't keep overmaking decisions or undermaking them. In other words, he's doing a proper estimation of his decision. And then we get down here, this is very mild effect, but here we have an indecision, see? And by the way, it's very, very interesting that low on the tone scale we have people who put indecisions into effect. Did you ever know anybody that put indecisions into an effect? Well, they exist. Believe me. This is getting way down the line here: We get decisions to force irrational decisions into effect. Where is that on the tone scale? What is it? 1.5. That 1.5, they're wonderful at that. They're always making decisions to put irrationalities into effect. The second you show them an irrationality, they'll put it into effect; if you show them a rationality, they won't put it into effect. It's as much as your life's worth. As a matter of fact, if you want a 1.5 to act, what you do is demonstrate that what you want to do is irrational, and then they'll make you do it. You see how that is? You show them what you want to do is completely irrational; then they'll make you do it. That's a fact, it works. Then we get down here into indecision. And that is about 1.0. That's "Am I going to stay here or am I going to run?" Fear is just below this, you see? But that's the borderline of fear right there: indecision. And now we come down here finally to apathy, which is decision not to be. Here is your enthusiast - people like me, always making decisions that "can't be put into effect," you see? Saying, "All right now, we - what we're gonna do is - is get this and we're going to make this, and then get right in there. And everything's fine." And somebody points out to me, "Yeah, but we haven't got the two million dollars that it takes to do that." And I say, "Oh, well, all right." People have a hard time with me. Well, there's your tone scale of decisions. And you can actually take a preclear and look him over very thoroughly and you can find out what he's deciding to do and you can say where he is on the tone scale. You can also spot him on the tone scale and then predict very, very well what that individual will decide. (continued in part 7/13)