Introduction: "To be or not to be?" That's what man is fixed on. But that's not the question. To grant beingness or not to grant beingness is the question, on which he's stuck every day in his life.
Read Max Hauri's introduction letter to this article below.
Beingness
"But above all these things lies the ability of a person to grant beingness to the moment, to the past, to the future, to other persons and his own things. To grant beingness, and then not to be afraid of it. And if you have granted beingness, continue then granting beingness, instead of stopping doing it, just because one part of it has hit you."
We have discussed the subject of cause and effect, which is the first line in the Factors. Well, there is a second line. One of the most important points for everybody – Beingness.
It's only a word. BE, and yet all other things, including cause and effect, are basically symptoms of beingness. Life itself with all its randomities consists of it, whether you want other things to be or not, or whether other things want you to exist or not. This alone forms the basic for the game.
All things in life have to do with beingness. Beingness is the stuff, by which life is made.
A thing, which is alive, is below the level of a thetan. A thetan is something, which grants beingness.
The kingdom of the ants
Let's look at the kingdom of the ants. The ants were granted beingness. They themselves are not beingness. That means, they are no independent beingness like a thetan for example. And here we encounter something strange. If you as a thetan go there and play with an ant and send a beam through its head, to short-circuit a few important things, to let it go around in small circles, then you instantly get the idea, that there is something somewhere, which becomes terribly angry with you.
You could even go into the depth of the sea, and you will make a similar observation.
An auditor sometimes can forget, that he trains a thetan, and that a thetan doesn't have to breathe. A thetan can visit all kinds of places.
You can visit the deep sea of the Philippines, where there are some of the most interesting fish you've ever met. You encounter a world of phosphorescent life, if you go down there, The fish down there swim around' with torches, and they devour each other just as everywhere else.
Granted Beingness
All this leads to the fact, that this form of life has a granted beingness. Something has granted it this beingness. If you start playing around with it, something will become angry. You could simply continue playing around and nothing will happen. But you'll get an emotional back-stroke, because you actually work against a communication line of something, whatever it may be, that monitors fish and coral snails.
You fish for this animal or being and you start destroying its beingness. You upset the general beingness of this kind of being.
But even more important than that is, that you as a thetan have encountered genetic entities of a less low order than ants and fish, but they are certainly connected to them and they are devoted to them to a certain degree.
Now no word was said about the body being a degraded thetan. I never said that, and I don't say it now either. It's a possibility. I personally don't believe, that it's true. I believe, that it is a completely different class of beingness. But it is a higher class than ants and fish etc. And still it is something to which beingness was granted. In other words, above there is a second level "something". We don't know all there is to know about the anatomy of life forms in this universe. Mostly because we don't have to know it.
Fixed ideas
Well, life can do anything, until it commits itself to one single communication line. Any being can do anything, until it commits itself to one single communication line, which it considers as being unvariable. The only excuses for the communication lines in Scientology are, that they resolve communication lines and reestablish the ability to create communication lines, forms and randomity.
Automaticity takes place because of granted beingness. You grant beingness to a space or something else, and afterwards you say, that this beingness will now function in this way.
This is a second or third class of beingness in comparison to a thetan. So he has basically made an ant, or something, which has not such a concrete form. He called an idea into life. And if you call an idea into life, then you have granted beingness to a space.
So what about this idea? Now we'll talk about these things, which life makes and which are quite different to MEST. We get to this point: MEST has no ideas, life has.
Well, to get an idea is something like to grant beingness. If you grant beingness to something, then you have, to that degree, given life to it. And if you start tearing down your automaticities, you actually destroy life. But you destroy life, which you yourself have put there.
The deterioration of a thetan
The deterioration of a thetan happens on this cycle. He grants beingness and then he's sorry to have done it. After having granted beingness he cuts his connection to the beingness, and he thinks, that he has cut his own beingness. Therefore each time, he is granting beingness, he believes, he is making himself smaller. This is not true. A person becomes more and more and more and bigger and bigger and bigger. The thetan has a limitless reserve of beingness he can grant. Therefore he becomes bigger and bigger, you could say.
A thetan can grant beingness and take it away again, as long as he doesn't persist on resisting, what he already has created.
Creating opponents
How you shouldn't do it, is, to grant beingness to a something and then to decide to oppose it. But this is one of the first things a thetan does, in order to create some randomity. He creates the other chess-player. Then after having created the other chess-player, he plays a game with him. If he continues with this behaviour-pattern, he'll wind up having created all his enemies himself.
The ideas, he has created, could be real live beings or they simply sail around in the air, or they are in space or in his space fixed as things, for which he refused to take anymore responsibility. So we have here the problem of man and his ideas. We could say: "Man and his Subordinates". Or we could also say: "The Thing, which grants beingness, and those Things, to which beingness is granted".
The most noble thing a thetan can do
A thetan has granted beingness to the body. Where this beingness is granted, the thetan will do it to such a degree, that he believes the body to have an own beingness thereafter, which is similar to his own. And so you get a thetan, who conforms to the ridges (Tech. Dictionary) of the body. These of course are his own ridges. They are his ideas, his mechanisms, and so he thinks, he is the body.
A thing, which grants beingness and is able to grant infinite beingness, which can animate and endow with life everything, and which finally comes to the conclusion, that something has granted life and beingness to him, will be found in a very bad state.
Therefore the most noble thing, a thetan can do, is – to grant life and beingness. And the most stupid thing, a thetan can do, is to set up an otherness and to fight it. This is the history of man who fights himself!
Granting beingness with the means of a via
Each preclear you have is simply a drama of a being, who can grant beingness, and who fights this beingness, he has granted. He is surrounded by things, to which he doesn't want to grant beingness. Things he is convinced about, that they are no good, if he grants beingness to them. He believes, he has to use a system of communication for the granting of beingness. We are dealing here with a second order kind of beingness. Why? He thinks, he has to use a system of communication, in order to grant beingness.
Let's look at a carpenter. He grants beingness to the wood by taking a saw, a hammer and a chisel and making a box. Now he has created a box. This is meant by granting beingness via a system of communication. What kind of beingness would he grant to something, if he simply was sitting there granting beingness to this thing? This way he could probably create a wooden box. But he doesn't believe, that he can do it.
Therefore he uses, as he believes, the reliable system of communication and creates with a hammer, a saw and a chisel.
You can look around, just where you are, and see two or three things, to which you wouldn't readily grant beingness.
Resisting all effects
You take a piece of paper or a watch and you say to yourself: "Now it's silly of me to grant beingness to this watch, because it's running already. It's running, because the respective owner turns it on or off". Now you see, the watch was already granted beingness by a communication system. A thetan comes into play a bit later, and he starts to grant beingness to a thing, which is subscribed to another beingness-line already. And so nothing happens.
This is the one thing, the watch may not do. That's inherent in it. It must resist all effects. The firm in Connecticut, which produces these watches, produces them with this inherent postulate. And the guy, who has planned and designed them, made them with the inherent postulate: Resist all effects.
A stranger in town
A thetan could then believe, that it's impossible for him, to adequately compete with the MEST-universe. He appears on the scene, only this scene was granted beingness before. And this is the point, where an individual has a difficult time in a new community. All beingness is granted (that's what he believes).
It's not true, the thetan only believes, that it is. He goes to the new community and all flats are completely strange. They were already granted beingness. Everybody is telling him all the time: "This house here belongs to judge Morton, and there is Bill South's Pub, there we have our courthouse, which we have rebuilt, shortly after it fell a victim to a fire." He finds out, that everybody here has granted beingness to the town, except of him. He finds out very definitely, that everybody in this town is anxious to tell him, that they have granted beingness to this town. Not him. He is a stranger.
Granting beingness to space
Let's take a child, who was born and raised in this town. The child has explored everything and left his sign on the old oak. He has broken the windows in that house, and in another house an old lady tried to catch him. There is the house, where he's made somebody an April fool. He's more or less left his fingerprints in the whole town. Before his earliest childhood he's had his own ideas about this town, and luckily he's had these ideas two or three years before anybody thought, he'd already have any ideas about it, and so started to educate him. Or in that time he already knew, that people erred. He knows, that the house on the hill is haunted by ghosts, that it always had been haunted and that the ghost. will haunt it in the future too.
Even if people would tear the house down he would still know that this is the place where the ghosthouse was. He has granted beingness to it. In other words he has identified it. He has classified it and visited it.
In this way a person lives in the whole community, in which he has grown up. This leads to it that people who have moved too often early in their lives reach a point where they believe in not being able to occupy the community. Here we deal with the question of being space, but there is more to it, than simply being space.
Granting beingness to your future
That's a very weird matter. Some guy is coming over the peak of a hill and sees a town spread out before him. He says: "What a terrible, shaky, ugly, mean place this is!" And the next guy comes over the peak of the hill, looks at the town and he endows it with beingness and then he says: "There is a town down there."
Well, the first guy goes down to the town and nobody does anything for him. When they shoe his horse or repair his car, they will shoe it the wrong way round or repair his tire in a strange fashion, which doesn't keep for long. Things do happen this way.
And the next guy comes through the town and he has granted beingness to it. Probably there is nothing wrong with his equipment anyway, but he goes down there and finds that everybody is really nice to him. In the hotel he gets a good room. Food is good and everybody is happy and merry about the whole thing. Such things happen to him during his whole life.
Well, it isn't that one has manufactured his own future to this degree simply by considering things are bad. It's because he doesn't manufacture it at that long range, he manufactures it in terms of split seconds. From moment to moment he manufactures his own future. And if he won't grant it any beingness, his future isn't alive. It has no life in it at all. A split second after he utters the postulate, no life occurs. That's because this individual is unwilling to grant beingness or is afraid to.
What life does best
Above there is a higher ranged part of the computation, and that is beingness. If you are not willing to grant beingness to the people you talk to, you're consistently trying not to grant beingness to them… Do you see, what will happen? You start to fight your granting of beingness. You talk to somebody and grant him beingness. You do this simultaneously. We talk about something, which is very very bewitched. We don't talk real at all. We talk about what life makes best. It waves its magic wand and says: "Be or Live or Exist", and all things do it. That's what life does.
"Not granting beingness" equals "less space"
Here you have a person who caused that more things exist and he is not anymore willing to cause that anything exists. So he's being attacked by everything he's ever made. The things in his immediate environment will attack the person. They refuse to grant him beingness. If anybody has been refused beingness by his environment too often, he himself will start to refuse beingness to the environment.
Besides all mechanics this beingness will manifest itself one way or the other, in order to disqualify the person who doesn't want to grant beingness. He has to have less and less space, because he can't stretch himself out over a broader space, as he isn't able to grant beingness to these things.
You'll see that manifested on the bodies of those people you audit. You'll see to what degree people have refused to grant them beingness, and while they are being audited, you'll see to what degree they refuse to grant beingness.
Beingness and the tone scale
The tone scale is a scale of life. It's also a scale of the amount of beingness someone believes having and it reflects in the amount of motion he thinks he can control. It shows in lots of things. You'll find out that everybody, who is having difficulties to get out of his head, or who has difficulties with terminals, regardless of mechanical relations, that to every such person beingness was refused to a large extent. He insisted upon granting beingness to himself, and that met with resistance, and he refused to grant beingness to anybody else.
What is this granting of beingness? It's simply a series or correlated words. They wear out rapidly. They are symbols. But the action doesn't wear out.
Rehabilitating the ability to create
The granting of beingness and the refusal to grant beingness – all the words of man and all the things, which face a person in life can therefore be summarized.
The first decision is to be. Where there is life in this universe, there one has decided to be. But above this level, there is the granting of beingness, and this is a trainable function.
A person, who has lost his ability to grant beingness, has lost also his ability to create. When we rehabilitate creation, we then first observe this point in the preclear: his willingness to grant beingness.
Mind-reading
Each artistic work has to live. With this matter we don't try to transgress the boundary into the realm of mysticism or black magic. But from time to time you will make this experience, and don't think, that this is an unusual experience.
You tell a preclear: "Okay, now put this postulate, whatever it is, into the front wall of the room." – Then you put the same postulate into the front wall of the room. Do you know, that you'll get the same wording of his postulate? You'll put your postulate into it. But you are in communication with him, and that is a higher communication system. This thing about mind-reading can be something very undefinable and very upsetting. But there, where you have a coincidence of beingness in this straight way, you'll be dealing with that. The less the case is capable of exteriorizing, the less positive this is. But you are immediately in a thetan-to-thetan-communication-system, and such a system exists independent of words.
Art, which contains life
The artist who can paint without granting beingness to his work of art is rather a bad artist.
He simply applies paint to a sketch.
When Michelangelo painted something or made a sculpture, it was pretty perfect in its form. The form and the sketch of the painting or statue are good enough, so that you can look at a photograph of it and think that it's beautiful. We are here close to the boundary, not quite being able to talk about it. The MEST-language doesn't go along with it.
Before having confronted an original Michelangelo in reality, you don't recognize that the guy who has painted it really meant it that way. The amount of life in the statue itself, which is being controlled and held down one way or the other, is about becoming a Supernova or so. It's the amount of vitality. In other words, this thing is alive, and its life is quite apparent, even for some rascal off the street!
I once saw a wonderful white statue of a sculpturer, whose name I never heard. It was in an utterly strange and weird part of the world, where one never had guessed that an artist would have lived there. This statue was so simple in its form that you hardly could call it a statue. And yet it was of such a vitality animated by a quiet expanding nature, that the statue actually filled the whole courtyard with peace. It was alive there was absolutely no doubt about it. And that wasn't anything that could only be recognized by some especially gifted people.
Those people, who only ploughed their farm land, might not have immediately seen it, but each beggar, pedlar, each maid and each person, each gentleman and each clerk in this road would come over to the courtyard almost every evening, he would sit down and have a look at the statue. There were much prettier places to sit around, but they came and looked at the statue. It was alive. Of course, you could say, that they themselves by their looking granted even more beingness to the statue, and so they have preserved the tradition of its existence. And so this lively something ensued.
Bringing new life
Have you ever seen a house, which wasn't inhabitated and which decayed and lost its beingness? Have you ever seen a town, which is losing its beingness? Or have you ever directly felt the beingness of a town? The people maintain this beingness.
An artist, a writer or a poet could arrive and grant a new beingness to a town. He can simply do it off the cuff. He simply looks around and says: "You really do have a beautiful town here!"
And he tells the people all about it. They never have granted any beingness. They are so busy keeping themselves from devouring each other, that they never have noticed it. But this is something they can agree to. And at this very instant the town will be living. It's quite remarkable to do this in a town. It's a capability every being has.
Eventually man was discouraged by this. He thinks, that it is a cheat or something. That's not the case. An artist has very very little to do with facts, the more he has to do with facts, the more he is a labourer. What he has to do with is directing beingness. If he can inspire something with the breath of truth, he's an artist. I don't care how many diplomas he's got or under whom he'd studied.
It's simple to free this. It's not a God-given untouchable talent, or a talent, nobody could adopt. You are here – you are alive. When you were small, you have granted beingness to your dog or your carriage, in other words, you made them alive. And still today you grant beingness to your car, a pet-book or to other objects. Maybe sometimes even this happened to you: You were wearing certain clothes, when you had an unpleasant experience – and the following day – or maybe even three or four days later – you didn't feel like wearing this suit or that dress. You put it aside. The reason for it was, that you have furnished it with a certain beingness.
This beingness is more than simply time, space and energy. It's a liveliness and it escapes observation, until the person examines it.
You are as much alive, as you have been granted beingness by others and as you have granted beingness to others. You are alive as a group to that degree. But you are really only as much alive, as you yourself are utterly willing to grant beingness, are able and willing to allow others to grant beingness. You are alive only to that degree. I don't care by what moods somebody is overcome, how drunk someone may become or how much Heroin somebody can take – he never will gain more life. No artificial stimulant and no love-affair or anything else can give somebody this level and this characteristic of existence, because we are dealing with life itself.
When a preclear is being audited, it is often completely incomprehensible, what he wants.
He will say: "I want to be happy." Now that's the biggest fraud in this universe. He can't live in this universe and be happy for 24 hours a day, 12 months a year or for a 100 galactic units of time. It's impossible, because he'd be miserable, if he were.
He himself seeks for drama and tension. I've never seen anybody, who enjoyed life so much as a girl, who was playing the beautiful sadness of being left. Only if she can't play the beautiful sadness of being left, she's overcome by the beautiful sadness. You have to start to audit it.
This case had the most remarkable love-affairs, and did this and that. She is very willing to tell you something about it with some pride, but always notice this gleam of pride, which is behind it. This is no aberrative material. Then she got into trouble, when she couldn't outflow a kind of beingness, which therefore, was stopped and piled up in the flow. People then worked at it to deny the ability to her to be a certain thing. They denied beingness.
They would say to this person: "That's all unreal. You are only dramatizing, and you don't really mean it, and those tears don't mean anything, you are only trying to dodge. You're only trying to achieve something."
Existence is actually the whole array on the Chart of Human Evaluation. Where you can freely execute this, where you have a wide scope to live and express your feelings and express the drama and be able to get involved in it – here all these things become vitals and life-blood.
But above all these things there is the ability of a person to grant beingness to the moment of time, to the past, the future, to others and his own objects. To grant beingness, and then not to be afraid of it. And if you have done it, well – then just continue doing it and grant rather more beingness, than cease to do it, because something of it has bitten you.
You can't become able in life, while being afraid to live it. Never. And somebody can't be himself, without being willing to grant beingness, because he is the only one, who can grant beingness to himself. So we arrive at a level of processing, which tells us a lot already, and which is in its own theory its own process.
"To be or not to be?" That's what man is fixed on. But that's not the question. To grant beingness or not to grant beingness is the question, on which he's stuck every day in his life.
L. Ron Hubbard
Dear Friends,
A new year is behind us, and for us, it's been a fruitful one. More and more people are recognizing the importance of an applied philosophy that emphasizes that the spiritual is above the material, and that the thetan – that is you – is the source of life.
Yet we are faced with a world full of challenges, and it doesn't look as if these challenges will disappear tomorrow. That is why it is all the more important for everyone to play an active part in shaping the world, because each and every one of us is an important part of our society.
The idea of having been “created” unfortunately often leads to seeing ourselves as an effect. In a system that aims to reduce us to mere consumers and “make us happy” with the status quo, it is easy to go with the flow and not resist. But in this way, we are only effects, not causes.
The risk of conformity is considerable. The idea Ron shares in his book “The Creation of Human Ability” strikes me almost as an axiom: “However it can be said with some truth, that a Man is as sane as he is dangerous to the environment.
I appreciate people who rebel, take active action and stand up for themselves when something doesn't suit them. People who take initiative and stand up against injustice. These people actively shape the world and make it fair.
It is important to be strong and not afraid of the “crazy” ideas of our fellow human beings. Of course, we need to be able to tell the difference between right and wrong, and if someone is acting really badly, we should be ready to stand up for equity.
Through our philosophy, through Scientology, we acquire a foundation for living and understand what is right and what is wrong. It is not up to us to tell others what is right and what is wrong. By auditing out harmful energy and failures, each individual recognizes for himself what is right and what is wrong.
Scientology's basic assumption that Man is basically good is constantly confirmed by auditing out harmful energy and failures. Scientology doesn't train “good” people, but effective people – people who are causes and make a difference. A Clear is not just “good”, a Clear is cause.
Happy New Year!!!
Max, Erica, Melinda, Dirk, Vreni, Jean und Sibylle