HELP – MERRY CHRISTMAS

Introduction:  I'm sure that you have people in your immediate vicinity that you have tried to help and have failed to help. But I wonder if you've ever looked at this: Was it possible for that person to accept any help?

One of my most important observations in life is that you love those whom you help. It is not the other way around. Just because you help someone does not at all mean that they love you.

The reward of help is that you become a more ARC-filled being and that you love people.

If you want to hear the entire lecture below, I recommend listening to it on the website sciento.org. There you can read along in English and German at the same time while listening to Ron. Go to “Lectures” in the top right corner.

Merry Christmas!

Max and Erica, Melinda and Dirk, Verena, Jean, Sibylle and Henrietta

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Some Aspects of Help

Excerpt form the lecture "Some Aspects of Help" given on the 30 June 1960 by L. Ron Hubbard

The most fundamental button man has is help. And that button which can be most easily tampered with or upset or aberrated in man is help. And you start saying to man, "help," and man has a variety of reactions. And of course Dianetics and Scientology are nothing if not help mechanisms.

When help is straightened out in an individual, his IQ goes up. Now there's a fascinating one for anyone whether he's philosophically inclined or technically inclined or anything else. Not only does his IQ go up but his freedom, of course, and belief and confidence in himself increase. Help is the button which can be just knocked to pieces or re-established in the individual. That's a tremendously powerful button.

A person basically intends to help. The beginning of any difficulty he's in right now is an effort to help. And also, the only reason he's alive and happy right now is help.

But this is a double-sided coin. If you think of somebody you hate, you can probably remember a time when you tried to help him, or a man like him. Your hatred actually is based on the fact that you flopped. You failed you and you failed him.

If someone decides that he cannot help society or any section of it, you have a delinquent on your hands, if he decides that. He has to know that he can help. And as long as he knows that he can help, he'll stay in communication and stay right. But when he feels he can no longer help, he starts blowing up. There goes his life.

This factor as far as one goes in life, is determined apparently by the degree that he feels his activity helps one or another sections of life. And when that poor fellow comes on down to the last dregs of nowhere, he can't help anybody in the whole world including himself. And he's a goner. He's a dead one by that time. I don't care if he's still breathing.

You can tell how dead the person is by how little they can help. It's actually a direct correlation.

No, we had a limiting factor here. Apparently there weren't too many people in western civilizations who still believed help was possible.

You are asking straight on top of the basic button and reason people have for existence. The fellow says: "Why are we alive?" Apparently the reason we are alive is to help.

"What is the reason for life?" Oddly enough, the apparent answer to the thing if he wants a very finite, basic reason is to help people. That's apparently a fundamental reason for existence. And when they can no longer help people, they're dead.

You take somebody who is on the verge of committing suicide. He keeps talking all the time about suicide. And you say, "What's the matter, Bub? Can't you help anybody?" You're liable to hit right into the middle of it. Yeah, he's liable to say, "That's right."

Help is the most acceptable subject you ever discussed with anybody. And a person who starts to fulminate and doesn't believe that help is possible has simply slipped. Help has redefined him, and you'll find this out in discussing it with him.

The wrong way to handle them is show them definitely that they aren't helping anybody. The right way to handle it is have a talk with them as to how they could help people. You'll find out that the button will realign very rapidly.

Now I'm sure that you have people in your immediate vicinity that you have tried to help and have failed to help. But I wonder if you've ever looked at this: Was it possible for that person to accept any help?

If you found a person with a very bad leg, do you know that enough discussion from you and getting enough answers from that person on the subject of how he could help legs would do something for the bad leg? Probably do more for it than all the clinics in the world. And for the person that won't listen to you when you say you have a very interesting subject you've heard about and so and so, and he goes, "Reow, reow, reow," don't bother to discuss it with him. Say, "What is help? What is help anyway?"

Oh, you're liable to get one of the wilder discussions, or you'll get a total silence. Or you'll get no answer at all. But you'll get no more "reow, reow, reow." And maybe it's worthwhile just to be able to shut that off.

L. Ron Hubbard