Insanity

Introduction: All insanity is a specialization of, and a total exclusion of all else, of just one point of sanity. You might say every insane person is totally sane to such an extremity that nobody can stand it.

Understanding Insanity? It is possible!

What a fitting title. Ron’s text speaks for itself.

I have also attached the complete lecture from which I took this text.

The lecture “Tone Scale, Effect Scale,” given on 8 April 1959, is one of the particularly valuable lectures on the Tone Scale. Ron does not limit himself to simply listing individual tone levels, but shows how the various scales actually function in life – and how they can be observed and applied. For him, a scale is a tool: only through its intelligent application does it become a truly useful aid.

What makes this lecture especially interesting is that Ron deals extensively with areas of the Tone Scale below 0.0. He describes minus levels like responsibility as blame, shame, regret, protecting bodies, etc. These additional tone levels and their emotional manifestations provide a much finer understanding of the lower ranges of the scale.

Furthermore, Ron connects Affinity, Reality, and Communication with the Tone Scale and shows how emotion, reality, and communication reflect one another. Ron explains that there are lower harmonics of the emotions – a kind of correspondence – and how emotions are Ridges and Flows, as well as Attention Units.

Studying this lecture therefore gives one not merely more data about the Tone Scale, but a practical instrument for observing and understanding people, communication, and behavior. The gain is being able to apply the scale in a living way – and thereby recognize more precisely where someone is on the scale and what is moving them upward or downward.

Much love

Max Hauri

PS: I recommend to listen to the original tape in: sciento.org "Lectures", the full text being attached below.

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Insanity

Excerpt form the lecture Tone Scale, Effect Scale, given on the 8 April 1959, by L. Ron Hubbard

There is no emotion or state of mind that is sane which cannot, fixedly and singly, become an insanity.

All insanity is a specialization of, and a total exclusion of all else, of just one point of sanity. You might say every insane person is totally sane to such an extremity that nobody can stand it.

There is no sane manifestation that you will not find in an insane asylum. And every person you find in an insane asylum is manifesting some­thing that maybe in another environment or another place would be totally sane.

There are no special characteristics which are insane characteristics. This is the lesson that psychiatry never learned. And so they could never diagnose. And it stayed as a total barrier across all of their diagnosis and assessments of people. They thought there was a peculiar thing called insan­ity and a bunch of states of mind which were insane. No, there are a bunch of specialized sane states of mind which, sufficiently specialized, drive a person straight around the bend. Got the idea?

I'll give you an idea. This individual is sympathetic. Now, there's nothing wrong with being sympathetic but this individual is totally sympathetic. He is 100 percent sympathetic and he is only sympathetic about earthworms. Of course he's crazy. Get the idea? And all you have to do is super-specialize a sanity, compartment it and totally fixate it. Get all the attention units of the person totally fixed on this one point of sanity and you have an insane person.

Similarly, you can find an insane person almost anywhere on this scale if he's totally fixed on the scale, but if you look at him carefully, he will be on one of the lower harmonics of the scale. He falls away from the sane expression and he goes down scale and he only expresses an insane version. Got the idea?

Don't look for a special thing called insanity. Just look for totally fixed sanities and you've got it, you see? Naturally, the fellow who takes a piece of paper and puts it on every door knob that he opens and won't touch a door knob, is doing a sane thing – maybe in a leper colony.

But he's doing it everyplace, don't you see? And you say, "Well, that fellow's pretty batty." You're absolutely right, the time and place is wrong. But a person who is totally fixed has no time and place, you see? And that's how he can be so insane.

We get into the whole idea of atten­tion units. A person's total attention is on one thing or on a very few things. And he can't span his attention easily. He has no breadth.

Now, I talked about the dynamics – his attention withdrew off the vari­ous dynamics and inverted on them and became very fixed. Similarly, with this Tone Scale his attention can be fixed along with these various emotions. And he gets one emotional response: everything is bad. Or, the way to do everything is to protect bodies. See, he's just totally fixed. He's just going to protect bodies [-2.2 on the Tone Scale].

You'll find that if you work this out yourself, you could work out quite an insanity that a person could go through simply protecting bodies. You know, he could insist that everybody stand in the middle of the street very still with concrete walls around them. Then the body would be totally protected, you see? Try to make this into a law, or something like that. You'd say this fellow would be totally batty.

L. Ron Hubbard