Introduction: A great article on training and self-determinism. Really good!
A must read or listen to. https://www.ronsorg.space/blog.
Much love
Max Hauri
Wisdom and ignorance – training and self-determinism
Taken from the lecture "Training of Auditors" given on the 16 July 1954 by L. Ron Hubbard
You will discover that is difficult to train new people.
By training a new person you are training him up against his livingness. You are, to some degree, training him up against a set of realities which he holds which might or might not be true. You are training him on the common denominator of considerations on the track which brought him to the point where he is. Obviously then the training will restimulate him.
All you have to do is teach somebody very thoroughly about ARC and the various parts of communication and the considerations which go into making up that communication and you will discover that he gets restimulated.
He might be a very bright boy and you could easily go out and show him how to drive a "Satmobile" or you could show him how to knit or do almost anything. Or how to be a general (being a private is more complicated). You could probably teach him any one of these things rather easily. And you will discover that his ability to learn to some degree slows down the second you begin to train him in Scientology. Why? It's the incoming comm lag. As you teach him, you start to bust up his case. ["Incoming comm lag" refers to all kinds of restimulations that arise in the student's mind. The intention of the teacher or the study materials must pass through these restimulations to reach the thetan.]
If you were to think of teaching in terms of evaluation, you might yourself, after a while, begin to conceive yourself to be guilty of an overt act against the student. You are obviously constantly evaluating for him, aren't you? Obviously.
No, you're not. You're pointing out to him the woof and warp of life. And if you didn't point this out to him, he would never get anywhere near it. His comm lag itself would shy him off of it.
Wisdom and Ignorance
Here's the difference between wisdom and ignorance: Any wisdom, from whatever source, would be better than ignorance on the same subject. Any wisdom is better than ignorance, whether it's other-determined, self-determined – it doesn't matter. But where it comes to instruction, any wisdom is better than ignorance on that subject. So, you've chosen only the lesser harmful thing.
You could train in an entirely different way. You could train in this wise: you could just process the person till he discovered all these answers. That would be possible if you cared to invest some fifty or a hundred hours on a person every time you were going to train him, you could then bring him up to a realization of these various points.
Culture
The communication of the information is the more difficult part, however. An individual can know all about the subject of life and livingness and yet have great difficulty putting it into language. Easily the biggest stunt, you might say, in the formation of Scientology, is the adequate codification of the information so that it could be relayed, so that the information becomes a Third Dynamic subject.
The amount of harm which you will accomplish by "evaluating for" your student is negligible today because you have processes adequate to the instruction. It's negligible.
Simply training somebody will have a tendency to bring him up in tone.
In darkness, any shining star possessing some constancy is better than no star at all. So evaluation is a word which harshly may be assigned to your instruction of a student, but how else would he get there?
And quite, quite strangely, if you would care to investigate savage cultures (of which I've investigated a few) you would discover that it is ignorance itself, it is a lack of wisdom in that community itself which brings about terror, injustice, maltreatment, decay and deteriorization.
Wisdom afloat in a culture makes the culture. The very definition, culture, could be summated by the amount of technology, knowingness, wisdom, in existence in that culture.
What you call today Western culture is a combination of knowingnesses which summate into a higher, more decent form of life than can be achieved in other areas where that wisdom does not exist.
However much harm might come about to a society through becoming mechanized by finally mechanizing itself up to a point of where it blows itself to pieces – however much harm might come about because of that – any part of that harm could be nullified by a sufficient, broad spread of wisdom. In other words, it is only the fact that the atom bomb is arriving in mystery, in a civilization which still bows down to superstition. [In 1954 when this lecture was given, people were still in shock and awe over the devastating effects from the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The lack of information about what an atom bomb is and what it does, led to much superstition.]
It is a very superstitious culture, this Western world – very. It believes in invisible gods, visitations, mumbo jumbo. And an atom bomb arriving in that unstable a condition in the society, of course, can produce an enormous amount of harm because the humanities have been outstripped and overbalanced by a technology appertaining only to the physical universe and leaving out of its computation, the mind, life, beingness.
Never worry for a moment how much you evaluate for somebody if it's in the line of what life is all about. And you're simply talking to him about the generalities of wisdom itself. Don't discount this. You can't hurt him.
Harmful evaluation
The way you can hurt somebody is to evaluate specifically: "The trouble with you is …" And that is what we mean by harmful evaluation. It almost must be preceded by, "The trouble with you is …" And so we find the main difficulty with evaluation, in general, is the fact that it validates somebody's difficulties.
Wisdom is not the difficulty. The difficulty is the unknowingness. Now, if you were to talk to somebody and teach him in this wise, "I am talking to you because the trouble with you is you are so stupid, you see, because you don't know these things, because you've never run across these things, because you haven't got two brain cells to knock together. That's why I've got to talk to you this way." If you trained anyone in that sort of an atmosphere, you would not be training anyone.
The only reason you can relay the information to him at all is because it has deeply subjective experience behind it. You can relay the information of Scientology to him as well as he has experienced it on the whole track and no better – not a bit better. And so you are perhaps spotting up for him and telling him on an other-determinism that there are many unknown things on the track.
The funny part of it is that all he has to do is look around in life and recognize these facts and large chunks of bank blow on it, just like that.
You notice that a preclear can get well because you, the auditor, are indicating the process. Well, you don't conceive that to be evaluation. Well, don't ever conceive training in Scientology to be evaluation for the preclear. Have I made my point on that?
Processing
I can tell you clearly that it's almost impossible to very widely train anybody in Scientology without, at the same time, doing two other things: getting that person to do some processing and getting some processing for that person.
And if you can't get him to do these two things, why, you're sort of talking to the wind. His realities on what you are talking about are grouped in with many, many other realities. He's been told so often by a teacher or a writer that there's this, there's that, there's something or other, that he no longer has any great differentiation.
It is the processing which he does and the processing which he receives, which gives him the differentiative factor from other data and information which he has imbibed, which isolates the information for him.
Now, you can give him a barrage of information, a tremendous quantity of data and afterwards you would find, if you examined him carefully, that it had gone into and mixed up with Christian Science, it had mixed up with Rosicrucianism, it had mixed up with something he read one time that Schopenhauer wrote and Thus Spake Zarathustra – if he'd ever heard of that – and the subject of creative art and mechanical drawing. And it had kind of all mixed up and it was as though you put him in a washing machine and turned the paddles up to high speed.
Now, you could just pour the information at him and just by sheer voice, enforce upon him, "Space is a viewpoint of dimension. Now if you ever answer that otherwise – space really is a viewpoint of dimension, and space is a viewpoint of dimension – and if you don't agree with me and think otherwise, why, I'm afraid we're going to have to flunk you or penalize you in some way."
This individual has not been trained, because he has not been given a differentiative factor. He has not differentiated this. Space is space is space when you first start training him. And then he starts seeing, as he is processed, that as he looks, so he has space. He begins to conceive this as a thetan. As he looks, so he has space.
Up to that time space was just a chunk of stuff to him. And he had no great use for it and he couldn't do anything for it. All of a sudden he begins to tie it in with other difficulties, and he begins to see what space is, how it is formed, and he realizes quite clearly, "Yes, space is a viewpoint of dimension. It is a viewpoint of dimension."
He has as much space as he can perceive. And really, he has as much space as he can know.
But he gets this subjectively and he gets some subjective reality upon it and even though the subjective reality which he receives upon it is slight, it has still differentiated the datum for him.
Self-determinism
On the field of instruction, you're certainly interfering with somebody's self-determinism. Don't think for a moment that you aren't.
This person obviously was very self-determined to go along with the public school system and the Republican Party. All of a sudden you're telling him all sorts of things that aren't held to be true in the public school system or the Republican Party, which, if they held them to be true, would no longer be the public school system and the Republican Party.
You're just crushing into him like mad. Self-determinism? Why, you're destroying his self-determinism, obviously. Or was there any there to destroy? Or I mean, how much was present? That's the question.
Now, if you want to restore his self-determinism, you've certainly got to interrupt it someplace.
What self-determinism is this? I think this is what Schopenhauer meant when he said, "will." He said, "Stubbornness is the will taking the place of the intellect," which is nice and bright. But at the same time, doesn't this rather define "will" as meant by Schopenhauer?
Will. One time somebody came tearing in from some squirrel layout [Kind of an off beat Scientology event] and they'd heard the first hour of a tape I had made on the subject of self-determinism, and he had decided that he was going to be self-determined, and he was self-determined and this was self-determinism. And he defined it to somebody in this wise: (this is self-determinism) "You see that – that (one of the kids' toys lying there), now, you see that – that toy lying there? Now, if you wanted it, that would be you exerting your self-determinism – go over and pick it up. But if I wanted it, why, I would go over and pick it up." And the person said, "Well, but what if I picked it up while you wanted it?"
He said, "Well, then, I could really exert my self-determinism and I could kill you if you touched it and therefore, it would have been a self-determined action."
This seemed a bit confused to me, but this is generally what's rather well-understood as self-determinism, is the exertion of unlimited will. And any time you exert an unlimited will, you violate the remaining dynamics, don't you? Here, if you went around and killed off all life in all directions in an effort to communicate with a nothingness, it doesn't look to me like you would wind up completely free. This doesn't add up as a possibility.
So therefore, what your student, if you caught him raw and he was having a bad time, would define as self-determinism would be the liberty he could use in exertion of will.
How much will is he permitted to exert? Your psycho comes up through that band, goes into a rage, he wants to get into the rumpus room and tear everything up. He believes all other-determinisms are contrary to his own.
Well, now that's a very limited viewpoint right there, isn't it? "All other-determinism are contrary to my own." That's a definition of "paranoia." Well, Man's complete freedom happens to lie, unfortunately for such thinking, in his recognition of his brotherhood with the entire universe. And in his failure to recognize this, he will fail. Now, somebody goes down into apathy – there is always a mockery band on the bottom of the scale – somebody goes down into apathy and he says, "Well, I won't hurt anything. Everything can walk over me. I don't mean any harm to anything."
And you start processing this fellow and he comes up out of apathy and he'll rampage around for a while until he discovers something vaguely resembling a First Dynamic. And then he can go on up to a Third Dynamic.
Freedom of viewpoint
Self-determinism was a concept of very early days of Scientology and the late days of Dianetics. We have exceeded the concept – exceeded it very markedly. And in the place of self-determinism, we get freedom of viewpoint.
Instead of self-determinism, we now have freedom of viewpoint. You see how these two things would merge, one with another, and how freedom of viewpoint is a tremendously higher concept than self-determinism? Because freedom of viewpoint would mean it's perfectly all right for you to argue with yourself any day you want to, if you'll just remember you're arguing with yourself.
You can even forget that if you'll remember it again.
Here you have yourself at source-point and yourself at receipt-point. And when an individual is really doing well, he doesn't care whether he's at source-point or receipt-point or how much distance is in between them or how close they are together or whether they're completely identified – it's perfectly all right with him. He can be relaxed about it. Not because he's in apathy and has to be relaxed about it, but because he can be relaxed about it, that's why.
One person that's monitored by is you. It's monitored by at least you. And so it isn't free within its own line, it'd be free under you, this beingness, which is being monitored from source-point alone. Your body, right this moment, is only free under your rule. But within that limitation, it has some freedom. And this is beingness.
So, in training, in training don't ever worry about interrupting somebody's self-determinism.
You have to be, to some degree, a policeman in all training. You have to know where to cut the line. You have to know where to indulge freedom and where to impose a barrier. And until you have achieved an agreement on the part of your students as to the workability, the simplicity of the technologies which you're trying to relay, you will find you have to bar many doors. Don't forget to open them up again after they have a reality on what you're trying to teach.
In training, the self-determinism which you're trying to bring forward is the actual self-determinism of the person – not an imposed social determinism which is, as far as we can see, "will" taking the place of the intellect.
L. Ron Hubbard
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