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The Tone Scale: How Valid Is It?

F.Bullbait

Oh, a wise guy,eh?
We take many things for granted that are a puzzle to folks from other cultures.

I used to live across from an apartment building that housed people "fresh off the boat". One day I saw a fire inside an apartment which had the door open. A further investigation revealed an electric oven was being used by the inhabitants as a fireplace.
 

JustSheila

Crusader
We take many things for granted that are a puzzle to folks from other cultures.

I used to live across from an apartment building that housed people "fresh off the boat". One day I saw a fire inside an apartment which had the door open. A further investigation revealed an electric oven was being used by the inhabitants as a fireplace.
You think that's bad. I had a Brazilian renting a room from me for a while. One day I gave him a ride. When I stopped for gas, he kindly offered to put the gas in the tank. By the time I turned to give him the key to my locking gas tank, he had a screwdriver in his hand to break it open, that fast. I kid you not. :omg:
 
I thought when I looked into that link I would find a work w/only the most tenuous relation to Hubbard's. I was right.
Lol!

Thanks very much for that, Veda.

Here's the Project Gutenberg copy of that Darwin book, complete with illustrations.

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1227/1227-h/1227-h.htm

It looks interesting. :)

Paul
l
 
That's an excellent start.

Add to that another essential part of the Hubbard Rhetorical Triangle meant to further muddy the water--so that there is always a convenient explanation for those times when REALITY does not match Hubbard's DELUSIONAL scripture. Example:

NEW SCIENTOLOGIST
Hey Billy, I've noticed that you have been
really downtone recently.

BILLY BLOWDOWN
Oh? What makes you think that?

NEW SCIENTOLOGIST
Well, I was obnosing you on course the past
five days and you have been really smiley, but at
the same time you are doing really mean things.
Isn't that "covert hostility" on the tone scale?

BILLY BLOWDOWN
Oh, my goodness no! I am solidly in exhilaration--that's
eight-point-zero on the tone scale, ya know! What's confusing
you is that Ron states that each individual tone level has all of the
harmonics of every other tone level--within it!

NEW SCIENTOLOGIST
Wuttttttt? That's really weird!
Are you sure about that?

BILLY BLOWDOWN
Absolute certainty!
I'm totally exhilarated,
but in a 1.1 way.

NEW SCIENTOLOGIST
I don't know. . .
that sounds so stupid, LOL.
You think it might be my study case
keying in?

BILLY BLOWDOWN
Yeah, definitely. Ron says low-toned people who can't
perceive and "have" the total uptone-ness of OTs just
need to work it out in clay until you come up
the tone scale and feel good about it.



I think u make a valid point about the Church, except I don't know of where LRH says all tones have harmonics of all other tones. He says some tones r harmonics of some other tones. I'd like to behold any evidence u have of ur take over mine. In any case the sort of manipulation u describe does go on in the church, last I checked. It's crap that needs to stop for the real subject to emerge. I possibly shouldn't b on this message board. I consider myself an fzer, among other things. LRH made a system that had the potential to b the 1st religion where some1 @ very bottom could potentially cause harm to some1 @ very top (KRs/Things that should not b reports), but fact is I was told @ least 2ce, that experience ruled above that seeming potential. Altho, I could understand the why on that, that + the fact I did not have a good friend w/whom to compare notes, who was also in Scientology, meant that it was about @ that point my cognitive dissonance was getting too extreme for me to have much potential to bootstrap myself into an effective Scientologist. Couldn't excuse that, deep down in my thetan kisser.
 
  1. Meaningless question. Are these specific emotions that are the same for everyone. When they say "Antagonism", does that mean the same "antagonism" of someone else? I doubt it.
  2. Sure, except for the determination, as above, as to how each person experiences each emotion and what it is called. What one "observes" may have absolutely nothing to do with what the other person is experiencing.
  3. No. What on earth gives anyone the idea that there is a "sequence" to emotions -- that you must experience each in turn as you move from one emotion to another. Not to mention the numbers!! Someone please explain what the numbers are based on and how someone else could verify whatever they mean?
  4. Yeah, no thanks.
Here we get into the difference between a philosophically inclined fzer/an anti-Scientologist. It's a deep subject; a big can of worms, / if u don't even respect the opinion I'm about to give, I hope you'll respect the point of this preface pov.
1. Personally, I gotta respect LRH for trying/trying damned hard to come up w/a damned good answer. As for my own observations; I'm left wondering what the psychologists have been up to, if they never came up w/a scale of emotions. That is a definite Scientological pov. As for the same for every1; I think it rather long established in philosophy that we can't say for certain that 1 person sees anything like the same color red. All we can say is that we make the same demarcation between red/say, green. In other words, the question "do we experience the exact same emotion" is in fact where we get some degree of meaninglessness in a question.
2. All this says to me, is that the tone-scale is 1 of LRH's more complex observations. I would also say it's brilliant...but that's just me, I suppose.
3. uh...brilliance, IMNSHO. Hubbard is the 1st/only person I know to say that emotions relate to how well a person thinks they r surviving. As for having to experience each as 1 moves up/down scale. That's not real to me. I don't yet believe it's true, because I've never observed it in myself or others. It does "stand to reason" tho/I'd take that pov, if I suddenly saw it was true. LRH was not an occultist, but an engineer (I know he did not pass his engineering class, but somehow or another, he took on many of the thought habits of an engineer, IMNSHO). Therefore there's 0 numerological symbolism to the #s, as LRH makes clear. He also STRONGLY hints, that tho the #s aren't reflective of anything like some platonic absolute truth, the idea of harmonics means they r not completely arbitrary, either. The #s give some idea of where tones r harmonics of each-other.
4)... ... ...OK; on the 1 hand I consider the HCHE brilliant; on the other hand, I doubt it lives up to it's potential. No1 knew, for instance, what a homosexual really was, until they began fighting to b free. Observing a caged animal is not the same as observing a freed 1. Look @ Freud's bass ackwards speculations on the matter for instance. 1.1 is still sometimes an important part of some gays behavior to this day, but the basic why for such may b way off the mark. I need to read SOS/see what he says about oppression there. Note that during the raid, Scientologists were instructed to b 1.1 to the peeps conducting the raid (See Omar V. Garrison on this point). IMNSHO, SOS is 1 of maybe 3 of LRH's most important Dianetics/Scientology works. Psychotherapists should have beat down the f'ing door to get it. A few did. The blurb of 1 such used to b on the back of SOS. Note that the psych study has also been removed from the beginning of SOS. I'm aware of the stated reason for this on Wikipedia, but highly doubt it. Wikipedia has a scathing/lying critique for anything in the realm of religion/spirituality/metaphysics, much newer that 120 years ago. No big surprise, therefore.
 
I feel a bit covertly hostile asking this but what happened to sympathy?
Maybe you'll get this; maybe u won't. Expanded tone-scale has both pity/no pity. They r quite close to each-other on the scale. It helps if u understand that "God" does not "care". Since "God's" care is infinite, "He" does not "care" (where care in quotes = ur particular ideas of what 1 would do if they "cared".). I 1ce had a conversation w/the 8th dynamic, wherein he told me in no uncertain terms "I don't care how it's going". THat eventually woke me up!
 
For the sake of "discussion" it seems, Paul posted:

Anyway . . . .


  1. Are these emotions?
  2. Are they readily observable in people?
  3. Does the sequence seem correct, in that on a personal level does an emotion higher on this scale seem preferable to one lower down? [This question is complicated by Hubbard's idea that someone chronically above 2.0 is survival-oriented, and someone chronically below 2.0 is death-oriented]
  4. How about the Chart of Human Evaluation?


I'll give my own answers, just to start the ball rolling.

1. Yes
2. Yes.
Those first two aren't meant to be trick questions. I think the answers are obvious, but I spent so many years in Scn and the tone scale is such a basic Scn thing, who knows?!
3. I haven't done thousands of hours of auditing and taken careful note of the pcs' emotional tone. I know one was supposed to note it on the worksheets where it changed, but .... Personally, the sequence seems ok.
4. Heh. That's a vast, open-ended question! To be discussed, shall we say.

*****


My answers:
1) again Hubbard screwed up by pinching and not understanding that which he pinched from. "Emotion" was a big subject in the day he "researched" psychology . . . so, a better view of it is that they are not purely only "emotions." . . . closer, better investigation reveals they are MOODS and actually a combination of emotion and attitude.

2) Yes

3) Yes, relatively correct in the context of how these conditions of relationship to "life" a person expresses relate or align to each other . . . but Hubbard's additives and explanations are erroneous examples of his effort to appear "scientific."

4) Ummmm, heh indeed.



I really admire how u seem to b trying to b objective here, / give the devil his due, but on point 1) This seems to b from the pov that "OBVIOUSLY" psychologists know more about emotions / such than LRH. We differ on this pov, if so.
3) Yeah...sorry...I think LRH's relation of emotion to evolution is what makes the tone scale so brilliant. U can't have 1 w/out the other. To say the scale is basically right, but the science purely bogus strikes me as the most irredeemable nonsense, / besides mere confirmation that LRH was a pragmatist.
 
New converts to Scn seem to really get a kick out of learning about the tone scale and judging their friends and family and strangers with it. Apparently it's fun to slap labels on people.

The more one stays in Scn, however, the more pernicious it becomes. You have the datum that Scn is supposed to raise people on the tone scale, you also have the datum that if you aren't getting more uptone with Scn then there's something wrong with you like PTSness or SPness.

So you eventually have "senior Scientologists" who've spent years in the cult "going OT" but not feeling very OT and they're trying to artificially appear uptone to keep the illusions alive.

In other words, lying to themselves and others about how great and happy they feel after spending years in an indoctrination cult, being near bankruptcy, losing friends and family due to disconnection, etc. But you better LOOK and ACT uptone or risk an expensive trip to ethics to find your overts!

Isn't that something to be enthusiastic about! How theta! How uptone!
U seem to b admitting that there's Scientology/then there's the cult. That's why I'm in the fz. I think LRH was brilliant / made real additions to the knowledge of mankind.
 
Yah. I always had issues with the tone scale in this regard. The line in the org was that if someone is in enthusiasm, then they are going to be making pro-survival decisions along the dynamics, and are trustworthy. That wasn't always my experience. I have met many people who come across as "high toned", and who simply couldn't be trusted. In some cases, they were almost guaranteed to betray you when they had the chance. I've also met many people who were quite powerful as personalities, or had very high IQs, and again, COULDN'T BE TRUSTED. They would use their personal dynamism and/or IQ to dominate the people around them. That made me discard the tone scale as a tool for picking friends. Tone level doesn't seem to be a reliable criterion for choosing people who won't betray you. IQ doesn't either. Which I found inconsistent with Scientology theory. After all, high toned people should generally be able to think more quickly (and hence have higher IQs on average), and people with high IQs should, on average, have fewer withholds (since O/Ws were supposed to reduce a person's IQ). So I don't think Hubbard's tone scale and the related Science of Survival charts can be completely right.

I also had reservations about the lower tone scale, and the tone scale above exhilaration. Given how important it is, I found it bizarre that there was no real explanation given as to how he derived it? How does one know that hiding comes below needing bodies (or whatever it comes below)? Or that games is higher than action? or that these are even the higher tone levels. Plucked out of his ass, as far as I could see. Same with the conditions formulas. Plucked out of his ass, and in some cases (some of the lower conditions) the meaning of the formula steps wasn't even clear (does "find out who I am" mean find out who I am being that I shouldn't be being, or does it mean find out who I am fundamentally (but am not being at the moment)? Nobody in the orgs where I was knew. Everybody had a different interpretation. Supposing for a moment that Scientology is the true route out, Hubbard did a piss-poor job of explaining these important points, in my opinion.

I choose people I can trust as friends. People who aren't trying to dominate you/control you/use you/betray you. That doesn't seem to be correlated with "tone level".

W.
There's so much I could say about this post, / I may later, but I think so much is explained by something LRH said in a lecture...I think sometime in the 60s. "I don't know how to teach judgement". Thinking of the ramifications of this, hopefully u, @ some point come to consider the possibility that the church, @ some point became a red-herring; that's why I'm in the fz. I'd give my left nut to know the exact point wherein LRH went bat-shit, if it wasn't a gradual development. Tending to guess, creation of Sea-Org, if there was an exact time, these days...yet I think he did some important stuff after it's creation. Stuff that emphasized he was not playing a wog game, tho, / so, of course, this is where the "law-only"/"real-estate novelists" type crowds get most down on him. Big games involve big risks.
 
The whole thing kind of falls apart when you see CEO's earning millions of dollars a year by aggressively destroying manufacturing, jobs, companies, employee work benefits, longevity pay, and full-time jobs while they make the stocks go up by buying out other companies to do the same thing again and never actually managing a company.

Is that Action?
Enthusiasm?
Covert Hostility?
Anger?
Antagonism?

I guess even a sociopath can be way uptone and high survival, so that negates the Chart of Human Evaluation, too. Aggressive sociopaths and other vicious predators often rise to the top ranks of companies, but their success and the Tone Scale and Chart of Human Evaluation have nothing to do with each other.
The most important thing I have to say about this post is that I dislike rather intensely, that it seems to me ur disguising the promotion of "law-only"/"real-estate novelist"/pinko commie soc values as real criticism/wish to understand. I find that to b underhanded. The answer to the question: "How much have u been programmed by the media/modern literature?" is in my case, NOT F'ING MUCH! I'm not even saying that those povs r wrong, yet. The arg has not yet progressed to that point. U haven't shown ur cards, so the game is still in play. After u have the guts to come right out w/what ur selling, then we can discuss particulars/the like. The answer is most likely "action", but if it isn't then that simply shows how far south the society has progressed. Seems to me the central concern of the whole track, is how the MEST universe treats OTs/big beings, who, admittedly, do not conform or see eye to eye w/ "conform-or-else" as the way to do ethics. 1ce ur @ that point in ur questioning (if u ever r) the questions that arise r: 1) R there better policies towards big beings/OTs? 2) If there is a better solution or solutions, is LRH in-line w/such and/or to what degree? 3) Is the current church in-line w/such. Answering these questions may well tell u who u r (enemy formula).

I'm surprised the "LRH: THE____" series (LRH: The Writer, LRH: The Educator, etc) hasn't produced LRH: The Economist. His economic ideas r completely out of line w/neoliberal agenda, but fit pretty well w/ Adam Smith, the philosophy of Mill, Ben Franklin/Ayne Rand. Church should get on that. If ur not a commie symp...please...stop giving so much credence to their BS words.

Anyway: I'm surprised the society hasn't completely crashed yet; since if the above economists (including LRH) r right, it should've any time after 1910-1930 or so. Seems to me the fact that it hasn't excuses anybody getting welfare; since; the fact that it hasn't yet, has gotta make u wonder if right-wing views on economics might actually b false. Franklin makes total sense to me, but how long has it been since we've abandoned his suggested fundamentals? Curiouser/Curiouser!
 

TomKat

Patron Meritorious
I think Hubbard's observation of 1.1 is a great contribution to human understanding, probably drawn from personal self-observation. Is there an actor in Hollywood who doesn't have covert hostility down? It's a fascinating tone, but I notice a lot of people who use it are more fearful than hostile, more vic than perp. You really need some grit to pull off the Full Monty. Take Sen. Chuck Schumer -- his phoniness is so overblown it seems fragile, a cover for propitiation.
 
I'd go with RogerB on this one. I don't know of any actual data (versus opinions) that would confirm that sociopaths and psychopaths don't feel the full range of human emotions, they just feel their emotions for selfish and destructive reasons. An inability to empathize with others doesn't affect that, and empathy isn't even on the Tone Scale, anyway, so L Ron considered it unnecessary. That says a lot.

The assumption that people feel good emotions for good reasons and then behave in a good way is false. It's not even related.

A man can cheat on his wife in action or enthusiasm. A kleptomaniac shoplifter can feel complete and at peace only after a success stealing binge. A scammer will feel powerful, in control and energetic when he knows he's winning at fooling a group and is about to bilk them out of a lot of money. There are endless examples. Any correlation between upbeat emotions and good behavior only exists when good people are already behaving, but since everyone has the capacity for mischief, the emotions are unrelated to the behavior. A person can feel good about mischief or even "hurting another in a just cause" which can actually be unjust, vicious and cruel.

The entire Speech and Reality columns and a few others on the Chart are attitudes unrelated to emotions. Someone in grief over animal pain can be a spectacular supporter of anti-cruelty groups. Sure, generally, people function better when they are more uptone. That's not always true, though. Some people need to get angry to get past the inertia of boredom to get anything done.
"I 1ce failed a class in free thinking, because I came to the conclusion u could think freely"-LRH
The # of unstated assumptions/"everybody knows"/hidden standards I think I see in this post r truly astounding:
1) Everybody knows there's 0 worse than a cheater
2) Everybody knows there's 0 worse than a klepto
3) Everybody knows there's 0 worse than a scammer
4) Everybody knows the tone-scale is the only thing LRH produced/there can't b other qualifying data (sorry; as much as LRH liked simplicity, there r problems w/more than 1 factor involved in solution. Hubbard; like a good engineer; tried to find least factors needed to solve a problem, but he did occasionally admit there were problems who's current solution was TOO simple).
5) Everybody knows left-wing ideas about "good"/evil r the 1s that count.
6) Everybody knows that laws about mscief exist because mischief is SOOOOOO darned wrong. This couples w/Everybody knows that people convicted of criminal mischief had mischief in their hearts (actually, I've reason to believe that laws concerning criminal mischief have almost 0 relation to the state of a persons mind or emotions).
7) Everybody knows the ends don't justify the means (seems to me if there were an omniscient being, ends would indeed justify means).
8) Every1 has the same definition of injustice, /that injustice is the worst possible thing.
9) Every1 has the same definition of cruelty, /besides babies know everything about ethics, it's just us retarded adults who don't. Everybody knows that vicious is the worst thing a person could b.
10) Every1 has the exact same definition of cruel/that's the worst thing a person could b.
11) Everybody knows that a person in enthusiasm, couldn't b a better supporter of animal rights than some1 in grief (assertions of this general sort).
Everybody knows LRH was saying 1 should NEVER B IN GRIEF (Nope! That's not what he was saying. Besides: Ever heard of the 5th dynamic?).

"Whatever else u may say about the 10 commandments, u gotta respect the fact that there were only 10 of them."-Robert Anton Wilson

OK...All of these things u seem to b saying r the worst things u could possibly do or b...sorry...Jesus opposed legalistic ways of thinking. He was a VERY BIG BEING/they executed him for it/let a murderer go free/the only person we know is going to heaven is the thief on the cross next to him, because he's the only person Jesus ever said directly was going to heaven.

U see...I see it different. I can see something worse than all these things u seem to want to say r so damned bad...I see MIND CONTROL, in any of it's myriad forms, as being worse. Always have; always will. Seems to me something LRH may have never have said directly is a POV of any TRUE Scientologist. Namely: The most pitiful thing about this planet is how few have ever tried anything except hypnosis as a cure for non-psychotic/non-psychopathic mental illnesses. So much is just so much mind control/hypnosis...we scientologists find this to b a matter worthy of much grief, IMNSHO.
"Every new law creates a new criminal."-Robert Anton Wilson

P.S.:It's not so much that I disagree, but that I'm an iconoclast; and I'm coming right after all ur sacred cows!
 

Wilbur

Patron Meritorious
There's so much I could say about this post, / I may later, but I think so much is explained by something LRH said in a lecture...I think sometime in the 60s. "I don't know how to teach judgement". Thinking of the ramifications of this, hopefully u, @ some point come to consider the possibility that the church, @ some point became a red-herring; that's why I'm in the fz. I'd give my left nut to know the exact point wherein LRH went bat-shit, if it wasn't a gradual development. Tending to guess, creation of Sea-Org, if there was an exact time, these days...yet I think he did some important stuff after it's creation. Stuff that emphasized he was not playing a wog game, tho, / so, of course, this is where the "law-only"/"real-estate novelists" type crowds get most down on him. Big games involve big risks.
According to Hubbard's tone scale, the higher-toned you are, the more you will make decisions that encompass all the dynamics. What I have observed is that some people who are "high toned" take decisions that suit THEM, and don't always care about how it impacts anybody else. They know they are doing well as individuals, and seem to feel it makes their right to survive more important than anybody else's. Which suggests to me that there is something not quite right about the theory behind the tone scale. I do find some of the ideas behind the tone scale interesting and potentially informative, but I don't think the tone scale is the full story.

For example, whether a person keeps their word doesn't seem to be entirely related to tone level. There are some drab, low-toned people who make a point of keeping their word, but are otherwise low-toned, and some high-toned people who keep their word only to the extent that it suits them (which, in effect, isn't keeping your word at all - the whole point of keeping your word is that you commit yourself to something, which means doing it regardless, acts of god aside).

I tend to choose my friends based more on things like whether they keep their word, and whether they make me feel good as a person, than how enthusiastically they say "A E I O U" (Tech film reference, for anyone who is puzzled by that statement).

I recall a person in my local org who was in chronic 'enthusiasm'. She was always touted as the embodiment of the state of Clear. But I found her to be a nasty, unpleasant person to be around. There were also people in fake enthusiasm. That kind of person was tiring to be around. I remember feigning exhilaration myself, as youngster, around an OT VII executive at ITO, because I thought she was in the tone level of exhilaration. When she laughed and said "look at him", I realised how ridiculous it was trying to pretend to be in a particular tone level, or mimicking other people's behaviour.
 
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Gib

Crusader
I think that's a realisation that everyone had to have at some point. There was an element of fanaticism, I felt, around the subject of MUs. The idea that it was impossible to have understood the bulletins, simply because you didn't know what LRH:AB:cd:ef meant seemed a bit ridiculous. I remember spending over an hour trying to deal with an MU on a taped lecture caused by not being able to clearly hear what Hubbard was saying. The word in question SOUNDED (to me at least) like "over-larded", and I remember having a LONG discussion with the course sup about what the word might actually be.

But I found myself that, when trying to study a scientific subject to gain an understanding of a particular point, but without being an expert in that area, it was INEVITABLE that you would come across words that you COULDN'T actually clear up, because they relied on concepts that, to understand them, would require a long and thorough study of a huge amount of material. It never made sense to me to have to spent six months studying mathematical physics (say), because the word 'tensor' (say) had been mentioned somewhere. So I quickly learned that you had to be sensible when it came to looking up words. As a result, I never rigorously followed the rule that you needed to look up EVERY definition of a word. Sometimes that was useful; most of the time, it wasn't, and could actually make you understand the word LESS than if you'd just focused on the core meanings that related to what you were reading.

That's why I think that the Primary Rundown (look up EVERY word mentioned in the Student Hat, in alphabetical order) would be a recipe for utter confusion on the part of a student.

My attitude when it came to word chains ended up being that I would look up words to the extent that I found it useful. If I found myself in word chains involving subjects in which I had no interest, I skipped it.

So I think that Hubbard's choice to add reams and reams of photography and pipe organ terms to the Student Hat materials was ill advised. I had no interest in either subject, and resented having to wade through the word clearing on those subjects just to get through the tapes. Not to mention that it conflicted with another precept of the study tech, which was "study for application", and that you needed to have INTEREST in a subject before you could study it successfully. I also spent a lot of time trying to figure out terms like "SEC ED" and how it differed from "Sec'l ED". "Secretarial to the Executive Director". But secretarial, in that sense, didn't exist in the dictionary. I had no idea what it was supposed to mean, and spent about a day with the Word Clearer at St. Hill going around in circles. If I was confronted with that now, I would just sort of guess the meaning (presumably it means that a secretary wrote it on behalf of the ED, or something like that). And anyway, all this stuff related to the historical pattern of the orgs, and didn't exist in present time anyway.

For someone who had "discovered" study tech, Hubbard at times didn't seem aware of its implications. The tech dictionary told me that the Class VII course was the internship for the Class VI course. But it WASN'T. The SHSBC had its own internship, and the Class VII course was something else. And I remember having to basically GUESS what the difference between a Dianetic Clear and a Scientology Clear was (presumably a Scientology Clear was someone who went Clear via the Clearing Course, but, if I recall correctly, the Tech Dictionary didn't say that). Also, when studying at St. Hill, if you didn't get in early and grab your favourite dictionary, you ended up having to use a dictionary that was over your head. I could study a course using the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary NOW, but when I was 18, it was way over my head. I quickly bought my own dictionaries - you couldn't survive otherwise.

When I first arrived at ITO for KTL auditor training, the first thing that happened was that we were all given an RTC-type issue to read that went on for pages and pages, and no access to dictionaries. It was full of rules and regulations, and penalties for divulging the secrets, etc. I think we had to sign it once we had read it. With hindsight, I think we must have been expected not to actually read it. I, still being a fanatic, read every page of it, and asked for a dictionary. At the time I thought, "Isn't it appalling that we start the KTL by reading this, without a dictionary, and probably getting MUs on it as we go". But it's those little points that, with hindsight, are tell-tale signs that the RTC doesn't really believe their own teachings.

Anyone who has ever learned a foreign language knows that it's IMPOSSIBLE to study a foreign language without going past MUs, even if you WANT to understand it all. The differences in grammar alone will ensure that it's not possible to understand everything at the start of your studies. You HAVE to be willing to strategically go past MUs, and focus on the things that you CAN learn about the language at the level at which you find yourself.
one of the things, or maybe several, were that if I did method one word clearing, and then student hat, and also primary rundown, and the later KTL/LOC,

why I would be a genius beyond unbelievable.

I fell for hubbard's rhetoric and sublime thinking. Nowadays it's called PR.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sublime_(literary)
 

Wilbur

Patron Meritorious
one of the things, or maybe several, were that if I did method one word clearing, and then student hat, and also primary rundown, and the later KTL/LOC,

why I would be a genius beyond unbelievable.

I fell for hubbard's rhetoric and sublime thinking. Nowadays it's called PR.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sublime_(literary)
Yeah. To be honest, I gained a LOT from study tech - especially the idea of not being lazy, and looking up words I didn't know, even though I couldn't otherwise be bothered. I also gained a lot from the looking-up-of-small-words section of the KTL. Looking up words is one aspect of Scientology that I have continued to use throughout my life. Along with the phenomena of a misunderstood word (and the other barriers to study). But you are right, looking up words, whilst it gives you a good vocabulary and aids understanding, doesn't seem to be the key to genius. And certainly the idea of trawling through your past life to find all the MUs you have gone past doesn't seem to be as valuable as Hubbard made it sound. It might be useful for someone who has made a practice of reading books without looking up words, I suppose. But I remember spending three or four days in qual, word clearing the whole of the Dianetics book, to try to resolve difficulties that I was having studying Staff Status II. I felt no better at the end of it than I did at the start. The only reason it ended was because I decided that it was a ridiculous waste of my time, and wasn't really helping, upon which I managed to conjure up the EP of my qual action, and get back on course.

I think word clearing itself can be useful. But it has to be done in moderation. Wading through days and days of nothing but word clearing can often create more of a mess than it is intended to clear up. I don't think doing the Primary Rundown would create anything other than a FEAR of misunderstood words. And of dictionaries!
 
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Wilbur

Patron Meritorious
Yeah. To be honest, I gained a LOT from study tech - especially the idea of not being lazy, and looking up words I didn't know, even though I couldn't otherwise be bothered. I also gained a lot from the looking-up-of-small-words section of the KTL. Looking up words is one aspect of Scientology that I have continued to use throughout my life. Along with the phenomena of a misunderstood word (and the other barriers to study). But you are right, looking up words, whilst it gives you a good vocabulary and aids understanding, doesn't seem to be the key to genius. And certainly the idea of trawling through your past life to find all the MUs you have gone past doesn't seem to be as valuable as Hubbard made it sound. It might be useful for someone who has made a practice of reading books without looking up words, I suppose. But I remember spending three or four days in qual, word clearing the whole of the Dianetics book, to try to resolve difficulties that I was having studying Staff Status II. I felt no better at the end of it than I did at the start. The only reason it ended was because I decided that it was a ridiculous waste of my time, and wasn't really helping, upon which I managed to conjure up the EP of my qual action, and get back on course.

I think word clearing itself can be useful. But it has to be done in moderation. Wading through days and days of nothing but word clearing can often create more of a mess than it is intended to clear up. I don't think doing the Primary Rundown would create anything other than a FEAR of misunderstood words. And of dictionaries!
Also, I think the criterion used in star-rate checkouts, of being able to parrot back a definition of a word without comm lag, is flawed. I could give verbal definitions of some words I knew I didn't understand. And would comm lag on giving definitions for words that I DID understand, sometimes. I think all of this is a symptom of the fact that although Scientology paid lip service to the idea that "the thetan himself knows" and is responsible, it became increasingly condescending towards its own practitioners, assuming they DIDN'T know a word despite saying they understood it, and that their ethics were out, despite a person claiming that they felt their ethics were in.

Scientology went down its own dwindling spiral of not trusting its own adherents to know what they in fact knew. Which I suppose it had to do, given its business model of fleece-and-declare.
 
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