MISERY AND ECSTACY In the search for a meaningful and worthwhile purpose for 'being here', it occurs to me that there are basically two different kinds of goals in the world. I have taken to calling these goals, IS GOALS and CHANGE GOALS. An Is Goal is the goal to be here to experience something as it is. A Change Goal is the goal to be here to change something from what it is to something else. Usually a change goal would be to change something that one was NOT interested in experiencing it as it is to something that one was interested in experiencing it as it is. For example, when you go to the Louvre to view the Mona Lisa, you don't go there to change the picture, or make it better, you go there to experience it as it is. That's an is-goal. However when you go to the inner city and see lots of crime and drugs and drive by shootings, you want to change this to something better and fast. That's a change goal. There are 3 kinds of change goals. There is the goal to change nothing into something. This is basic creation, the act of an artist. To put something desirable where there was nothing. There is the goal to change something into nothing. This is basic destruction. To put nothing where there is something undesirable. For example you want to kill off all the cockroaches in your kitchen. There is the goal to change something into another something. This is sort of a combination of the first two, like when you want to change the present hell on Earth to a heaven on Earth. The search for a meaningful and worthwhile purpose to be here then would have to encompass the above 4 types of goals. The basic Adorian E/P of any process is "Able and Willing to Be Here." That's a big win if you can attain it but it has some problems attached to it. First of all let's say that the being has nothing but Is Goals. That means his total purpose for being here is to experience things as they are. Clearly he has no motivation to change anything, so basically he won't DO anything all day long except take in the sights. You would have to be REAL OT to maintain this kind of existence in this world. So if you are going to get into action you are going to have to have some change goals too. Let's first look at the extreme. Say you have ONLY change goals. That means you are totally dissatisfied with things as they are, there is NOTHING you wish to experience as it is. This puts you into a total state of action trying to bring things about that you are willing to experience as they are. It would be pretty hard to call this a state of happiness right? There would be no rest, except maybe sleep and no experience at all. So from this I would have to conclude that change goals alone will not do, and that happiness involves a balance of is goals and change goals. The purpose of a change goal is to produce an is goal after all, so if one is winning there should be at least SOME is goals around, even if there weren't when you started. There is however another problem with change goals. A change goal involves two things, it involves the desired end state that you are trying to bring around, and it involves the PROCESS of getting there, the game in other words. The being may highly desire the end state he is trying to attain, but resent the hell out of the process necessary to get there. For example we may want the raiding hoards off our soil, but we don't want to go to war and get tortured to death to attain it. This too is not a state of happiness even if you win. Winning a change goal where the process of attainment was resented leaves a bad after taste that lingers forever. So from this I must conclude that to attain 'able and willing to be here', the being must have a balance of is goals and change goals, and also have change goals which demand a process of attainment that the being enjoys indulging in. Now that would be pretty magical wouldn't it? One way to audit this is to mockup being way outside the Earth, like coming into the Solar System and seeing the Earth in the distance. From this point of view you can mockup the present state of Earth, and all the games and things to do that you might find here. From there you can ask yourself "What is goals and change goals would make it worthwhile and meaningful to come to Earth for?" "What could I do here that would make me want to come here for a while?" Now from that point of view some things come to mind that are not so pleasant to behold. Earth is filled with people who have to eat to survive, they have to kill to live, even if its only plants. Life on Earth is filled with constant pressure and hurry, because time is passing and hunger grows and only extreme affluence will guarantee your survival through the rough times. Until the sun goes super nova that is. So in the long run, everything you build on Earth, or in this universe in fact, will one day be dust in the wind as, in the end, the universe itself is its own bull dozer. Worse the penalties for failure here are extraordinary, really unconfrontable. Try starving to death sometime just to see if you can do it. Or spending your life in jail because you said something politically incorrect. Or eating anthrax because the local yokels don't like your religion. Given this point of view what possible meaningful and worthwhile goal could there ever be on this planet except to get the hell out of it and never come back? If the good Lord were to give you a ticket to leave would you take it? I would. I would demand a ticket for Jane too, but then we would be out of here in a second. Now worse all these things that I just listed above are really totally foreign to a native state thetan. Hurry, pressure, having to kill to survive, having to win present games in order to even have future games are all totally opposed to what a thetan really is. What kind of being could have an affinity for such a state of enslavement? Then you come to Earth and you find that EVERYONE not only is in this state, they have hammered themselves into nothing until they consider it NORMAL and LIFE IS GOOD. They have taken TOTAL PSYCHOSIS and made it into "THINGS ARE JUST FINE, THANKYOU." These people are so far gone they are no longer able to compute a way in. They just can't figure out how or why a native state sovereign thetan would ever or could ever create the present mess they find themselves in. It just totally breaks their mind and sense of repsonsibility to even try to think about it. Because they can't compute a way in, they can't compute a way out either, because the way in is the only way out. So they are stuck and don't know it any more. They have totally gone to sleep from pain and are living a delerium tremens called normal 9 to 5 life. Then you have to take a look at the fact that 99.9 percent of any game you choose to play here will be directly or indirectly influenced by the crazy psychotic games being played by these people who can't wait to get out of here but who can't admit they feel that way. Yes they keep the GNP going, yes they milk the cows and bring the bread home, but its usually to fatten you up so you can go die in some foreign war or another. What looks like civilization on one hand turns out to be a death camp designed for slaughter on the other. Now you are going to come into this place and find a worthwhile and meaningful game to play? You are going to run some process that gives you "Able and Willing to Be Here?" You have your work cut out for you. Homer ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Homer Wilson Smith News, Web, Telnet Art Matrix - Lightlink (607) 277-0959 SunOS 4.1.4 Sparc 20 Internet Access, Ithaca NY homer@lightlink.com info@lightlink.com http://www.lightlink.com