************************************************************************ The following first appeared in the private email list IVy-subscribers, which is available to all those who subscribe to the printed magazine, International Viewpoints. Home Page: http://home8.inet.tele.dk/ivy/ - with extensive links to FZ! ************************************************************************ X-Authentication-Warning: gem.lightlink.com: majordom set sender to owner-ivy-subscribers@lightlink.com using -f Received: from mx.lightlink.com (mx.lightlink.com [205.232.34.15]) by gem.lightlink.com (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id BAA28420 for Sat, 20 Jul 2002 01:20:52 -0400 Received: from imo-r08.mx.aol.com (imo-r08.mx.aol.com [152.163.225.104]) by mx.lightlink.com (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id BAA29703 for Sat, 20 Jul 2002 01:20:52 -0400 From: PJSpickler@aol.com Received: from PJSpickler@aol.com by imo-r08.mx.aol.com (mail_out_v32.21.) id q.139.117a1fef (4533) for Sat, 20 Jul 2002 01:20:46 -0400 (EDT) Message-ID: <139.117a1fef.2a6a4d2d@aol.com> Date: Sat, 20 Jul 2002 01:20:45 EDT Subject: IVySubs: Case To: ivy-subscribers@lightlink.com MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: AOL 3.0.1 for Mac sub 85 Sender: owner-ivy-subscribers@lightlink.com Precedence: bulk ** ivy-subscribers relaying ** Dear Fellow-listers, In one of my recent short postings to the IVy list there was quite a bit of talk about case and no-case, it struck me somewhat later that I didn't say very much about just what "case" is and I got to thinking, maybe there's a lot of people out there who don't have a case, just because they don't know what case is, in the same way that there really wasn't much gravity around on this planet before Isaac Newton discovered and defined gravity. Prior to Newton, it was darned difficult to keep anything on earth without an anchor. Well, you know I'm mostly kidding, but sometimes definitions can be useful and can even serve as points of discovery, especially when people start talking about something -- then definitions can be pretty darn handy, since it leads to the remost possibility that two or more people are actually talking about the same thing. Well, when I got to thinking about "case," I'm not sure exactly when I first heard the word used, outside of medical terminology -- for example, "he had a case of tuberculosis," or "the case we are presenting to you medical students today is one of advanced lumbosis" (first coined by L. Ron Hubbard, who was forever, and for good reason, making fun of some of the arrogance, stupidity, and know-it-all-ness of the medical profession, with of course some exceptions). Anyway, there was a use of "case," and then there were some uses outside of medicine, such as "He was a tough, or a hard case," which usually meant someone whose ideas or opinions were fixed or rigid, making them difficult to deal with. But it seems to me that I got onto this word "case" back around 1952, in Dianetics, where such expressions as "wide-open case" or "occluded case" or a "tough case" or an "easy case" were in common usage. Well, "case" back around 1950 - '52 meant the reactive mind, the stimulus-response mind, the sum total of engrams that made up the person's "case," and just as in medicine, "case" meant what was wrong with the guy or gal. The guy's case is what prevented him (or her) from being clear, or at least from being closer to the idea of operating in an optimum way on each of the four dynamics, which is the number of dynamics which were around in the Dianetic history pre-Scientology. So "case" was what was wrong with the preclear, and getting rid of case by erasing the engram collection or "bank" was considered a good thing, but it wasn't until Scientology came along, around '52 or so, that the expression "case gain" became widely used, and "case gain," even though it seems like a strange use of the word :case," didn't really mean that the guy got more case, or gained case (this was recently pointed out to me by my friend and constant companion Julie B. Spickler). Anyhow, due to the vagaries of language, ":case gain" meant LESS case, and was a very positive or good thing, and auditors and directors of processing and case supervisors were generally concerned with whether the preclear or the pre-OT was obtaining case gain. One of the definitions of case gain was the preclear's or pre-OT's personal and subjective consideration of whether he or she was making case gain or having less case and feeling improved in that department. Now when Scientology came along, Mr. Hubbard, in his finite or infinite wisdom, either discovered or found four more dynamics to add to the list of the dynamics, and when you added 'em all up, these eight dynamics were called Life, with a capital L. And case gain could be defined as how well, or how much better, a person was doing on each of these dynamics after receiving auditing and/or training, and this was a useful yardstick for determining how well the person was doing in relation to their given case. Well, after Dianetics, "case" had to be re-defined to include things that seemed to be other than engrams that prevented the person from optimum survival or existence on each of their eight dynamics. (If anybody has any question about the eight dynamics, or Life, as Mr. Hubbard modestly calls them, in order to secure the brevity of this posting, I highly recommend that either via the Internet or some of Mr. Hubbard's books one take a look at what these eight dynamics are and how they are defined, because even though the distinctions between the eight dynamics are largely verbal, they still as defined are useful in examining life and just how well or not-well you're doing in that department.) Dianetics did not have as its major address a human being as a spirit or soul or what later came to be called a thetan; but since the range of thetan possibly goes far beyond the limitations of human being, so go the possibilities for case to realms that prior to Scientology had not been discovered and/or defined. As long as we stick to a general definition of "case" as anything or anyone that prevents another, either as a human being or as an immortal soul, from achieving the most optimum possibilities, it remains possible to enlarge or expand or discover just what the limits of case may be. Back in the mid-1950's, after Scientology came into existence, and if you considered the individual to now be an immortal spirit or soul called a thetan, the biggest impediment for such a being to be conscious of its full freedom and its greatest creative possibilities would be for such a being to consider itself a human being: that would be a thetan's major case, major misconception, and major inhibition to realizing its true nature and possibilities. (That definition, by the way, never seemed to be very popular with many of the thetans that wished to be human beings, and that's easy to understand.) To further add insult to injory in the department of defining "case," Mr. Hubbard at one point or another happened to mention that the real and sum total of case that a thetan or free immortal spirit could have, including its identity as a thetan, would be the eight dynamics. That's right -- Life itself was the guy's case! This gets easier to understand when and if you realize or allow for the possibility that a thetan is nether alive nor dead; and when you get him to thinking that he can be alive or dead, which is what life is all about, he, the being, can't really get any more confused than that. So here we are now: when you start talking about case, you're talking about life. And therefore, at the highest echelons of case gain or improvement, we really aren't trying to get the guy to get rid of his case, which is tantamount to getting rid of life, neither an easy nor a desirable thing to do. Instead, whether it's just the littlest tiniest bit of case to the biggest ugliest case you could ever imagine, we want to get the person to where they can HAVE, not get rid of, case; which is to say, have life and not try to get rid of any of it. And of course when we say Life, we mean all of life, not just the stuff that we arbitrarily label "good" or "bad," with all of its opposites. This is, in my opinion, a state that goes 'way beyond the notion of neutralizing or doing anything about polarities, other than simply having them. When you're neither dead nor alive, things like pleroma don't mean anything. I close this by simply saying knowledge can be very painful or pleasurable. The saying that ignorance is bliss may be worth meditating on. Good night, and don't forget to write -- Phil ** Home Page: http://home8.inet.tele.dk/ivy/ - with extensive links to FZ! ** ************************************************* X-Authentication-Warning: gem.lightlink.com: majordom set sender to owner-ivy-subscribers@lightlink.com using -f Received: from mx.lightlink.com (mx.lightlink.com [205.232.34.15]) by gem.lightlink.com (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id AAA04149 for Tue, 23 Jul 2002 00:34:53 -0400 Received: from imo-r07.mx.aol.com (imo-r07.mx.aol.com [152.163.225.103]) by mx.lightlink.com (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id AAA13395 for Tue, 23 Jul 2002 00:34:51 -0400 From: PJSpickler@aol.com Received: from PJSpickler@aol.com by imo-r07.mx.aol.com (mail_out_v32.21.) id q.1a7.584db87 (2616) for Tue, 23 Jul 2002 00:34:47 -0400 (EDT) Message-ID: <1a7.584db87.2a6e36e7@aol.com> Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2002 00:34:47 EDT Subject: IVySubs: Just a "case" of mistaken identities To: ivy-subscribers@lightlink.com MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: AOL 3.0.1 for Mac sub 85 Sender: owner-ivy-subscribers@lightlink.com Precedence: bulk ** ivy-subscribers relaying ** Hello, anyone! It seems as though a little more could be said about the subject of case without heavily overdoing it. I think it's a darned interesting subject, and one that can't help but evoke a fair number of viewpoints about said subject. L. Ron Hubbard, in his time, seemed to have quite a bit of interest in case and cases, and certainly had quite a bit to say. Regarding the notion that life itself is a being's case, Mr. Hubbard said something like, "Life (with a capital L) is a game." He also said, somewhere or another, "All games are aberrative." It's also been pointed out in that notorious area called Service Facsimiles that Life is an immortal's excuse for failure, and service facsimiles most definitely come under the heading of case. Also, and this is just my own opinion, seems to me it would be pretty hard to have a case without life. But to get a little further into the entertainment aspect of tonight's deposition, if we look in the last century, the 20th, that is, around 1950, and we mention engrams for a moment, the thing about engrams that made them so aberrative or so much that which was called "case" is that they constituted or were a hidden influence on the person. And through Dianetic auditing it was possible to help a person find out that they had engrams that had previously been hidden or unknown to the person, and that when they became restimulated or keyed in, because they contained pain and unconsciousness, and held command value over the behavior of a person, they could cause a person to behave in suboptimum, non-survival, ways; they could cause a person to become sick and/or crazy; and in short, cause somebody not to be doing very well on their first four dynamics. So case gain occurred in large because what auditing was doing was making that which was unknown to a person, now consciously known, so that it ceased to be a stimulus-response recording that had great influence over the person's life. Now if you've ever run a real fire-breathing engram on somebody who could run an engram, you'll see right off the bat that the person, when they first contact an engram, has a heck of a time having it or being willing to experience it. This is understandable because the durn thing is filled with real pain and real unconsciousness, real sturm and real drang. In fact, it's the sort of experience of which one might say, "This must never happen again." But with good auditing that gave that particular preclear a chance to start re-experiencing this horrible experience on a comfortable gradient, after awhile that which had been unhaveable, with a lot of unwillingness to experience, finally became quite haveable, something the person was quite willing to experience, and which had lost its power, the awful power of a hidden influence. And since Have is very close on one of Mr. Hubbard's various scales to Create, well, if you can get someone up to the point where they can have something, they just aren't very far from being at the point where they could create that something, and of course when their responsibility level gets to the point of Create, they can if they want erase or make vanish whatever it is, because they're now at the point of being its author, or the source of its creation. It seems to me, if I understood Robin Whitson's posting correctly, he was pointing out that he had a painful experience when he took a tumble over some reinforcing steel and landed badly on one of his shoulders. He found, if I got what he was saying, that the experience was being locked in place and the pain continuing because there was Protest about whoever left the reinforcing steel laying around as well as the pain in the body's shoulder. Well, as you know, if you're in protest about something, you just plain aren't having it. But Robin went ahead, using some of the Pilot's tech, and handled that protest, as well as the protest in an earlier similar incident; and once the protest was gone, and he was able to have what had occurred, the next thing you know, the pain diminished and/or vanished. So, in my opinion, and perhaps Robin's too, being able to have is sort of the make or break point on the resolution of any particular piece of case, as well as life itself; and I don't make any separation between life and case, since that which exists is part of life. OK -- if I've got Robin's posting completely backwards from what he meant, I now and in advance apologize for my misunderstanding what he was attempting to communicate, and hope that he will set me straight at once. I'd also like to make it perfectly clear (just kidding) that my speculations, thoughts, and even the possibility that I might know something about case, should not in any way be construed as a suggestion that one should cause the big case called Life to vanish. That doesn't look like any fun at all, does it? No, as Mr. Hubbard and other philosophers have recommended, we're mostly interested in getting a person into good enough shape vis-a-vis the game to know that there IS a game and that, whether they like it or not, they're in it, and that it would be very nice to remember what the rules are that define the game, and how to play it and play it well. I think if anyone has the opportunity to listen to Mr. Hubbard's Philadelphia Lecture Series, all this stuff that I'm so poorly suggesting is beautifully and clearly explained and enlarged upon far beyond my timid efforts. I think it's interesting to note that all along the Scientology track, at different points and intervals, starting in 1950 and carrying through to such exalted levels as the New OT VII (Solo New Era Dianetics for Operating Thetans), the theme has been, whether it's engrams or screwed-up thetans stuck in and around or at a distance from somebody's body, the theme is hidden influences -- things that are having an adverse effect upon you and your life that you don't know are there, and finding a way to help a person discover just what these hidden influences are, and make them conscious. It sounds pretty simple, and if you wanted to continue to push the frontiers of t ech-finding further and further you couldn't go very far wrong if you can come up with some more things that are hidden influences in the life of a human being or a thetan, and provide a method for taking them from the hidden or the unconscious into the conscious or de-fused state where they no longer constitute a menace to your best possibilities. As previously mentioned, I'm not recommending a state of no case at all, 'cause that's no life at all and not much fun. Thank you for listening to these philosophic speculations -- at their very best, they provide some food for thought, maybe even a cognition or two, and at worst are the biggest bunch of baloney and bognitions you're ever likely to find anywhere. That's where the guru that lies within each of us (I like that -- the Guru Within) must decide if such matters as this posting concerns are true for someone or not. That old idea that "If it isn't true for you, it isn't true" is certainly a wonderful thing when we speak of your own personal a nd subjective universe. On the other hand, if you start saying that certain things like Copenhagen, or the roundness of the Earth, or gravity, or caviar and champagne, aren't true for you, other folks will probably think you're crazy. Well, that's all for this evening. If there is more, it shall come forth, by and by. Hoping to hear from anyone, I remain, your most obedient savant -- Phil ** Home Page: http://home8.inet.tele.dk/ivy/ - with extensive links to FZ! ** ******************************************************** We also got permission to publish this comment sent to the ivy-subscribers list: *********************************************** X-Authentication-Warning: gem.lightlink.com: majordom set sender to owner-ivy-subscribers@lightlink.com using -f Received: from mx.lightlink.com (mx.lightlink.com [205.232.34.15]) by gem.lightlink.com (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id KAA04516 for Sun, 21 Jul 2002 10:59:12 -0400 Received: from mail4.nc.rr.com (fe4.southeast.rr.com [24.93.67.51]) by mx.lightlink.com (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id KAA17728 for Sun, 21 Jul 2002 10:59:11 -0400 Received: from ron ([66.57.245.117]) by mail4.nc.rr.com with Microsoft SMTPSVC(5.5.1877.757.75); Sun, 21 Jul 2002 10:59:11 -0400 From: "Ronald Blouch" To: "IVy" Subject: RE: IVySubs: Case Date: Sun, 21 Jul 2002 10:59:01 -0400 Message-ID: <000101c230c7$295310d0$6601a8c0@ron> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 (Normal) X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook, Build 10.0.2627 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2600.0000 Importance: Normal In-Reply-To: <139.117a1fef.2a6a4d2d@aol.com> Sender: owner-ivy-subscribers@lightlink.com Precedence: bulk ** ivy-subscribers relaying ** Hi Phil, It's good to see you posting, again. I want to thank your for your last two posts. You gave me some of the final pieces of the puzzle. I now begin to understand how Scientology moved from what it seems to have been in the 50's to what it became later. If you find the subject to be of sufficient interest I'm really curious about how the focus on "human improvement" shifted to "spiritual improvement" within Dianetics/Scientology. Who and what created this shift? Was it Hubbard's work alone or was there some kind of overwhelming evidence to support it? If so, what was it? Whether you choose to answer these questions or not I appreciate whatever contributions you do make to the list. Give my regards to Julie. Ron -- Ant Antony A Phillips ivy@post8.tele.dk tlf: (+45) 45 88 88 69 Box 78 DK - 2800 Lyngby Editor, International Viewpoints (= IVy). See Home Page: http://home8.inet.tele.dk/ivy/ Administrator: trom-l, selfclearing-l, superscio-l, previous-life-scio, dan-know and IVy lists --