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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.
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Fifty-fifty
by Phil Spickler
3 Apr 00

Greetings, fellow listers, wherever you are --
        Just as I was being led away, securely bound in a tight-fitting
straitjacket to the nearest booby hatch, a sudden gust of wind picked up a
small pamphlet that had been perched in a branch of an oak tree near where I
live and wafted said pamphlet directly at me, and by stretching my neck just
a little bit I was able to catch it in my teeth.  A quick glance revealed
that it was IVy 46, and before anyone could stop me, I gobbled down its
contents, which gave me the strength of several OTs, and with a single
expansion of my mighty thews I was able to break free of the bonds of my
straitjacket, which so impressed the team that had been escorting me to a
nearby ambulance that they simply begged my pardon for making such a mistake
(or case of mistaken identity) and rushed off to see if they could do better
in finding lunatics at the local Church of Scientology, leaving me to my own
devices and making possible what now follows.

        Having thoroughly digested the IVy 46, as is customary to show my
appreciation for the pleasure of this hearty mental meal I gave a good belch,
which is in-reality in the society that I inhabit here in my own Middle East,
and leaned back with a sigh of contentment as this rush of words wrote
themselves on the inside of my eyeballs, which I now relate for your
listening pleasure.

        The title "Fifty-fifty" refers to two points of view that are both
present in several articles in IVy 46, and are to be found in earlier
articles of this journal, as well as in the earlier and much earlier writings
of various philosophies that purport to accurately describe the nature of a
person.

       Some of these philosophies hold forth the position that John Mace and
Alan C. Walter and others hold, which is to say that behind all case is a
single, discrete, fully individuated being/thetan/spiritual being, etc. etc.,
and that this guy always has been, is now, and always will be; that he in
truth and in fact has no case, but sometimes thinks he does by misidentifying
his perfect self with identities or other things that allegedly do have cases
or are being cases, and that once you scrape all that stuff away you've got
this immmortal tough guy who is always at cause and knows it.

        The other viewpoint, which has quite a few adherents, or if you will
the other side of the coin (for those of us who allow that the coin does have
two sides), more or less starts with the 8th Dynamic or the great big A
Static of Scientology's Axiom 1, which can and ordinarily does extend an
infinite number of viewpoints or points from which to view, and these are
called thetans or spiritual beings or consciousnesses or The Real Person,
etc. etc. etc.

       But this point of view and the philosophies that underwrite it would
urge us not to consider this the real guy or person, that this is just a
false "I" or ego, and that all efforts to elevate it to superconsciousness
where it can always be at cause are inevitably doomed to failure and endless
efforts to achieve the impossible, since it's just an identity of the real
thing, which is the 8th Dynamic, the undifferentiated Static if you will.

        Now the first viewpoint is all about therapies and methods for
achieving the impossible, although along the way a lot of nifty things can be
accomplished that do make the lot of what you're working with at least
temporarily improve.  "B" does not hold out the notion of a perfected ego,
but does, as Roman pointed out in his good effort to describe this notion,
make it possible to attain the viewpoint of the 8th Dynamic
and thus at once be at the point of creation of all that is, which as you can
readily see is outside Life and the game, and nowhere near as popular as
working within that realm called The Lie.

       There, I've said it again -- there's the two sides of the given coin.
Every time you flip it, your chances are fifty-fifty as to what's going to
come up.  Neither side of that coin matters very much when you experience
what the coin itself is, rather than its sides.

        All right -- in closing: I forced myself to read Part 2 of Christine
Norstrand's term paper for Psychoanthropology 602,
and while it is just the sort of paper that appeals to academic authority and
thus doesn't really have to say anything except to have accurate footnotes
and references, I think it's essential to take the OT 3 idea or myth and just
briefly bounce it off the guy that dreamed it up, to see who it was invented
for and what result one might hope to obtain from exercising various thetans
in the auditing activity.

       Ron, while not being the sole inventor of all Dianetics and
Scientology, pretty much did do, for better or for worse, most of that work,
and one of the things that was required by popular demand was always the next
breakthrough or the next  hoped-for step in creating an unassailable ego, and
all the game that went with it.  It also almost goes without saying that the
creating of these big-ticket items that were very expensive to purchase was
one of the main methods of driving vast sums of money into the Church's
coffers, as well as the enormous follow-up business and profits that were
earned in the endless repair of these great adventures.

      From Dianetics onward, one of the fundamentals of auditing was to get
the person being audited more and more able to confront and experience bigger
and bigger engrams, the theory being that if you did that on a gradient that
kept the person winning, you would at some point end up with a guy that was
once again willing and able and tough enough to play at the game called Life
without flinching at all the things that life can throw at us that might
restimlate earlier engrams in which we lost part of our ability to confront
and experience Life, including the notion of our own immortality.

        OT 3, if you look at the progression of Dianetics and Scientology, was
supposed to be, real or imagined, an effort to raise folks' confront and
willingness to experience life at its worst.  Unfortunately, it went on too
long, and for many ended up taking people up the ladder and then down again.
But by the time NOTs came along (which is called New Era Dianetics for OTs),
a much better approach toward finding out who was having trouble confronting
and experiencing and enjoying life was provided, and although its
possibilities were superior, both OT 3 and NOTs for many folks failed to
produce the big cognition, and were just another failed effort to try to
raise the false "I" or ego to a permanent state of ascension.

        But here and there a few folks managed to spot the "who" that this was
all being done for, and after many hours of laughing could now enjoy both
sides of the coin, including the source of the coin itself.

       In closing, I'm still hoping that Otto Roos, who has a pretty turn of
phrase in IVy 46, will some day entertain us by telling us what it was like
to be a hit man for L. Ron Hubbard.  There's much more that could be said
about IVy 46 and some of the wonderful articles, especially by Frank Gordon
and others, that I hope to make further comment on.  Since Ant reputedly
created the IVy subscribers list as an immediate vehicle for commentary on
the products contained in IVy the Magazine, it would be nice and very welcome
to hear from a few more people on just what their thoughts are on this latest
edition.

      All the best, and as not-ever,
         Phil