************************************************************************
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.
************************************************************************

Hooked and unhooked, Parts 1-5
by Phil Spickler
20 Sept - 3 Oct 1999


Part 1

To anyone likely to be reading this:
        As early as the early '50's, it had been well noted that you could
run engrams that had drugs in them with quite a bit of profit to the
preclear; and that engrams with drugs in them could be pretty sticky and
confusing, but again, when sorted out, did wonders toward making a more
conscious, a more aware, person.

      Jumping from the early '50's to the late '60's, L. Ron started to pay
quite a bit of attention to drug experiences that someone might have had,
with not just this lifetime but the whole track as a fund of such
possibilities.  Also, by 1968, the 7 Special (or Resistive) Cases had come
into being, and it is well to note that one of the resistive cases, which is
to say, things that kept folks from easily getting case gain and keeping it,
was the person's drug history.

        Prior to what later came to be called the Expanded Drug Rundown, and
in terms of the 7 Special Cases, the one under "drugs" had as an assessment
statement "Still seeking the same thrill attained on drugs."  And if that
line truly read on an E-meter, the pc in question would receive X amount of
drug handling, with the idea that there were certain drug experiences that
were standing in the way of easily attainable results from regular auditing.

        As time went by, everyone, resistive or not, got enormous Drug
Rundowns that were intended to handle any and every possible substance under
the heading of "drug" -- I think I remember getting run on chicken soup, at
one point, but who could argue?  its second name was Jewish penicillin.  But
all kidding aside, those of us who were around for this emphasis- on-drugs
period in Scientology can probably remember spending quite a bit of time in
the Drug Rundown area, not to speak of great expense, getting so
"re-de-resistified" to the point where if an auditor just sat down across
from you and said, "This is the session," that would be enough to pop you
instantly into Clear-OT or better.

        All this, of course, became a happening, whether the pc was resistive
or not, and it turned the Drug Rundown into one of the biggest of the
big-ticket marketing and sales items, which nearly everyone wishing to go up
or across the Bridge would have to go through, lest you failed to pass the
necessary sobriety tests along the way.

        Later on, and I shall not speak of it at this time, came the
Purification Rundown, and the penultimate efforts at physical detoxification,
etc. etc.

        This all got started in the late '60's just because some folks who
had used drugs, particularly of the sort that were becoming commonplace in
this era, sometimes got hung up in auditing because they were, consciously or
otherwise, expecting auditing to produce states and conditions that might at
least be comparable to some of their best drug experiences.  And as we saw
later, it became necessary to rehab and acknowledge the fact that some people
did have rather mind-blowing experiences, cognitions and awarenesses, using
drugs, and that these needed to be fully acknowledged, and that anything that
had been put in place from drugs that wasn't so neat needed the attention of
auditing in order to clear the road to easier case gain.

        Just about anyone that has a human body or is being a human body has
probably noted at one time or another that unless said body is feeling just
fine, it can be a rather unpleasant companion, and is definitely a detriment
to a sense of well-being, clarity of mind, and a high-toned approach to
existence.  Why, I'd venture to say that thousands of years ago, before the
great pharmaceutical companies got into the business of selling relief from
unwanted pain, sensation and somatic in connection with the human body, folks
here and there chewed on something, on purpose or by accident, or smelled
some kind of smoke or something, and discovered to their delight that they
started feeling a lot better than they had been feeling.  In fact, in some
cases they started experiencing sights and sounds that made them wonder if
they had been transported into some magical or heaven-sent state of
existence.  Usually the word got out on this, and everybody that could get
their hands on the stuff started using it, until someone claimed to be a
medicine man and quickly got control of the usage and dosage, as well as all
the power and influence that went with it.

        So for thousands and thousands of years, folks, whether it was to get
relief from the tedium of everyday existence or relief from pain and other
unwanted sensations, have been using quite a wide variety of things to
improve the way they felt, whether it's the two-martini lunch or the
five-cocktail party, the list of substances that have been found, designed,
created to achieve an improvement of the general human condition has, as of
this writing, become somewhat extraordinary.

       And whether it's to feel better after a hard day at the auditing chair
or to relieve the awful pain that can come with some of the terminal
illnesses, there seems to be something for everyone.  And just about everyone
that is using something, whether it's a couple of glasses of good California
wine, a marijuana cigarette, or a self-regulated morphine induction system to
control a really awful chronic pain, one counts on these substances to
reproduce the better feeling that was achieved through earlier usage.   Folks
as this millennium closes are probably more universally using substances to
improve the feeling of life or existence, more so than ever.

       In the late '60's, if you happened to take an aspirin, just one little
old aspirin, you'd have to wait six weeks before you could get auditing.
That's how severe the moral judgment of the effect of drugs on auditing had
become: it had reached the point where it was truly a sin.  There had been a
wild scandal in this period, right aboard the Flagship, where it had been
discovered that none other than the Master at Arms himself (that's nautical
terminology for the Ethics Officer) was running a small marijuana operation
on board the ship, right under the must-have-been-stuffed-up nose of the
Commodore, that's L. Ron Hubbard himself.  Sometime when Otto Roos is in a
good mood we should get him to tell us about this history, since he was
there.  Nevertheless, Ron made some pretty unpleasant considerations about
drugs and their use at this time, finally concluding, somewhat later, that
anyone who had ever used LSD could never become a member of the Sea
Organization, which incidentally, had it been applied to existing members,
might have reduced the ranks of that less- than-noble organization
considerably.

        In the next chapter of "Hooked and unhooked" I propose to say a few
words concerning Buddha and his formula for release from suffering;
Scientology and Dianetics, as a promise of a drug-free, suffering-free high;
and in a rather shocking expose, attempt to clarify and deal with the
possibility of becoming addicted to auditing and the type of resistive case
that can result from such an addiction, and what its indicators are, just as
though it were another form of substance that could be abused.  This last
will be filled with shocking revelations and even some self-confessions.

       So, yours for greater moments of suspense, I remain,
	Philip the Terrible


Hooked and unhooked, Part 2

Greetings and hallucinations!
       L. Ron, some years ago, had quite a bit to say about how the cure
could become the illness, or how the solution could become the next problem.
He didn't, however, have a lot to say about how Scientology as the solution
could become the problem, but he did mention in those poor old and
self-evident truths called the Axioms that the game was for theta as the
Static, theta the solver that is, to be perpetually involved in attempting to
solve the problem of theta itself as MEST, which in turn gives us the name of
the game at its most fundamental level.  And of course, the more that theta
makes itself into matter, energy, space and time and gets itself located, the
more it is the problem that theta as itself, the solver, works on solving.
Sounds silly as heck, doesn't it?  But on the other hand, what have you got
without that?  Just a great big nothing; and very few of us, in my
experience, are quite ready for that.

       So back to Scientology and Dianetics as the solution, and could it be
that they also become the problem?  'Cause remember, theta has to kind of kid
itself or deceive itself or lie about itself in order to construct this game
in which it pretends to be something it isn't, and then gets all happy and
excited when by process of discovery of its own postulates it finds out the
truth, and we get that sudden burst of VGI's, F/N called "freeing theta."

        Now then, speaking of getting hooked, there are certain drugs in the
cocaine area, especially if used in the style called "freebasing," or in
other dangerous methods, that have been noted for creating something called
instant addiction, after which people so addicted have been known to spend
what remains of their lives doing everything and anything it takes to
re-experience whatever happens when they use that particular drug.  This,
however, is not by any means the only drug that gets people so hooked that
they will part with everything they own and literally do anything, however
demeaning and degrading, in order to get and keep getting the next fix.

       I have often asked myselves the question, "Can Dianetics and
Scientology have a similar effect on some people?"  This is a pretty
outrageous thought, and I'm glad that I can talk about this in the
comparative safety of an electronic medium, since earlier experiences of
being stoned to death, burned at the stake, garroted, drawn and quartered,
and impaled, while they are interesting in retrospect, at the time seemed to
exceed even my most far-out hopes for the experience of pain, not to speak of
hurt feelings.

        But to continue this thought: I have seen folks have one very amazing
experience with Scientology or Dianetics and become so powerfully affected by
it that they behave, in many respects, like an individual who has become
hooked or addicted to a drug.  Some of them have reached the point where they
will suffer any indignity rather then be put in a position where they could
not get another "fix," usually in this case talking about auditing and the
great promises, many of which can be realized, that have been described and
promoted, marketed if you will, over the years.

         Does it seem as though I'm exaggerating at this point?  I don't
think so.  I could even confidently admit, in the past, to greater or lesser
degrees of addiction, and what it's like if you decide to stop being an
addict, and what type of withdrawal you can expect to go through, and some of
the steps that you may have to take in order to reconstruct a life free from
the need for any kind of an addiction, including Scientology, and the great
possibilities that lie outside of that sort of life.

       To continue the analogy, you could say that the Grade Chart is a
progression of fixes, and the promise that each fix will be a bigger and
better one than the previous fix; and of course the charge or the cost goes
up as one went up the Grade Chart -- this from a guy named Hubbard who
started a grass-roots movement called Dianetics, with the hope that people
could simply and would simply use that information to help one another --
period, end of report; and from those humble (and lofty) beginnings went on
to generate one of the biggest money-making-per-capita businesses ever to be
falsely called a church, with everything patented and copyrighted to try to
prevent any loss of profit.  However, that's another story; today we're
talking about getting hooked and getting unhooked.

        It is possible to get unhooked just by simply cogniting on being
addicted to the idea of periodically and chronically getting your mind blown
by the use of auditing or some similar procedure, and getting away from the
idea that if you don't feel a certain way the only way out of it is to get
another fix.  That's sort of the "cold turkey" approach, and I promise you
that it will produce the same kind of withdrawal symptoms that you may have
observed if you've ever attempted to aid someone in detoxifying or getting
through an addiction.

       Now you could use auditing or something like it in the same way that
you'd use it in the context of a Drug Rundown, to run out all the stuff that
is making someone addicted to the game of creating a case or a mind which
then needs to be blown, so that one can experience (or I should say
re-experience) the ecstasy of feeling some truth for a change.  You can
short-circuit this whole process of becoming addicted by simply finding out
who or what in that thing we'll call "your universe" is in that condition,
and by correctly identifying each source and handling it.  You can, in hardly
any time at all, find yourself free of such addictive needs.  So in this wise
you could use some of the Scientology techniques to run out your addiction to
both Scientology and those things that have followed it.   There are also
quite a few things around, and have been for ever so long, that don't require
that you become an addict or a pusher or a source of some type of mental or
spiritual activity that hooks people and imbues them with the continuous
craving for the type of experience that these mental and spiritual "drugs"
promise.

      It's been sad, over the years, to see in myself and others the sort of
depression that would occur when the kind of mental and spiritual "drug" that
was being used was no longer producing the big blow-out, and how we waited
and agonized for the day when the first announcement would come from Ron of
another tremendous breakthrough that would provide a fix and a high point
never before dreamed of -- only available to those who could afford this very
expensive drug, and who would laughingly and cheerfully, no matter what it
took, find the many thousands of dollars necessary to get the dose -- only to
find, some time later, that they still needed something else to re-experience
that magic of converting themselves as MEST into themselves as theta the
Static.

        Well, I guess by now you've gotten the idea of what I'm talking
about; you may have even had the experience, or are currently having it.
There comes a point where a person has to engage in quite a great deal of
not-know, of self-invalidation, self-deception and self lying to self, to
feel the need to look to anyone or anything outside what we'll loosely call
themselves for any answer.  This is of course all too human and is indeed the
human condition, which is to say (and here is the big secret) what you really
are is the Truth.  Now that's a very responsible point of view, and at the
same time extremely unpopular, since if a lot of people were really to get
that idea, you'd be looking right at the end of human existence.

       So in conclusion, I recommend being human and addicted in moderate
doses, and I recommend being the Truth and completely free in moderate doses.
 What lies in between, assuming that there is one, is up to you, and just how
free or how self-enslaved you would enjoy being.  Since we're leaving moral
judgments of right and wrong out of this, since we are talking about matters
in another realm, the final word is, it's really OK just to be as you are,
and of course it's really not OK also -- get the idea?

       I'll have to admit in closing that I would enjoy hearing from my many
admirers (that is to say, both of you) and any thoughts you might have on
this outrageous hypothesis.
         As ever,
              Philip the Terrible


Hooked and unhooked -- just a little more (Part 3)

Hello once again --
       My failing brain informed me that I had neglected to say a few
thousand words about the Buddha, and didn't really get into the promised
drug-free high that for so many years was touted by the Scientology
marketeers.  Which reminds me, on an entirely different topic, (this just to
show you how strangely the minds of old people work) -- around 1979, maybe a
little earlier or a little later, the Powers that Be in the Church of
Scientology spotted the fact that the outer organizations and the mission
network had many, many people (public, that is) on their lines who were
cheerfully and pleasantly coughing up modest amounts of money in the hopes of
one day being properly set up to do the parts of the Grade Chart from Power
all the way up to OT 7.  The auditing this public was getting was that which
had been decreed to be necessary before such high-falutin upper-level stuff
could be successfully delivered.  But the Church fathers, ever sensitive to
anything that has the word "money" in it, realized that in one fell swoop
they could pull all those people out of the outer orgs and missions and get
their bodies on the lines of Advanced Organizations and Flag, including
pulling all of their advanced-payment monies and future monies out of the
mission system and the outer orgs, and would now have these many millions of
dollars, marks, lire, francs, shekels, ruples, pesos, etc. etc. safely being
laundered into the Swiss banks and other offshore places that contained the
giant Scientology "war chest."

        The answer of how to get ahold of all these people was very simple:
just have Ron come up with some idea and put it into writing that there were
Natural Clears and Always-Been-Clear, had probably gone Clear on lower-level
auditing, etc. etc..  But it was all about Clear and how you could attest to
the state, in most cases, without ever having really achieved it, which would
now put you on Advanced Org lines, meaning you and your money would never
again be given to the outer orgs or missions, with the exception of some
low-level training.  But from now on, as a Clear, your money can only go to
AOs and the Flag Land Base.  Pretty clever, eh?

       Well, this really emptied the outer orgs and the missions of all the
people who had been frustratedly awaiting the opportunity to become Clear and
now only had to produce a floating needle at the right place and the right
time in response to the right question to be declared, along with thousands
of others all over the world, to now be Clear and be routed at once to the
Registrars who would then proceed to round up every possible penny that these
poor souls could lay their fingers on for the rest of the Bridge.  It should
be noted that it's almost always possible to get some entity or valence,
particularly in a person who has been around Scientology and read books and
heard things about Clear, to answer up with a big F/N to being Clear -- this
has really nothing to do with the guy being Clear.

       This was another very dark day in the history of Scientology, and one
that will live in infamy.  It was a direct assault on the missions, in the
main, and used the button of status-seeking to propel many people into
something that was not truly the case, just in order to get their money.
Some of these folks got the idea, looking at the Grade Chart and things that
were said about different levels on it, that they must be at least OT 25, and
demanded to be allowed to attest to such things.  This even exceeded the
madness of the moment, and such shenanigans were usually prevented from
occurring.

      The history of the poor folks who leaped on this bandwagon and what
they ended up going through has yet to be writ, but the vast majority of them
fared poorly, and ended up with vastly reduced pocketbooks, mortgaged homes
and businesses, and more problems and difficulties than you could shake a
stick at.  There are some still around who have not fully recovered from this
massive error.  Talk about being hooked!  Talk about labels, such as "I am
Clear," "I am OT this-or-that" -- it's sort of like some of the worst Zen
Buddhists who go around bragging about how many koans they have completed,
not realizing how stupid such silliness makes them look.  Labels do not make
Clears, nor do they make thetans operational.  But Americans, and I suppose
Europeans too, are so conditioned to Newtonian thinking, such as "This 'up'
is higher than that 'up' " and that more is better, that if you're clever
enough, you could sell ice cubes to Eskimos while making them think they're
better off than their fellows who only have blocks of ice.

        I've mentioned the above because it was one of the greatest "hook
jobs" ever carried off, and the monetary inflow was truly enormous, and
something that any real business would be proud of, casualties
notwithstanding.

        Well, here I am, I've gotten off the track, and I still  haven't said
anything about Buddhism and getting hooked or getting high and staying high
without drugs -- but that's all for now; and the next time they let me out of
my cage I'll cover those other two points in hopes that my list of admirers,
which is roughly two in number, will be eagerly awaiting this vital
information.

       As ever,
          Philip the Terrible


Hooked and unhooked, continued (Part 4)

Hello!
       One might get the impression from this series that yours truly might
be suggesting that one should not give or receive help using Dianetic or
Scientology techniques, for fear that you might get hooked or cause another
to get hooked.  This is far from the intention in these offerings, since I
have been and remain a great believer in giving and receiving help, and I
most earnestly know that when Dianetics burst upon the scene, the visible
intention of its founder was to put in the hands of regular folks a method
for helping themselves and others in the direction of being more healthy and
capable and also, and most importantly, much more fully and consciously in
charge of their lives and out from under the spell of the hidden influences,
then called engrams, and from much of the cultural programming that generally
gets installed in the minds, hearts and souls of human beings long before one
has reached the age of discrimination regarding this sort of information and
experience that the society, in the form of one's parents, teachers,
religionists, and governments so determinedly and with such strong intention
installs in the young minds of children.

        Yes, the big idea was, using Dianetic terminology, to restore an
individual to the condition of being his or her own control center, which is
quite a different state than most people of that era and today live in.
Dianetics provided a wonderful chance to deprogram oneself and make a fresh
start at finding out what one's own thoughts, feelings and basic personality
really were.

       Now we see, almost half a century later, how some individuals, some
groups, and some large organizations, particularly the current Church of
Scientology, do not have such hopes and ambitions for the people who come
within their thrall.  Having once hooked folks with the tremendous
possibility for transcendental experiences that are easily available in both
Dianetics and Scientology, such people and organizations seek not the
individual liberated, but someone who is now under the control and domination
of the group or individual that can provide the mental and spiritual "fixes"
that the person becomes addicted to.

        It's quite easy to get into the habit of doing this to people: the
joy of having so much power over them and their lives.  It was one of the
very things that Ron, and Dianetics,  aimed at ending as a terrible abuse by
the existing mental health authorities to be found in 1950 and extant today;
and one of the great criticisms leveled at psychoanalysts, psychiatrists and
psychologists was the great degree of dependence that many of such
practitioners engendered in their patients, who often reach the point where
they couldn't think of making an important decision or life change without
seeking the advice and help of such people, having given up the role of being
a source of their own wisdom and decisiveness to these folks, who often kept
their patients on the string for years and years and years, and at great and
ongoing expense to the individual patient.  With the advent of health and
mental health insurance, this terrible sort of thing continues to this day.

       The great tragedy is that Scientology as an organization and many of
its individual practitioners, against earlier warnings by L. Ron Hubbard,
have fallen into the same practice; namely, having become the new
other-determined authority in the life of their clients or pcs, victims if
you will, who are now kept on the string for most of their lives, and at
enormous cost, and who live in fear of ever being cut off from the
connection.  What a terribly sad outcome!

      So you can see there is an awesome responsibility when you undertake
using these powerful tools to help another person, and it is your absolute
responsibility to ensure that the umbilical cord gets firmly, realistically,
and finally cut in such a way that the individual that you are helping
regains full control of their life and the determinism to direct it not only
willingly but eagerly accepted.  And that, my friends, is the true and honest
outcome of any wisdom school that is worth its salt.

       It would please me greatly if individual and popular practioners of
this time, both in the Free Zone and in the Church of Scientology, and the
Church of Scientology itself, would harken back to this basic of all basics
and free all the people that currently haven't achieved such a result to
attain it at whatever cost, and I'm not referring at this time to money.  To
do otherwise is to perpetuate the long and unpleasant track, history,
extending into this lifetime and right up to this moment, of using mental and
spiritual practices, including hypnosis, to gain control of the lives and
minds and ideas of others, and not to use these tools to bring them through
as strong, capable and conscious beings who operate knowingly and freely
across their dynamics.

        This brings us to the Buddha.  In spite of the fact that what he was
all about ended up being described as one of the world's great religions,
with him as the founder and revered by hundreds of millions of people as a
god, as myself and Max Sandor will tell you, that's really not what Buddhism
is or was all about.  As all of you students of comparative religions and
unreligions know, Buddhism is not a religion with a god, but is simply a
suggested path that one might embark upon to regain one's consciousness,
one's awareness, one's understanding, as fully as possible, and is not
something that can be taught or acquired through faith or belief, prayer, or
any of the other ridiculous things that have arisen in the wake of one
person's enlightenment.

      It's just simply, can you, by your own efforts, tugging on your own
bootstraps, and with your own intention and determination, simply become
aware, in the fullest sense, of what is -- period, end of report.  You can
neither buy it nor sell it, contrary to some of the popular opinions that
lead to further enslavement.  It is, except in the hands of the
unenlightened, not, I repeat NOT, a moral philosophy, and has nothing to do
with right or wrong.  As far as I know, it has nothing to do with drugs or
non-drugs; in fact, it doesn't really have anything to do with anything.
However, here and there, there have been certain things spoken of which are
not Zen itself, but might be considered signposts, and if you're interested,
you could certainly see what posts these signs aim at.

        One of the things in the written history of Zen and its influence in
various cultures that is sadly lacking in one of its offshoots called
Scientology is that when someone shows signs of being too lazy and
irresponsible to find out the truth for themselves, and is endeavoring to
make someone their master or spiritual senior, such a person either with
their fist or stick or foot is usually able to get such a person jump-started
in the direction of becoming the source of their own understanding, not
simply a trip to the Registrar for some more hours of auditing.

       I can see by the counter I'm running out of electrons, and so shall
attempt to prolong our mutual agony by further communications in the near or
distant future.

       As ever,
        Philip the Worst (is that the superlative?)


Hooked and unhooked, more yet (ugh) (Part 5)

      Someone likes "Hooked and unhooked" so much that henceforth, now and
forever, it shall be the only title I ever use for any communication about
any subject.  This should get me a "10" rating on the eccentricity scale, and
ensure me a lasting place in the halls of the unoriginal.  Nevertheless, and
under this same banner, I now proceed to the next outrage.

      What follows is somewhat autobiographical, but over the years I've had
a chance to talk about such matters as are to come with other roving psychos,
and have determined to someone's satisfaction that the following may apply
broadly.

      Well, what in the heck is he talking about?  I'm talking about people
who become or fancy themselves "repair people" of minds and souls.  There
have been, over the centuries, lots of names for such folks.  Fairly recently
they've been called things like "auditors," "therapists," "processors,"
"psychologists," "psychoanalysts," "psychiatrists," "shrinks," and I suppose
I even have to include things like "sha-persons" (that's politically correct
"shaman"), and as you travel around the universe, since English isn't, I'm
sorry to have to say, spoken everywhere, there are many, many other names for
such folks, and sounds and syntaxes most difficult for the human ear to
comprehend.

        To diverge for a moment, but yet in a connected way, I'd like to talk
about a good friend who was one of the best automobile mechanics that I've
ever known -- both by training and natural aptitude, this chap was in a class
all of his own.  He was so good at his specialty that, when it came to
automobile engines, he could often correctly and miraculously diagnose any
problem with an automobile engine just by listening to the darn thing while
it was running, and could usually "case supervise" the actions necessary to
bring the engine back to its ideal state.  But as the years went by, this
ability started to become more and more a serious problem for my friend, as
more and more automobiles came into existence and their presence and sounds
and emissions became a constant in our modern environment.  The more my
friend became aware of all the difficulties that he could hear and sense in
automobiles in his vicinity -- engines that were out of tune, in particular,
got to him -- the more he could feel, empathetically, what needed to be done
that others were not aware of, and until such a thing was corrected, if it
was in his presence, it bothered him mightily.  Once he or another could
bring the engine into tune and running properly, he'd become happy and a
strong feeling of relief would come to him.

         Now in describng my friend, I'm also talking about a fraternity of
people that I strongly have belonged to, namely, folks who go all the way and
become professional auditors -- mechanics of the mind and soul.  Well, over
the years, I found myself feeling about people the same way my friend the
automobile mechanic felt about cars that weren't functioning the way he
thought they should.  And so we come to one of the downsides of the
profession known as "auditor."

      Auditors, as you all know, are in the business of helping people who
are thought, either by themselves or others, to be functioning in non-optimum
ways; people who, like automobile engines, aren't "in tune," who aren't
running well on all of their cylinders, who may not even be sure how many
cylinders they're supposed to be running on -- folks who don't fit some
standard or standards that have been devised to describe what an optimum
human being or soul, if you wish, should be.

       Now historically, philosophers and religionists and people like
Sigmund Freud and L. Ron Hubbard and others have attempted to set up various
standards by which to judge or how to tell when a human being is functioning
according to the design specifications of that particular model human being
or human beings in general.  This can be pretty nifty stuff, and at times can
open the door to some excellent possibilities.  It can also, at its worst,
especially on the religious side of such designing, consist of large numbers
of moral precepts, right-and-wrongs, that is, which can be used in a very
repressive way to determine who's going to be harmed and who's going to be
helped.

         But the downside of all this stuff, and that includes even the best
of it, is that it points out what's wrong with somebody or someone.  It
doesn't work from the standpoint "Everybody and everything is absolutely OK
just as they are," and since all the world's a stage, and since life is a
great play, and we are all the players in the play, we want and must have an
enormous range of roles, and Life, the great casting director, has with
infinite patience and understanding born of great creative energies
determined all the parts that shall be played.  (This of course includes the
people who give us all the stuff that's to tell us how we're supposed to be
in order to be certified as being OK.)

        Now these folks have all, with their -ologies and -isms, generated
great businesses, in the same way that my friend the mechanic has built quite
a repair business with garages all over the country; and these folks, of
course, are in the business of repairing people mentally and spiritually.
But the thing that's lost to them forever seems to be one of the most
important and greatest producers of peace of mind viewpoints imaginable,
which is simply the most native and the most beautiful ability of all, which
is to be able to see things, including people, exactly as they are and have
that be OK without having a thunderously horrifying response kick off, which
says "This person is not OK as they are -- they must be fixed!  In fact, the
whole world is filled with people that are not OK as they are, and because
they're not OK as they are, the world is not OK as it is, and therefore we
must do something about the world and all its people,"   etc. etc. etc.

       Well, this is really a pretty bad state to get into, and is surely not
one that I would wish on anybody, because it holds no peace of mind and no
havingness.  Now many of the professionals of various professions suffer from
this syndrome excessively -- you'll find it rampant among doctors, even that
scorned profession called lawyers.  It drives the police to suicide, drug and
alcohol addiction, not to speak of the awful effect it has on real or
squirrelly automobile mechanics.

     Speaking personally for the very first time in this outrageous essay,
I'd like to say it's taken me forever and a day to "unhook" from the
automaticity of looking at another person and having to immediately go into a
song and dance inside my head about what I could do for that person to make
them a better person.  One of the things that helped mightily in this wise
was to stop thinking about each human being in terms of "Could they afford,
or did they have enough money, for me to fix them up?"  Once I stopped doing
that, my automatic diagnostic internal team diminished greatly, and I would
say that's the first step that anybody in any profession needs to make if
they're ever to get unhooked.

       The next great step in this direction was simply to see that if I
stopped looking at life and other people through the lenses (pardon me,
philosopher Sir Francis Bacon) of any set of ideas concerning how a person
had to look or sound in order for me to see them as being OK, which is to say
stop looking at them as if they were automobiles of a kind produced in
Detroit or wherever automobiles are produced, I would start seeing more of
what each person really was and always would be, rather than measuring them
against a bunch of standards that even at the very best come down to a
right/wrong game.

         Well now, in closing, you might think that I'm advocating that
nobody should ever become an auditor or a doctor or a lawyer or a policeman
or a politician or a priest or a philosopher, etc. etc.  Well, actually,
that's not the case, but I am suggesting that these professions most
definitely characterize the notion of the two-edged sword, and that many of
the folks that pursue them without relief end up, in the relative sense,
really screwed up; but in the absolute sense, give us some of our neatest, if
somewhat craziest, characters in the cast of Life.  Isn't that right, Ron?

         All the best, yours for further outrages --
             Phil the very Worst