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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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My apologies in advance
by Phil Spickler
15 Dec 00

To those who list (we hope not self-listing),
        It was once said by the one known as Hubbard, L.R., that the single
source of aberration (ALL aberration) is pain.  As far back as Book I
Dianetic days, I'm pretty sure, as a dyed-in-the-wool Dianeticist, that I did
whole-heartedly agree with Mr. Hubbard about pain and aberration.  Throughout
the years of Dianetics and Scientology, and right on into present time, as of
the moment of this writing, I have put to the test more times than I care to
remember Ron's adage that pain is the source of aberration.

        But having a somewhat rebellious and disagreeable nature, as well as
being a charter member of the Contrarian Club, I've always held out a few
megabits of theta short of full agreement with that idea.

      Whether it's with painkillers or auditing and other possibilities that
exist for relieving humans of pain, physical, mental, emotional, and
spiritual, when this is truly and well done, a lot of what might be called
aberrated about a given being or human being sure does seem to disappear, as
if by magic.

       Now I don't often ask people on this list to feel so beholden to me
that they have to respond to any of my communications, but I would like to
say, with Christmas approaching and the spirit of giving gradually creeping
over selected portions of our favorite dirtball, Planet Earth, that I'd like
to hear some opinions and coommentary, if possible, on this notion of pain
and aberration, and whether anybody knows of some other things that can and
do cause aberration in ourselves and our fellows.  So OK on that for the
moment, and thanks in advance for your kind reply(s).

       The second subject for tonight's diatribe is control, which has for one
of its definitions the ability to start, to change, and to stop.  Back in the
mid-1950's, when I first chanced to work in close proximity with L. Ron
Hubbard, X number of people would arrive at the organization who seriously
wanted to get an answer to the question of whether there really was such a
thing as a thetan.  They wanted to know if they were  thetans, and if they
were something that was quite distinct and separate from the human body.  A
number of these people were almost immediately given to a good auditor to be
run on Start/Change/Stop with Havingness.

        So there they were, getting run on starting the body, changing the
body, and stopping the body; and they were being asked to do this consciously
and deliberately, which was something that a lot of people don't really do on
a day-to-day basis.  And as they would start doing this, there would be
frequent pauses in the start-change-stop process to be run on one or more
types of havingness, because the start-change-stop processing was starting to
bring separation from the body and the re-assumption of their true identity
as a nothingness, and most of us aren't used to being a nothingness.  We're
used to the havingness of the body and its mass, not to speak of all the less
visible mass that nothingnesses pile up and around and through themselves in
order to play the game of being human.

        So anyway, as the beingness of nothingness started to appear, it was
necessary to repair or even remedy Havingness so that the guy could
comfortably separate from the mass of the body and the bank and simply be
comfortable as nothing and no one, so to speak.  And if the auditor was
really sharp enough to keep that havingness-to-nothingness ratio well
balanced, somewhere during the intensive the pc would report things like
being much bigger than the body, being separate from the body, being at some
great distance even from the body; and at that point the auditor would then
shift into Routine 1 from _Creation of Human Ability_ and take the
exteriorized nothingness on the great Grand Tour.

        Well, I can just tell you that I saw some people arrive who looked
pretty lowdown human, and by the time they finished the aforementioned
rundown, their brightness was so great as to hurt the human eye, and their
abilities to permeate a space were extraordinary, and the list of abilities
and even the look of their human body was something special to see.  And all
of this came about by simply getting someone to control something consciously
that they had mostly been controlling through machines and other
automaticities.

          But I think that the really important thing to remember is that for
the guy to assume his true state of being as a nothingness, you really have
to keep his havingness in very good shape on his way to getting there.  And
that remains to this day one of the easiest ways to help another human being
answer the question as to what they really are.  And of course the nice part
about S-C-S is that it is truly an objective process, and absolute dynamite
for helping somebody to find out more about something.

         That's all -- the cat just came down here and said it was time for me
to go to bed, and that she'd tuck me in, and boy, if you've never had  a cat
tuck you in, well, they just really know how to tuck you in.  Bon soir, gute
nacht, and arrivederla --
        Philo