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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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Pulling out all the stops
by Phil Spickler
27 Nov 1999


Dear Fellow Travellers along the highways and byways of existence:
       For those familiar with the musical instrument known as the organ, the
expression "To pull all the stops" is an action which permits the organ to
exercise its full volume, range, and intensity; and if you've ever been in a
church or other location when the organist pulls all the stops, you know that
the ensuing sound can cause the building to tremble from its footings to its
highest reaches.

        I am modestly going to attempt in the following words to pull all the
stops, or at least a few of them, and dazzle my two readers and single
admirer with insightful bravura.

        It could be said that the following statements are, in musical terms,
the coda to previous postings concerning Why I'm not a spiritual being.

       It has been well noted in the past that when folks have emotionally
shocking or extreme experiences of pain, unconsciousness and heavy impact,
that there is a definite tendency in response to such experiences to make
postulates or considerations or strong opinions and decisions concerning the
meaning of the experience and about the state of being of that which or whom
has the experience, as well as the desirability of having or not having the
experience again or ever again.

        Such things take on a timeless character, a life of their own, and
are often found as major "stuck 7's" that operate with a tremendous command
value over the life of an individual or group.

        One of the things that you don't hear about quite as much, mainly
because they occur in connection with experiences that are thought to be
good, is that some of these good experiences also have giant and startling,
perhaps even shocking, effects on the folks that have such experiences; and
as a result these folks are also liable to form or make fixed postulates or
considerations about such moments.

       Historically speaking, the chap who became known as St. Paul is
alleged to have had quite an amazing experience whilst on his famous journey
to Damascus.  As a result of that experience, he made a whole bunch of
postulates and reached a whole bunch of conclusions that not only wrecked his
own life but have played holy hell (excuse the expression) with millions and
millions of people for the last 2,000 years of Christianity.

       On the local level, more recent times that is, you could often see
this sort of thing happening at the Success Desk of Scientology
organizations, where folks who had had some kind of a blow-out experience in
auditing were encouraged to draw conclusions about that experience, often the
type of conclusion that began with "I am certain I am a ______," or "I have
certainty now of self as a ______."  These folks often had plenty of help
from Scientology organizations and materials that they had read and studied
in reaching or drawing such conclusions, without perhaps being aware at the
time that they were making a postulate that now gave them the state of an
identity or beingness and all the travails that follow reaching fixed
conclusions about something that really doesn't have any borders,
limitations, or postulated definitions.

    In an effort to give a simple and somewhat silly example of what we're
looking at here, I'll just attempt to point out that if you were to conclude
today that you were a chair, and really put on that beingness, you would soon
find that people would probably start sitting down on you or using you to
prop open a door and possibly at some point in time having you re-upholstered
:-) -- or at the very least considering that you were nuts.

       So the idea is that whenever you claim to be something, with the
postulate that begins "I am a ______,' you will over time tend to get all the
experiencs that go with that postulate of beingness.  True, there may even be
some pretty good things that go with it, but you may find that there's also
quite a bit of stuff that you never really hoped for or wanted to experience,
like having people sit down on you to eat dinner.

       Now at least one form of basic auditing has to do with going as
directly as possible to the postulates or considerations that get formed when
the person is in one form of shock or another, and discovering those things
so that the person can let go of them, or at least reach a point where they
only use these ideas when they feel like it, rather than having them
unknowingly locked in place at all times.

        And so we are no great holders of respect for fixed postulates or
considerations of beingness, because they keep you from having the freedom to
assume and discard other and different roles in the great stage of life that
we play on.

       Now the greatest of actors have or possess a godlike ability, namely,
the ability to be no one, who can assume at will any beingness in the giant
casting department of life.  And of course that puts them right up there at
the 8th dynamic, since they literally can create people or personae of any
sort, which we generally think of as what the 8th dynamic is all about.

       So I recommend stop being such old fuddy-duddies and let go of those
fixed beingnesses, no matter how attractive they may seem.  In the long run
it's your ability or capacity to put them on or take them off and realize
that you are, basically, none of them that has a lot to do with what I like
to think of as OT abilities.

       Identity tech, such as NOTS, in my opinion, was a wonderful step
towards helping folks to reach this cognition about beingness and go directly
to the core of identities that hold onto fixed considerations of beingness
with such deadly ferocity.  I say, don't fear unmocking what someone always
thought of as their real self -- should you succeed, and I hope you do, in
doing this, you will at that moment open yourself (please excuse that
expression) to more fun and the expansion of more self or selves than you
ever dreamed of in this philosophy of yours, Horatio (that last bit is a
take-off from some little statement in Shakespeare's _Hamlet_).

        Well, I hope at this point that the stops have been pulled, both
literally and figuratively, and that this will result in some more of that
desire for a greater freedom being fulfilled.  I'm pretty sure that there
isn't anything in this that could be called new information, since I believe
it to be common knowledge in many of the best wisdom schools.

      Best wishes to all for a light and bright new millennium --
          Flipper Phil the dolphinologist