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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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To market we will go, or, Here we go again
by Phil Spickler
13 Oct 1998


Having just completed my alfalfa harvest and sheared a few sheep, (to 
keep in practice), as well as prepared the cave for a long winter's 
sleep, just as I was closing my eyes (as part of a metabolism test), 
it suddenly occurred to me that I had failed to contribute anything 
to the amazing IVy-list in some time, but rather had been sitting 
back and allowing the wonderful Frank Gordon to almost 
single-handedly carry the ball (so to speak), not to mention the 
ongoing excellence of Ant in inspiring diverse thought and 
interesting subjects for communication.  Therefore and forthwith, I 
hesitantly tender the following.

This essay is a ruthless attempt to reconsider the notion of the term 
"I" and what it's supposed to stand for, and to determine if there is 
such a thing, or if it's just an Earthbound marketing tool that is a 
natural outgrowth of a world based on supply and demand.

One of the neatest things to be found in early Dianetics was the 
notion of a grouper, and to loosely define a grouper is to say that 
it's a bunch of things that are all different, possibly even from 
different points in time, that somehow get plastered together as 
though they were all one thing.  This will probably sound familiar to 
folks that have played fast and loose with the notions of 
Scientology, OT 3 and NOTs, and if you think about the construct 
called the human being you're most definitely looking at a grouper. 
Again, we can go with the Scientology definition of a human being as 
a thetan, mind and body all plastered together. Then of course the 
body itself is certainly a model of a grouper in which all kinds of 
different things, billions and billions of them in fact, are all 
compressed into a form and hopefully will all work together in happy 
consensus so as to promote the ongoing survival of that form. 
Eventually this big enforced group no longer seems to live together 
in such lovely bliss, resulting in sickness and death or dissolution. 
And finally all that made it up can go back to being what it was 
before it all got gathered up and pressed into this one idea (not to 
mention that which did the gathering).

So anyway, that's a modest look at the notion of a grouper, and in 
auditing, whether it was Book I style or OT-something style, any time 
you ran into a grouper, things would usually come to a screaming halt 
until you identified the nature of the beast and what had made it a 
grouper, at which point you could end that form, and free theta, 
which usually produced considerable result.

Now historically, Dianetics and Scientology have gone back and forth 
between the notion of a single-unit being, or highly defined "I", and 
on the other side a composite that had many, many "I"s in it, which 
often threw into question just who in the heck anybody really was. 
The idea that there really is no such thing as an "I" that is the 
master of all of this stuff has not proven to be very popular; in 
fact you could say it's one of the worst things for business that 
ever came along.  And yet there does seem to be a thing called 
consciousness that can be aware of being aware.  On the one hand, if 
you audited the big group as a single-unit being, in the months and 
years that followed you ended up having to do a lot of correction and 
new item-finding for everything and everyone that hadn't been in 
agreement in the first place. And then, on the other hand, if you 
audited the group as a composite, you ended up getting rid of so much 
that on the theme of "Nature abhors a vacuum" there was a general 
tendency to gather up all kinds of junk and slam it back together 
again so that someone could claim they were a single-unit being again 
and enjoy the luxury of using "I" to describe everything under the 
sun: PHEW!

The Eskimos of North America in their language structure did a great 
deal to de-intensify aberration by leaving the term for "I" 
completely out of their language.  So instead of saying, "I am very 
angry," in Eskimo it would come out something like "Someone is very 
angry."  This avoids much of the misownership that causes such great 
difficulty in most people, since one doesn't rush to claim the 
ownership of every thought, feeling, mass, etc. that occurs on the 
scene, thus making possible a better vision of correct source. 
Misownership does lead to ongoing persistence, and in its most 
far-reaching notion leads to that which we call continuing existence. 
Having encouraged myselves and others to experiment just with this 
slightly different language construction for a period of time, it was 
quickly noticed that the intensity of most aberrations and 
concomitant misemotion was much more easily handled and observed, 
since dropping the "I" out of it instantly gave one distance and 
perception.         Earlier schools of thought have also talked about 
the notion of a false "I" and that it wasn't until one abandoned that 
false "I" or ego that it would really become possible to experience 
high and unvarnished states of awareness. Please don't ask what or 
who is doing the abandoning: more on that later.  It has been 
noticed, over the years of this lifetime, that what used to be 
referred to as myself and the selves of others have erected systems 
of thought and action that exist primarily to defend this ego-I from 
the onslaughts of Life, and that the urge is to make this ego-I 
impervious to effect, unless the effect is something that the ego-I 
deems to be acceptable.

When Hubbard said that the effort to survive, for an immortal, is as 
crazy as it's possible for that immortal to get, I don't think he was 
kidding -- since the only thing the immortal CAN do is survive, doing 
all kinds of things to survive looks pretty crazy.  All the immortal 
needs to do is remember that it's immortal, and quickly look in the 
dictionary to find out what that means!  That which is immortal 
surely is not an "I" in the sense of the "I" that's busily consuming 
auditing, penicillin, food, air, automobiles, air-conditioning, and 
steak sandwiches (plus noni juice).  Now if you try to raise the 
ego-I to the state of immortality, it's good for business but as you 
may have noticed in the long run it is impossible.         Well, you 
ask (or at least I hope you do), if I'm not an "I", what the hell am 
I?  First of all, let's say that you're not any of the words that 
were used in framing that question.  That leaves you with a basic 
nature, then, that can't be verbalized.  You could use the negative 
definition, found in Scientology's Axiom 1 (and please don't make the 
mistake of interchanging the word "Static" for "I").  That definition 
does tell you what the immortal is not: no mass, no motion, no 
wavelength, no location in space or time, but boy oh boy, what a 
potential!  Mark Twain (American philosopher and humorist), in some 
of his writings, took up the subject of the confusion about "What is 
'I'?" and he defined it as a vagrant thought of pure immortality 
floating through timeless eons as a nothingness.  This and other 
extraordinary thoughts are to be found in his book _The Mysterious 
Stranger_, highly recommended reading for all you 
philosopher/humorists out there.

Once the customer realizes that the "I" that he has been trying to 
turn into a super-big, super-tough, super-impervious operating God is 
indeed something that can never be any of those things, well, for 
awhile it's the way little kids feel when they find out that they 
have been deceived, and that Santa Claus was a lot of fun, but we 
were just kidding around, and that he was really just part of the 
Christmas marketing package; or the way certain Americans feel when 
they find out that George Washington did indeed tell a couple of 
lies.  For awhile, some folks are sadder, albeit wiser, but it 
doesn't mean you have to grow up and get serious -- it means you can 
now really start playing wth life and having a lot more fun, and you 
can stop bellyaching about "Why weren't my gains stable," and "if 
someone comes along and promises me stable gains I'll believe him 
forever, or at least until I find out there ain't such a thing for 
the ego-I," that being of course the someone who lives and dies -- 
and that's OK too, don't be afraid of either one, 'cause neither one 
is the truth.

Now does this mean that folks shouldn't get auditing or training or 
give auditing or training?  Not at all!  It just means that they need 
to have a larger truth or stable datum within which they can contain 
the things that they are doing for the various "I"s that make them 
up, so that it doesn't eventually turn into a very expensive, serious 
business with a never-ending craving to attain that which they really 
aren't anyway.

And so ends my latest late midsummer night's dream, or is it a 
nightmare, which I hope will inspire some responses from those who 
haven't already gone into early hibernation.  In visiting Japan for a 
couple of months earlier this year, and having the opportunity to 
chat about such matters with various Zen and Buddhist scholars, quite 
a few ho-ho's and ha-ha's were elicited in the discussion of this 
confusion about the notion of "I" (underlined and in quotation 
marks). It became apparent to me that for these folks the 
understanding of the fallacy of the notion of "I" and the mistaking 
it for the eternal verity is kindergarten stuff, but let's face it, 
us Westerners have been paralyzed for at least a few thousand years 
by some of the most ridiculous horse manure anyone ever took the time 
to use as an implant.  Which reminds me, I must get back to cleaning 
out the stable -- Love, Phil