Blog: Pursuit of Understanding - 2013-10-09
Pursuit of Understanding October 9, 2013,
I am introducing my recommended reading list to anyone who has attained the Scientology state of Clear. By doing so, I am not promoting or trying to win over anybody to a particular line of thought. Nor am I attempting to dissuade people from continuing to worship their firmly held religious constructs. I respect their First Amendment rights to continue to do so. Instead, I am responding to the relative few who have expressed genuine curiosity about from whence I have come and to where I am going. Folks can take it or leave it, or pick and choose to satisfy their own curiosities. And, as is their wont, Scientologists can of course nitpick and snipe so as to kill the agent who brings news they will likely find is anathema to their Scientology religious beliefs.
I recommend that these materials, minimally, be studied before embarking on Scientology OT Levels 2 through 8. Actually, I think anyone would gain a tremendous amount of insight by reading these books. But, I believe this (or a comparable) recommended study is essential to understanding from a scientific and spiritual view what it most likely is that makes a meter read on a Clear. It also gives a much deeper understanding of what it is that Ron Hubbard was grappling with on the upper levels. To pursue a subject calling itself a 'science of the mind', while subjecting oneself to religious mythological belief constructs (as one inevitably does by running headlong into the OT Levels of Scientology) sets up a vicious form of cognitive dissonance: religious belief masquerading as scientific certainty. The result is the inability to perceive as-is; defeating the entire stated purpose of Scientology. More debilitating, Scientology at the upper levels continues a process of self-affirmation and self-fixation that firmly shackles an individual from rising to greater heights; locked into a solidified ego as he or she becomes. I think this recommended study can alleviate that dissonance, freeing an individual to continue to move on up a little higher.
I am not creating some new study by this recommendation. I am sure there is an infinity of gradients and steps one could, and some certainly have, take to navigate the mire that is implanted at the Scientology upper levels. I did not follow this recommendation. I went through numerous other valleys and peaks along my own way. For example, as part of my own study, I studied and evaluated what Hubbard studied and drew from in developing Scientology; and I haven't included that byway on this list. I reviewed my path and noted those studies I feel were integral in understanding Scientology in the only way Hubbard himself recommended anything could be fully understood. That is, studied against data of comparable magnitude. When one does, I believe one cannot help but recognize that Ron was definitely onto something in his upper level research, but that developments in science and consciousness far more rationally and accurately revealed what it was. One may or may not also see in the light of this understanding, that continued, blind adherence to mythological constructs supplied in Scientology might be crippling of spiritual evolution.