The Philosophy of Scientology

Life is basically a Game

This is an attempt to cover the basic philosophy very briefly.

Scientology is best comprehensible if one takes the viewpoint that life is basically a game.

A game consists of "freedoms", "barriers" and "purposes" . (LRH)

(Already in 1934 the name "Scientology" appears as the title of a work by the German philosopher Dr. A. Nordenholz. His "Science of Knowledge" has quite some similarity to the philosophy of L. Ron Hubbard.)

A person playing a game is involved in it to a greater or lesser degree. He loses control over the game the more it becomes compulsive for him. He gets involved with interferences from others, agreements and non-agreements, with creation and destruction, he gets entangled in games not of his own, and in the end he winds up rather being a piece or a broken piece than a player.

One of the most important targets of Scientology is the rehabilitation of the person as "Player" and the rehabilitation of his "Spirit of Play".

In 1952 on a lecture series in Philadelphia, Hubbard said that

"there is a caste-system of games":

• There is the "Maker of Games": He has no rules and he runs by no rules.
• Then there are "Players of Games": Rules are known and obeyed.
• There are "Assistant Players" who merely obey the players.
• Then there are "Pieces": They obey the rules dictated by the players. However, they don't know the rules.

And then there are "Broken Pieces": They don't even know they are in a game and that there is a game at all.

Hubbard continues (quote):

• "How to make a piece...
• First, deny there is a game.
• Second, hide the rules from them.
• Third, give them all penalties and no wins.
• Fourth, remove all goals.
• Enforce their playing.
• Inhibit their enjoying.
• Make them look like but forbid their being players - look like God but can't be God."

To make a piece continue to be a piece, permit it to associate only with pieces and deny the existence of players. Never let the pieces find out that there are players." (Philadelphie Doctorate Course, 1952, Lecture 39 "Game Processing", Page 51 of the lecture transcript)

Capt. Bill Robertson covered the rehabilitation of players under this aspect and the current situation in which especially the people on earth are involved, in his Tech and Admin Briefings as well as in his lectures about the "New Civilization" which are highly recommended reading.

About the current situation on earth he says:

 "Imagine a cell. Six walls. A cell, no door, no window. A being inside that cell. However the cell is 20 feet across and 20 feet high and 20 feet wide. But the being, his diameter is only 19 feet. His awareness is only 19 feet. Does he see the walls? No! Now, if you are suppressive what you do is you give the guy in the middle some drugs and you give him some 'bumpf' on the TV and you make him think he is a one lifetimer and his awareness finally goes down to 18 feet. And when it goes down to 18 feet you move the walls in to 19 feet.

Am I tracking with you? Have you ever experienced this? On this planet? And finally when you get him down to about this size (size of a fist) the walls are about this size (stretched out arms) and everyone is nuts and really compartmented and conforming nicely all over the whole planet - one lifetime bodies and they got this whole planet. And if anybody jumps out of the line, anybody non-conforms - well, we got the methods of lobotomy, shock treatment, implanting, Siberia - whatever you want baby, it's there.

That is the mechanism by which this planet is being controlled right now, and the thing they fear most is people who can only see the walls. But they even fear something else more because the person who can only see the walls is still a piece in the game. And it can be controlled as a piece by cutting his 2D, by cutting his economic security, whatever you have to do, you can try and get his awareness back down to where he can't see the walls anymore. Right. Yes! Ok.

But the thing they fear the most is a guy that sees the walls and goes right through them. Because right outside the walls is freedom. And there is no fear. But not only that - the guy has now graduated from a piece to a player. And when he is a player he can handle other players who are playing the negative game." ... etc. (The full text is in his lecture at Crown Hotel East Grinstead, where you also see him on video).

In the development of Dianetics and later Scientology, Hubbard found out that there must be a life unit which on the one hand is involved in "life" and a "universe", but on the other hand is also capable of "creating a universe" . This life unit can be separated from the universe and it is able to exist without any universe.

He named it a "Static" and defined it as something which has no motion, no wavelength, no position in time and space, so to say a pure "Potential".

In the Scientology Axioms and Factors he develops a whole system, a whole series of statements about the involvement of this Static in a game. His early lectures of the fifties about Scientology as a Philosophy and Science, the Philadelphia Doctorate Course (PDC), the Hubbard Clinical Lectures (HCL), to name only a few, cover life as a game.

By entering a game a person, being or spirit, subjects himself to an "action cycle" of starting, changing and stopping .

By entering an action cycle a person is subjected to so-called conditions in the game which simply show how much he is winning or losing. Hubbard covered this in his writings about Ethics.

The more a person is able to carry through with such an action cycle or with action cycles in general he is "operating". He is self-determined then.

The more he is unable to carry out action cycles the more he is "other-determined".

This "other determinism" can be, for instance, the sickness of his own body which prohibits what he wants to do. It can be difficulties with the job, down to not knowing who he is at all. And it can also be some kind of force which deliberately is keeping him on a level of "piece".

The "bridge", as the Scientologist calls the technical application of Scientology, has the purpose to pick a person up at a certain level and rehabilitate and also increase his abilities and his awareness.

If you want to get an understanding of what Scientology is all about you have to differentiate in:

1. The Philosophy,
2. it's technical application (auditing, the bridge, etc.),
3. Hubbard's own opinion,
4. and the Scientology management (RTC etc.).

Conceptual understanding is of importance here. Not everything Hubbard said is of equal value. He had his own opinion and he, too, has his right to his own opinion.

In a lecture in Philadelphia he said in 1952:

"Now, I'm not asking you to look at this subject through my eyes.
There are two subjects here that I'm going to be talking to you about, just two, and one is "Scientology, a precise science of universes and beings therein or beings who make universes." Now, that's one subject. And then there's "Hubbard's opinion of this subject." And boy, I got some wild opinions. You ought to hear them sometime. But that's a different thing.. that's a different thing.. and you can tell very easily when I swing over into my opinion, when I start talking about some field of healing or when I start to talk about this or that, it's obviously a big slant and merely is my selection of randomity. Take it as amusing or evaluate by it or throw it away or anything. It doesn't have anything really to do with Scientology. But the subject itself is actually a lot cleaner than a wolf's tooth. I've examined a lot of wolve's teeth and I've found out that they're not too clean. And this subject is very clean though."(PDC 1, pg 14/15 of the lecture transcripts)

Also, about religion he said (freely quoted):

 A religion is something else than a religious philosophy. Totally different. Religion is the thing which is given to people as a pack about which they shouldn't think with reason... it is used to control people. Honestly. (HCL 27)

Interesting, isn't it?

It's easy to take a certain statement of a man who said some million words and even recorded them or wrote them down and blame him for something. Sure...

However, by differentiating a little bit, one can get the true intention of what Hubbard tried to accomplish with Scientology.

He didn't want to make new slaves or create another instrument of controlling people. He really wanted to help mankind and, at least, we in the Free Zone owe him a great respect for that.