Scientology

I spent last week at the Scientology center down on Times Square right opposite the Broadway show Movin’ Out with Billy Joel. I was getting trained in Dianetics. About a week earlier I’d met this woman who spoke to me about The Church and suggested that I find out why it was so popular. Why it was one of the richest institutions on the planet. She also gave me a couple of free books at the special reduced rate of five dollars off. I was very excited. But then I was also a little tired of being in conversations with people who spoke about the organization without knowing anything about it. Not that I wanted to defend it either. I just wanted the truth. And I also like Tom Cruise a lot. I think he’s a really good actor.

The first thing you notice when you walk in is how high-tech everything is. Televisions are everywhere. And they insist that you watch all the introductory videos a minimum of three times which is a classic passive resistance brain washing technique. But I didn’t mind. I just ate the free biscuits and loudly made out with my girlfriend so we couldn’t hear anything.

And I will say that some of the people there were a bit wonky. But then it does stand to reason. After all you don’t find healthy people in hospital. Or calm, centered people in therapy. But I’m not making any judgments either. I just went in and began the course. It was fairly straight forward. We have a conscious mind and an unconscious reactive mind and the unconscious reactive mind controls us. And every little trauma we’ve ever had is still right there with us. Getting re-triggered over and over and over again. Day in, day out.

Of course the theory is sound and the techniques they use do seem to work. But it is presented a little simply. Like they intentionally package it for five year olds. Or people who don’t speak English. Or who are very slow. The study books for example are a bit like pop-up books. And most of them can be colored in.

But the people there are very nice. And they all speak to you very softly. And as you’re doing the course they give you a dictionary in case there’s a word you don’t understand. And if you don’t have a dictionary right there next to you then they get you one. And even if you do have one they ask you if that one is adequate. They also test you on your understanding of words too. Words like adequate. And meeting. What does meeting mean? Then they ask you to use it in a sentence. And the funny thing is – if someone asks you a question like can you use ‘meeting’ in a sentence? You’re so astonished that you’re being asked such a question that it actually becomes fairly challenging. But don’t get me wrong it is a very good course. Even though they do make you feel like you’re retarded.

When you arrive they call you a Pre-clear. Which means you’re as retarded as it gets. Which technically means you have no free will. And that’s really what the whole hoopla’s about. The view that you simply do not have free-will until you have stopped Re-Acting. Until you have identified all of your conditioning and overcome it. But of course no one believes that. People walk around thinking they’re making decisions all the time about how to act. But really they’re not. They’re just Re-Acting. Re-Acting to stimulus. Even the brain signals that alert your mouth to say something or your body to act in a certain way have been found to proceed the actual conscious decision to do so by a very, very long way. And thats not even scientology. That’s real science. Some guy proved it. And some other guy in England just wrote a book about it too. Its no joke. But then tell someone they have no free will and watch what happens. They just laugh their heads off.

Drugs

I spent last night with a pharmacologist who moonlights as a small-time southern French clairvoyant. He brought me over some high grade, home grown doob and spent the evening smoking a great deal of it through an ancient bone chillum that he claimed some old man from god knows where gave him. He wanted to share his thoughts on expanding consciousness. 

Drugs will only do it momentarily before snapping you back to a place even smaller than where you were when you began. A one step forward two steps back sort of thing. A brief glimpse via the elevator. But climb up yourself and you can hang around all day. 

He took me to a bar off the Canal du Midi and ordered us two pints of shit beer. His attempts to tip the waitress with refinery were a catastrophe. But then he was holding a bone chillum in his hand that really just looked like a big dick. When he turned to me again his thoughts were in a muddle but I understood what he was attempting to explain. He seemed very interested in the latent, dormant abilities of the individual. 

This, he waved the dick in my face, opens us up to a mass of information that we only normally receive unconsciously. In this state we are far more aware of our energetic effect on others. A single movement, even in a place like this, will create counter movements and micro-counter movements in everyone else. Like schools of fish in the sea. But sober and we hardly notice them. We have in fact been conditioned to shut down our awareness of the greater truth of any moment because it can be so difficult for us to bear. Precisely why mystics say we don’t remember our previous incarnations. I mean could you live with your father today if you knew that three hundred years ago he’d been your wife? Paranoia is merely the emotional reaction to the recognition that what you are hearing and seeing from a person is in contradiction to what you are feeling from them. We’re all constantly saying one thing just to hide the fact that we feel another. And it’s not easy watching the lies of your friends and lovers day after day after day. It’s a heavy burden to bear consciously, regardless of whether it’s only being done reflexively. This is the reason why we have trouble understanding conversations in this state. Not because we’ve become slower but because we’ve opened up to the full information available. And because this portion is so vast, so much greater, so much more real than the charade, the theatre, the sheer falsity of our words, that a portion of the mind simply finds itself ignoring them. As if you were suddenly shown the motor of a performance car you were buying, when all along you’d just been checking out its paint work. Only a telepath, my boy, knows the full extent of the worlds pretense. 

From out of the corner of my eye I had noticed a couple of local girls checking us out. But every time I glanced over they pretended not to care, or suddenly began having what appeared to be the most interesting conversation in Europe. He went on. Of course the real truth is that we’re not really saying much at all. We’re not talking to communicate. We’re talking to expend nervous energy. To feel less anxious. We’re talking to relax. But it’s about as effective as draining a lake with a tea spoon. And we all know it. Because when we talk we’re actually slowing down the potential communication process by a massive degree. We’re reducing it to a linear grain by grain production line. But we’re capable of exchanging so much more, so much more quickly. There is in fact no limit. But speaking with these blunt staccato lumps, this completely stilted machinery, these individual fragments of such stark, inexpressive sound, we are simply slowing everything down. Every word we use is in fact simply reducing, through beat after battered beat, how much we are able to express, into smaller and smaller bits. The more you talk the less you say. The less you talk the more your mind will find another way. He now stared at me hard now, and slowly but meaningfully tapped his dick on his head. I ordered more beer. 

Dolphin

I met a man last night who’s absolutely dolphin mad. He’s spent almost thirty years studying them. He even had this machine with recordings of all their little kooky clicks and squeaks. He sat me down and played them for me, pointing his finger at the frequency meter and holding his mouth open, asking over and over again if I could hear the difference. He was very excited. Even his ring tone was a whale song. He told me how whales apparently never shut off their entire brains when they sleep. That they lie nose to nose and spiral downwards in deep water turning off only one side at a time. I didn’t understand what any of that meant so I did my own little squeak. He loved that. Soon he was squeaking back. Then the joke got out of hand and he was squeaking every five minutes, nodding his head and raising his eyebrows at me. It was a tough one. Consciously we’re nothing compared to them he said. We drift in and out of consciousness on a regular basis, moment to moment even. Its like our breath. It rises and it falls. Compared to a dolphin we’re not even unconscious he said, we’re comatose. He squeaked again at this point. I fake laughed. Don’t encourage him I thought. But he was off. Then when he came to I took a chance and asked him if he’d been unconscious then. He started for a moment and looked me straight in the eye. Then he said have you ever been driving and suddenly woken up? Suddenly come to and realised that for a certain amount of time you’d been driving completely unconsciously? Completely absent from the experience? I nodded my head. I didn’t need to be driving to feel that. But this is the essence he said. Because it doesn’t just happen when we drive. It happens all the time.

1.

We all have a blind spot. A part of ourselves that we cannot see. The only reason that we know it is there is because everyone around us can see it. Our friends, our family and most of all, our lovers. And this is the world we live in. Everyone seeing your blind spot but you.  

Premise

No one sabotages their life consciously. No one, without exception, sabotages their life consciously. And yet we do every day. And the reason is because we are not doing it consciously. We are doing it unconsciously.