************************************************************************
The following first appeared in the private email list IVy-subscribers,
which was available to all those who subscribed to the
printed magazine, International Viewpoints.
Home Page: http://www.ivymag.org/ - with extensive links to FZ!
************************************************************************
X-Authentication-Warning: gem.lightlink.com: majordom set sender to
owner-ivy-subscribers@lightlink.com using -f
Received: from mx.lightlink.com (mx.lightlink.com [205.232.34.15])
by gem.lightlink.com (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id BAA28420
for Sat, 20 Jul 2002 01:20:52
-0400
Received: from imo-r08.mx.aol.com (imo-r08.mx.aol.com [152.163.225.104])
by mx.lightlink.com (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id BAA29703
for Sat, 20 Jul 2002 01:20:52 -0400
From: PJSpickler@aol.com
Received: from PJSpickler@aol.com
by imo-r08.mx.aol.com (mail_out_v32.21.) id q.139.117a1fef (4533)
for Sat, 20 Jul 2002 01:20:46 -0400
(EDT)
Message-ID: <139.117a1fef.2a6a4d2d@aol.com>
Date: Sat, 20 Jul 2002 01:20:45 EDT
Subject: IVySubs: Case
To: ivy-subscribers@lightlink.com
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
X-Mailer: AOL 3.0.1 for Mac sub 85
Sender: owner-ivy-subscribers@lightlink.com
Precedence: bulk
** ivy-subscribers relaying **
Dear Fellow-listers,
In one of my recent short postings to the IVy list there was quite a bit
of talk about case and no-case, it struck me somewhat later that I didn't say
very much about just what "case" is and I got to thinking, maybe there's a
lot of people out there who don't have a case, just because they don't know
what case is, in the same way that there really wasn't much gravity around on
this planet before Isaac Newton discovered and defined gravity. Prior to
Newton, it was darned difficult to keep anything on earth without an anchor.
Well, you know I'm mostly kidding, but sometimes definitions can be
useful and can even serve as points of discovery, especially when people
start talking about something -- then definitions can be pretty darn handy,
since it leads to the remost possibility that two or more people are actually
talking about the same thing.
Well, when I got to thinking about "case," I'm not sure exactly when I
first heard the word used, outside of medical terminology -- for example, "he
had a case of tuberculosis," or "the case we are presenting to you medical
students today is one of advanced lumbosis" (first coined by L. Ron Hubbard,
who was forever, and for good reason, making fun of some of the arrogance,
stupidity, and know-it-all-ness of the medical profession, with of course
some exceptions). Anyway, there was a use of "case," and then there were
some uses outside of medicine, such as "He was a tough, or a hard case,"
which usually meant someone whose ideas or opinions were fixed or rigid,
making them difficult to deal with.
But it seems to me that I got onto this word "case" back around 1952, in
Dianetics, where such expressions as "wide-open case" or "occluded case" or a
"tough case" or an "easy case" were in common usage. Well, "case" back
around 1950 - '52 meant the reactive mind, the stimulus-response mind, the
sum total of engrams that made up the person's "case," and just as in
medicine, "case" meant what was wrong with the guy or gal. The guy's case is
what prevented him (or her) from being clear, or at least from being closer
to the idea of operating in an optimum way on each of the four dynamics,
which is the number of dynamics which were around in the Dianetic history
pre-Scientology.
So "case" was what was wrong with the preclear, and getting rid of case
by erasing the engram collection or "bank" was considered a good thing, but
it wasn't until Scientology came along, around '52 or so, that the expression
"case gain" became widely used, and "case gain," even though it seems like a
strange use of the word :case," didn't really mean that the guy got more
case, or gained case (this was recently pointed out to me by my friend and
constant companion Julie B. Spickler). Anyhow, due to the vagaries of
language, ":case gain" meant LESS case, and was a very positive or good
thing, and auditors and directors of processing and case supervisors were
generally concerned with whether the preclear or the pre-OT was obtaining
case gain.
One of the definitions of case gain was the preclear's or pre-OT's
personal and subjective consideration of whether he or she was making case
gain or having less case and feeling improved in that department.
Now when Scientology came along, Mr. Hubbard, in his finite or infinite
wisdom, either discovered or found four more dynamics to add to the list of
the dynamics, and when you added 'em all up, these eight dynamics were called
Life, with a capital L. And case gain could be defined as how well, or how
much better, a person was doing on each of these dynamics after receiving
auditing and/or training, and this was a useful yardstick for determining how
well the person was doing in relation to their given case.
Well, after Dianetics, "case" had to be re-defined to include things that
seemed to be other than engrams that prevented the person from optimum
survival or existence on each of their eight dynamics. (If anybody has any
question about the eight dynamics, or Life, as Mr. Hubbard modestly calls
them, in order to secure the brevity of this posting, I highly recommend that
either via the Internet or some of Mr. Hubbard's books one take a look at
what these eight dynamics are and how they are defined, because even though
the distinctions between the eight dynamics are largely verbal, they still as
defined are useful in examining life and just how well or not-well you're
doing in that department.)
Dianetics did not have as its major address a human being as a spirit or
soul or what later came to be called a thetan; but since the range of thetan
possibly goes far beyond the limitations of human being, so go the
possibilities for case to realms that prior to Scientology had not been
discovered and/or defined.
As long as we stick to a general definition of "case" as anything or
anyone that prevents another, either as a human being or as an immortal soul,
from achieving the most optimum possibilities, it remains possible to enlarge
or expand or discover just what the limits of case may be.
Back in the mid-1950's, after Scientology came into existence, and if you
considered the individual to now be an immortal spirit or soul called a
thetan, the biggest impediment for such a being to be conscious of its full
freedom and its greatest creative possibilities would be for such a being to
consider itself a human being: that would be a thetan's major case, major
misconception, and major inhibition to realizing its true nature and
possibilities. (That definition, by the way, never seemed to be very popular
with many of the thetans that wished to be human beings, and that's easy to
understand.)
To further add insult to injory in the department of defining "case," Mr.
Hubbard at one point or another happened to mention that the real and sum
total of case that a thetan or free immortal spirit could have, including its
identity as a thetan, would be the eight dynamics. That's right -- Life
itself was the guy's case! This gets easier to understand when and if you
realize or allow for the possibility that a thetan is nether alive nor dead;
and when you get him to thinking that he can be alive or dead, which is what
life is all about, he, the being, can't really get any more confused than
that.
So here we are now: when you start talking about case, you're talking
about life. And therefore, at the highest echelons of case gain or
improvement, we really aren't trying to get the guy to get rid of his case,
which is tantamount to getting rid of life, neither an easy nor a desirable
thing to do. Instead, whether it's just the littlest tiniest bit of case to
the biggest ugliest case you could ever imagine, we want to get the person to
where they can HAVE, not get rid of, case; which is to say, have life and not
try to get rid of any of it.
And of course when we say Life, we mean all of life, not just the stuff
that we arbitrarily label "good" or "bad," with all of its opposites. This
is, in my opinion, a state that goes 'way beyond the notion of neutralizing
or doing anything about polarities, other than simply having them. When
you're neither dead nor alive, things like pleroma don't mean anything.
I close this by simply saying knowledge can be very painful or
pleasurable. The saying that ignorance is bliss may be worth meditating on.
Good night, and don't forget to write --
Phil
**
Home Page: http://www.ivymag.org/ - with extensive links to FZ!
**
*************************************************
X-Authentication-Warning: gem.lightlink.com: majordom set sender to
owner-ivy-subscribers@lightlink.com using -f
Received: from mx.lightlink.com (mx.lightlink.com [205.232.34.15])
by gem.lightlink.com (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id AAA04149
for Tue, 23 Jul 2002 00:34:53
-0400
Received: from imo-r07.mx.aol.com (imo-r07.mx.aol.com [152.163.225.103])
by mx.lightlink.com (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id AAA13395
for Tue, 23 Jul 2002 00:34:51 -0400
From: PJSpickler@aol.com
Received: from PJSpickler@aol.com
by imo-r07.mx.aol.com (mail_out_v32.21.) id q.1a7.584db87 (2616)
for Tue, 23 Jul 2002 00:34:47 -0400
(EDT)
Message-ID: <1a7.584db87.2a6e36e7@aol.com>
Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2002 00:34:47 EDT
Subject: IVySubs: Just a "case" of mistaken identities
To: ivy-subscribers@lightlink.com
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
X-Mailer: AOL 3.0.1 for Mac sub 85
Sender: owner-ivy-subscribers@lightlink.com
Precedence: bulk
** ivy-subscribers relaying **
Hello, anyone!
It seems as though a little more could be said about the subject of case
without heavily overdoing it. I think it's a darned interesting subject, and
one that can't help but evoke a fair number of viewpoints about said subject.
L. Ron Hubbard, in his time, seemed to have quite a bit of interest in
case and cases, and certainly had quite a bit to say. Regarding the notion
that life itself is a being's case, Mr. Hubbard said something like, "Life
(with a capital L) is a game." He also said, somewhere or another, "All
games are aberrative." It's also been pointed out in that notorious area
called Service Facsimiles that Life is an immortal's excuse for failure, and
service facsimiles most definitely come under the heading of case.
Also, and this is just my own opinion, seems to me it would be pretty
hard to have a case without life.
But to get a little further into the entertainment aspect of tonight's
deposition, if we look in the last century, the 20th, that is, around 1950,
and we mention engrams for a moment, the thing about engrams that made them
so aberrative or so much that which was called "case" is that they
constituted or were a hidden influence on the person. And through Dianetic
auditing it was possible to help a person find out that they had engrams that
had previously been hidden or unknown to the person, and that when they
became restimulated or keyed in, because they contained pain and
unconsciousness, and held command value over the behavior of a person, they
could cause a person to behave in suboptimum, non-survival, ways; they could
cause a person to become sick and/or crazy; and in short, cause somebody not
to be doing very well on their first four dynamics.
So case gain occurred in large because what auditing was doing was making
that which was unknown to a person, now consciously known, so that it ceased
to be a stimulus-response recording that had great influence over the
person's life.
Now if you've ever run a real fire-breathing engram on somebody who could
run an engram, you'll see right off the bat that the person, when they first
contact an engram, has a heck of a time having it or being willing to
experience it. This is understandable because the durn thing is filled with
real pain and real unconsciousness, real sturm and real drang. In fact, it's
the sort of experience of which one might say, "This must never happen
again." But with good auditing that gave that particular preclear a chance
to start re-experiencing this horrible experience on a comfortable gradient,
after awhile that which had been unhaveable, with a lot of unwillingness to
experience, finally became quite haveable, something the person was quite
willing to experience, and which had lost its power, the awful power of a
hidden influence.
And since Have is very close on one of Mr. Hubbard's various scales to
Create, well, if you can get someone up to the point where they can have
something, they just aren't very far from being at the point where they could
create that something, and of course when their responsibility level gets to
the point of Create, they can if they want erase or make vanish whatever it
is, because they're now at the point of being its author, or the source of
its creation.
It seems to me, if I understood Robin Whitson's posting correctly, he was
pointing out that he had a painful experience when he took a tumble over some
reinforcing steel and landed badly on one of his shoulders. He found, if I
got what he was saying, that the experience was being locked in place and the
pain continuing because there was Protest about whoever left the reinforcing
steel laying around as well as the pain in the body's shoulder. Well, as you
know, if you're in protest about something, you just plain aren't having it.
But Robin went ahead, using some of the Pilot's tech, and handled that
protest, as well as the protest in an earlier similar incident; and once the
protest was gone, and he was able to have what had occurred, the next thing
you know, the pain diminished and/or vanished.
So, in my opinion, and perhaps Robin's too, being able to have is sort of
the make or break point on the resolution of any particular piece of case, as
well as life itself; and I don't make any separation between life and case,
since that which exists is part of life.
OK -- if I've got Robin's posting completely backwards from what he
meant, I now and in advance apologize for my misunderstanding what he was
attempting to communicate, and hope that he will set me straight at once.
I'd also like to make it perfectly clear (just kidding) that my
speculations, thoughts, and even the possibility that I might know something
about case, should not in any way be construed as a suggestion that one
should cause the big case called Life to vanish. That doesn't look like any
fun at all, does it? No, as Mr. Hubbard and other philosophers have
recommended, we're mostly interested in getting a person into good enough
shape vis-a-vis the game to know that there IS a game and that, whether they
like it or not, they're in it, and that it would be very nice to remember
what the rules are that define the game, and how to play it and play it well.
I think if anyone has the opportunity to listen to Mr. Hubbard's
Philadelphia Lecture Series, all this stuff that I'm so poorly suggesting is
beautifully and clearly explained and enlarged upon far beyond my timid
efforts.
I think it's interesting to note that all along the Scientology track, at
different points and intervals, starting in 1950 and carrying through to such
exalted levels as the New OT VII (Solo New Era Dianetics for Operating
Thetans), the theme has been, whether it's engrams or screwed-up thetans
stuck in and around or at a distance from somebody's body, the theme is
hidden influences -- things that are having an adverse effect upon you and
your life that you don't know are there, and finding a way to help a person
discover just what these hidden influences are, and make them conscious. It
sounds pretty simple, and if you wanted to continue to push the frontiers of t
ech-finding further and further you couldn't go very far wrong if you can
come up with some more things that are hidden influences in the life of a
human being or a thetan, and provide a method for taking them from the hidden
or the unconscious into the conscious or de-fused state where they no longer
constitute a menace to your best possibilities.
As previously mentioned, I'm not recommending a state of no case at all,
'cause that's no life at all and not much fun.
Thank you for listening to these philosophic speculations -- at their
very best, they provide some food for thought, maybe even a cognition or two,
and at worst are the biggest bunch of baloney and bognitions you're ever
likely to find anywhere. That's where the guru that lies within each of us
(I like that -- the Guru Within) must decide if such matters as this posting
concerns are true for someone or not. That old idea that "If it isn't true
for you, it isn't true" is certainly a wonderful thing when we speak of your
own personal a nd subjective universe. On the other hand, if you start
saying that certain things like Copenhagen, or the roundness of the Earth, or
gravity, or caviar and champagne, aren't true for you, other folks will
probably think you're crazy.
Well, that's all for this evening. If there is more, it shall come
forth, by and by. Hoping to hear from anyone, I remain, your most obedient
savant --
Phil
**
Home Page: http://www.ivymag.org/ - with extensive links to FZ!
**
********************************************************
We also got permission to publish this comment sent to the ivy-subscribers
list:
***********************************************
X-Authentication-Warning: gem.lightlink.com: majordom set sender to
owner-ivy-subscribers@lightlink.com using -f
Received: from mx.lightlink.com (mx.lightlink.com [205.232.34.15])
by gem.lightlink.com (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id KAA04516
for Sun, 21 Jul 2002 10:59:12
-0400
Received: from mail4.nc.rr.com (fe4.southeast.rr.com [24.93.67.51])
by mx.lightlink.com (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id KAA17728
for Sun, 21 Jul 2002 10:59:11 -0400
Received: from ron ([66.57.245.117]) by mail4.nc.rr.com with Microsoft
SMTPSVC(5.5.1877.757.75);
Sun, 21 Jul 2002 10:59:11 -0400
From: "Ronald Blouch"
To: "IVy"
Subject: RE: IVySubs: Case
Date: Sun, 21 Jul 2002 10:59:01 -0400
Message-ID: <000101c230c7$295310d0$6601a8c0@ron>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain;
charset="US-ASCII"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
X-Priority: 3 (Normal)
X-MSMail-Priority: Normal
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook, Build 10.0.2627
X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2600.0000
Importance: Normal
In-Reply-To: <139.117a1fef.2a6a4d2d@aol.com>
Sender: owner-ivy-subscribers@lightlink.com
Precedence: bulk
** ivy-subscribers relaying **
Hi Phil,
It's good to see you posting, again.
I want to thank your for your last two posts. You gave me some of the
final pieces of the puzzle. I now begin to understand how Scientology
moved from what it seems to have been in the 50's to what it became
later.
If you find the subject to be of sufficient interest I'm really curious
about how the focus on "human improvement" shifted to "spiritual
improvement" within Dianetics/Scientology. Who and what created this
shift? Was it Hubbard's work alone or was there some kind of
overwhelming evidence to support it? If so, what was it?
Whether you choose to answer these questions or not I appreciate
whatever contributions you do make to the list. Give my regards to
Julie.
Ron
--
Ant Antony A Phillips
ivy@post8.tele.dk
tlf: (+45) 45 88 88 69
Box 78
DK - 2800 Lyngby
Editor, International Viewpoints (= IVy). See Home Page:
http://www.ivymag.org/
Administrator: trom-l, selfclearing-l, superscio-l,
previous-life-scio, dan-know and IVy lists
--