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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.
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A "case" of mistaken identity
by Phil Spickler
13 Sep 00

Fellow supplicants:
       Having concluded that "the reality of nature" may or may not be the
same statement as "the nature of reality," I have relieved the numerous
thetans, AKA spiritual beings, under my command to work on other more
noteworthy projects, such as creating a virus that confers lifelong immunity
from other viruses, specially adapted for our new wet-world computers under
the heading "Don't let them get the bytes in their teeth,"  as we now turn to
further enrichment to follow under tonight's title.

      First off, and borrowing from the recent use of NLP-speak, I should
like to propose, or re-propose, a favorite and apparently real or imagined
presupposition called "what the guy's or gal's case really consists of -- the
total map."  Sounds like a title for the World Atlas, but actually it may be
said that the guy (please note we haven't defined what we mean by "the guy,"
but that may or may not come later) -- the guy's case in its entirety, the
whole map, is simply LIFE, AKA the 8 Dynamics, or the Great All or Everything.

     In spite of this revelation, and perhaps for very good reason, most
folks that are in the business of mapping case and/or treating case usually
like to take bits and pieces of the whole and either call them the whole or
indicate that this is a big enough chunk of the whole to work on, and go from
there.  To some degree this is like the chaps who are all blind and each
grabs a different part of an elephant, and hanging onto that part then
describe it and call it "the elephant," thus missing the whole (excuse my
language) or the entirety.

      Having said that, you could also say that a good approach to what
"case" is would be to describe what it isn't, and then whatever's left, that
would be case.  Sometimes I think this was fairly and adequately accomplished
by Mr. Hubbard in his early Axioms, as well as something called The Factors.
But these speculations may not be, much as I'd like to say they are, any form
of new or old absolute.

      It does seem imperative, too, that a definition is important, if not
absolutely necessary, of whoever or whatever is the "someone" that is capable
of having a case, and either feeling the need or having been convinced of the
need to do something about this case relative to how this someone would be
either without the case, or with the effect of this case upon this someone
diminished.

        Now, depending on our definitions at this point, it may turn out to
be simply a case of "you can't have one without the other."  This is to say,
depending on how you define "the guy" predetermines the case that must go
with him, or, the way you define "case" tells you what sort of entity or
being "the guy" is.  By the bye, and as an aside at this point, Bertrand
Russell, the British genius of philosophy and logic and many other things,
once wrote a marvelous little book called _Why I Am Not a Christian-, which I
used as the title of a recent post; and then he and a guy named Alfred North
Whitehead I believe collaborated on an enormous piece of work called
_Principia Mathematica_, which was the "Arabian Nights," all 1,001 possible
statements that could be made about formal logic.  But Ludwig Wittgenstein
came along and completely reduced that work to a logical nothingness by
simply offering Russell the following proposition to work out: "This
statement is not true."  Now if any of you reading this try to work this out,
be sure you have your straitjacked and tranquilizers handy!

       But let's get back to the main thrust of tonight's prayer.   One of
the favorite questions that was thought of, pre- L. Ron Hubbard, by what
might be called by present-day Scientologists a "wog philosopher" was the
simple following question: "Who's asking?"  This is a marvelous question,
because it gives folks who are asking a lot of questions or proposing a lot
of different things a chance to spot the source of the question or the
problem or the difficulty in their own composite universe, and having done
that, (a) be able to help or work with whoever has the question, and (b)
avoid the horrendous pitfall of misownership, or the worst of what might be
called A = A thinking, in which one beingness thinks it's another beingness
when it really isn't, and the many permutations that follow that possibility.

         This, to the best of my knowledge, is one of the greatest shortcuts
to clarity extant at this time, but it is oft ignored, dismissed, and not
bothered with, since it's another one of those game-spoilers in the area of
endless and mysterious case.  And it's such a tremendous shortcut to being
clear, clearing others, and diminishing the enormous (considered) size of
case that it is not very popular in the direction of prolonging the mystery
or the mysterious.

       It's also a tremendous Havingness process, when used with a gentle
hand, because it's all about *having* other sources and their creations
rather than seeking to diminish them under the heading of "unwanted case."
It also allows a re-definition of "self," again an unpopular idea, since this
is a shortcut to becoming no one or nothing, with very high or full potential
for being anything or everyone or everything, and usually casuses most
humans, even as just an idea or a vagrant thought, to cross their eyes just
before they run screaming out of the room.  This one is SO terrible that you
don't have to beat any drums, play any music, or touch any part of the body
to get such effects.

        Thus we arrive at a "case," a full case, of mistaken identities; and
in that case, with its multitude of misunderstood, misidentified, mistaken
identities, which taken to the nth degree would be all of life, AKA the 8
dynamics, can be found any degree of resolution imaginable under the headings
of "self and everything else."

     There's no point, really, in continuing this any further -- you either
get this idea now, or somewhere along the razor's edge in some further moment
of no-time time it will be gotten.  I further promise not to mention this
again until at least one year from this date.

     In my next posting, should it ever occur, I shall attempt a wide-ranging
discussion under the title "From here to eternity," a title I believe
currently held by both a book and a movie.  Oy veh -- such plagiarism!

     Good night; sleep loose -- until we meet again,
      Phil