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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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Strawberry Hills
By Phil Spickler
10 Mar 99

Greetings and salutations to my fellow listers!   My pen has been
silent for some time, but with good reason -- for the last week or
so, we've been in the process of moving our base of operations to
Planet Earth, which proved to be more difficult than I thought it
would be, what with all the strange things that are set up around
this planet to either keep folks from entering or leaving.  Anyway,
it kept our screens coruscating quite a bit, and a bank of the
fanciest computers ever devised off-world busy night and day
attempting to solve and resolve the intricacies of all the amazing
things, both near and far, that surround that pretty little planet
called Earth.          

Once you get down here, depending on the spot you've picked, it can
be pretty pleasant, but one of the sad things is that most
Earth-people, both individually and collectively, are in a condition
of shortage of terminals. By this I mean they have all their
attention focused on Earth and the things that seem to be happening
on it, but they don't have another planet or system that they're
aware of at sufficient distance to conduct a comm cycle with ARC,
which is too bad, 'cause it's a no-terminal situation and it tends to
make Earth and its inhabitants feel like a bunch of only-ones, and I
think contributes a lot to the loneliness that so many people seem to
be experiencing hereabouts.  But on a cheerful side of things, I
should like to include a quote from the universe-famous Earth
philosopher and humorist Mark Twain: "When we remember that we are
all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained."  Well, I
hope that helps.          

I know that at some time in the past I had hoped to bring you some
refreshing information about another Earth luminary by the name of
Wilhelm Gottfried Leibniz, and have been remiss in carrying that out.
This chap, as you may remember, is one of the people that L. Ron
Hubbard seems to have studied and gotten some pretty good ideas from.
Just to get a date and a locate on this fellow Leibniz: 1646 -1716
AD, born in Leipzig, Germany, and was, just to further help give him
a position, pretty much contemporary with Isaac Newton of England.
They both, at just about the same time, invented that mathematical
system known as the calculus, and Leibniz went on to develop a pretty
good working computer, purely mechanical and truly amazing for its
time, as well as stumbling across the binary system.  These were just
a few of the little things that emanated from his mind, but like
Leonardo da Vinci, this chap was a man for all seasons and came up
with many inventions and ideas in a very wide range of earthly and
human possibilities.        

He was a philosopher of some note, and had a great yearning to inject
a bit of pan-determininism into philosophising that he hoped would
generate some harmony among the many discordant and arguing
philosophical factions of that time.  He himself had been quite
interested in, if not enamored of, the work of Pythagoras, and like
Pythagoras was somewhat convinced that if the correct numerical
values were assigned to all aspects of life, all problems in life
could be solved.  He did invent a system called Monadology which may
be the thing that Ron Hubbard might have found most interesting,
particularly in formulating Scientology; and the word "monad" means
"an individual elementary being, psychical or spiritual in nature,
reflecting within itself the whole universe."  As you can see, that's
quite a mouthful, but if you take the time to get ahold of Leibniz's
writings on this subject you'll find that he would consider that what
each of us would call a thetan, he would call a monad, and that the
monad is an indestructible singularity that is fully immortal, and
that the body (human, that is) is also made up of all kinds of monads
who are in different stages of evolution as monads, but that each and
every monad is proceeding towards total sentiency but is not fully
aware of reflecting within itself the whole universe.        

Leibniz also came up with the idea that the body was just a very
small thing that existed within the enormous space that you as a
senior monad occupy, and you'll probably remember that Ron in the
past described the body as a very small sliver in the thumb of you,
the big thetan.  Anyhow, in his small treatise on Monadology, Leibniz
speaks at some length of the potentials of the monad and what its
direction in an ultimate sense is, and leaves us with enough
information so that if you, heuristically, wish to pursue his notions
towards the gaining of higher knowledge, understanding and freedom,
you'd probably find yourself on a rather interesting and exciting
voyage of discovery.        

This is all I shall say about Monadology for the moment, and I hope
it has teased your interest enough to convince you that one of the
good things about Planet Earth, aside from the Internet, is the
public library, and it's almost all free, if you can keep track of
dates.        

So far there have been only two entries in the contest regarding "the
only two crimes in the universe are being there and communicating;"
and "dying and becoming insane are two of the basic rights and
freedoms of the being."  I had hoped that this would not be another
"unpopularity" contest, and that the great reservoir of humor and
understanding that lies within the silent majority and minority of
the IVy list would come forward to enliven the moments between the
great peaks of the sine wave known as Life.  If this keeps up,
however, I shall have to say something about these matters myself --
this is not a threat or a warning, but simply a promise.  In the
meantime, and in the spirit of the matchmakers of old, I am working
at a Priority 1 level to see if I can find an appropriate terminal or
possibly a mate for Planet Earth, something that will give everybody
a chance to unglue all those attention units and get some distance
under the notion that it's at least a two-terminal universe, and I
personally hope a heck of a lot more than that.      

When next we meet I shall attempt to further entertain you by
describing our new Earth base and tell you something about from
whence we came.  Until then, au revoir, auf Wiedersehen, and so long
-- Phil