Self-determinism and postulates
An article by L. Ron Hubbard,
from the Scientology: Milestone One lectures
A person is as healthy
and sane as he is self-determined. Self-determinism
should be very free. The environment
should not affect an individual unless he
expressly desires it to affect him.
Stimulus-response is very low on the Tone
Scaleit's around 1.1very low.
The idea that because you see something
in the environment it's going to affect
you, gives you some sort of an idea of the
Tone Scale of the people I was working with
in the first book. The first book is, to
a large degree, a stimulus-response dissertation.
And if you want to know how stimulus-response
works, you can study it in the first book.
That's stimulus-response, and it's very,
very sharp the way this works.
Now, working with processes which pick one up out of that
level faster, you don't have to work with
this low-level process. Stimulus-response
is an unhealthy circumstance whereby the
individual is affected willy-nilly and without
choice by his environment.
SELF-DETERMINISM
AND SANITY
Self-determinism goes
up to enormous heights. And it doesn't mean
that a person becomes completely indifferent
and detached. He can become very, very intimate
with existence because he dares to
be, at a high level of self-determinism.
A person is as sane as he is self-determined.
Now that should be fairly
simple. It comes to this degree: Do you
know that nobody can be sick unless he has
desired to be sick at some time or other?
That's very fascinating.
You say to somebody,
why, you say, "Nobody can do this.
I never wished I was sicknot in my
whole life."
And you can always throw
him this little curve and it usually throws
him, if you get that reaction. You say,
"Did you ever try to keep from going
to school?"
And he says, "Oh,
that. Well, yes, I pretended I was sick
a few times then."
"Well, let's remember
one of those times." And we find out
that he's using this same mechanism to keep
from going to work, years later. Only by
this time it's developed into what they
call a chronic whatever-it-is.
Such a thing as an allergy can develop in this fashion.
The little boy is forced to eat something
and he says, "I don't like it."
Still they insist he eats it, so he says,
"It makes me sick" And he says
this very emphatically and he argues with
it and he loses the argument. Twenty years
later you pick him up and you find out very
mysteriously that corn makes him sick. Now
why should corn make him sick? Well, he
said so. He's boss. So he said so, so now
it's got to make him sick, because if a
person doesn't obey his own postulates he
is wrong. The second he doesn't do
what his postulate said, then he proves
that he is wrong.
And it's an odd thing
about rightness and wrongness, but theas
wrong as you can get, of course, is dead.
And if you get completely wrong, you're
dead. So wrongness is a measure of level
on the Tone Scale again. And when a person
gets down around 2.5, 2.0, 1.5, 1.0, believe
me, he can't afford to be wrong! Being wrong
just once will finish himboom!
And yet he's at a level
where he's forcing himself to be wrong.
And he's in a terrible chaotic state. Below
2.0 a person is more MEST universe than
he ishe's more controlled by the MEST
universe than he is by himself.
PEOPLE WHO WORRY
ABOUT POSTULATES
And so you find that at very low levels on
the Tone Scale people worry madly about their
own postulatesthe second they begin
to know about postulates. Then they'll start
worrying about postulates and they'll go back
and they'll pick up their own postulates.
And then they get afraid to make postulates
and so on because they can't afford to be
wrong.
That is why invalidation
of a low-level preclear can be almost fatalbecause
you tell him he's wrong, invalidate him.
You say, "Something is wrong about
what you remembered," and he just can't
stand that strain.
Now, you can take somebody
way up the Tone Scale and you can say, "You're
wrong," and you can bring out mathematics,
you can bring out Bowditch, you can
bring out anything you want to bring out
and demonstrate to him conclusively and
utterly and forcefully and with harsh words
that he is awful wrong. And he will look
at it and he'll say, "Yep, I guess I was.
What did we have to eat tonight for dinner?"
he says, "Let's have some of that." I mean,
that's about as much effect as it is. He
can afford to be wrong.
L. Ron Hubbard, from the lecture
THOUGHT, EMOTION AND EFFORT.
Excerpted
from the Scientology: Milestone One lectures
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