What is a marriage or
relationship?
An
article by L. Ron Hubbard from the State
of Man Congress lectures.
Because
when you're getting married, you're doing
something you don't know anything about.
Did you ever think of that? Hm, did you
ever think about it? That's the one trip,
one lifetime sort of a thing, don't you
see? And when you try it a couple of times,
why, usually you know less about it the
second time than you did the first time.
Now,
it doesn't say that operating manuals haven't
been written for marriages. I know there
are several extant, all written by bachelors
or people who have not beenlike most
of the care-of-children-for-the-mother books
are always written by bachelors.
Now,
marriage is an interesting boat to steer.
It's not a third dynamic activity, and yet
it is kind of. It generally ceases to be
a second dynamic activity but has to remain
so.
The
genus of marriage is one of these things
that is a big pose on the early track. And
that is thetan association. Thetans early
on the track very often got the idea that
they would mock each other up, you know,
asthey would be brothers, or they
would be a family or something of the sort,
and they would all appear to be related:
cousins, sisters, uncles, aunts, mothers,
fathers.
Mothers/fathers
actually comes later on the track. Earlier
it was just thetan brotherhoods. And this
pretense at association was something that
seldom worked out very well because everybody
knew they were just pretending and they
knew there was no real familial relationship.
This falsity or the ideas of this falsity
actually continue forward into the modern
family. It's very easy to break down a family
because there is no relationship in a family
except a pretended relationship. Think of
it for a moment and you realize you're supporting
a thing which can't exist. A thetan was
never the daughter of another thetan. No
thetan was ever the father of another thetan,
no matter what the Good Book says. That's
the truth of the matter.
Now,
any time you have a relationship which isn't
inherent of based on immediate and direct
fact, you have to work at it.
Now,
I'm not saying that marriage is a false
relationship. It isn't. In this society
and time, a family is the closest knit,
self-perpetuating, self-protecting unit
and is necessary economically and otherwise
to the society the way it's rigged at this
present time. And who destroys marriage,
destroys the civilization. That's fairly
sure.
A
culture will go by the boards if its basic
building block, the family, is removed as
a valid building block. But this is no reason
we should get mocked up and silly about
what the relationship is. The relationship,
basically, is a postulated relationship.
There is no truth in the relationship. It
is a postulated relationship.
And
when people stop postulating it, it ceases
to exist! And that's what happens to most
marriages. People stop mocking up the family
unit, and the moment they stop mocking it
up, it isn't. You see what happens to marriages?
It
isn't the other way around: It isn't that
all men are evil, so therefore, contracts
such as marriage dissolve usually in infidelity
and go all to pieces. That is not true.
The reverse is true: that when you have
a purely postulated relationship which has
no real existence in fact, you have to continue
to create it. And a family which doesn't
continue to create itself as a family will
cease to exist as a family. That's about
all you need to know about it.
When
I was a little kid, most people in this
society at this time had a considerable
formula. All over the world people are having
trouble with this thing. They're having
lots of trouble with this thing because
they're running on an automaticity; they
think this thing will hang together through
no effort of their own. And if it hangs
together through no effort of their own,
I've never heard of it. It won't.
L. Ron Hubbard
This
excerpt has been taken from the
State of Man Congress lectures.
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