THOUGHTS ON SIMILARITIES BETWEEN INDEPENDENT SCIENTOLOGY, OTHER RELIGIONS, AND THE REACTIVE MIND
The fundamental reason why I don’t entirely despise Christianity even though I grew up in a Christian cult, and why I don’t condemn other practices is because a lot of the religious principles found in these religions are all based off of natural laws of the universe and if I find something true across several religions, and even in science, to me it’s worth mentioning. The only reason why Scientology is my religion of choice (I really dislike even calling it a religion but I understand the purpose of it) is because I prefer reason over faith and also that it’s easy to recognize the many different natural laws in Scientology, whereas, let’s say Christianity, is a lot more subjective and open to interpretation. Unless there’s a radical change in our dictionaries, I doubt the meaning of unaltered Scientology will be as hard to decipher down the road as some of these other religions are now vs. then, as the metaphors are really kept to a minimum as LRH used real-life examples to guide his work instead.
It’s easy to see if Scientology is practical as a way of life and living if one can establish one fact only: does it work and produce repeated results, just like in Scientific studies? The answer, according to any Scientologist, is a resounding yes. The times it doesn’t work can be rooted back to one’s reactive mind and our sometimes impenetrable protection of the self and the ego. It’s HARD to be wrong and be made wrong. If Scientology was a person it would almost have a sign on its forehead that says "I will point out your flaws," except, Scientology’s (independent Scientology) aim isn’t to make anyone wrong, but to help. However, to be able to view one’s shortcomings can be a hard pill to swallow. The ego is used to protect oneself of that wrongness and that’s why the reactive mind is as big of a monster as it is. The trick is to not fall into the mistake of being too extreme when thinking of yourself. If you can maintain a balance between acknowledging you have flaws while also having compassion for not knowing any better (behind every overt is a misunderstood concept, word or symbol) then that’s the sweet spot. Unfortunately, so many people have been made wrong in Scientology, both inside and outside of the church, by other reactive minds and so we have the major ARC breaks we find on these sites dedicated to the destruction of Scientology. That can be a whole blog post on its own!
To get back to the point of this blog post, Scientology and many other religions as well as science have many similarities because they’re based on natural law. You could say prayer in Christianity works because of postulates, you could say Wu Wei in Taoism is practicing being there and being comfortable. You could also say the Hermetic principle of "the all is mind, everything is mental" is the same as the concept of "we’re all in the same room (or the Clear cog, if you know it). All this said, one thing that can be found across multiple religions but has been imbedded into pop-culture from Hinduism and is something most of us should know about by now, is Karma.
Sometimes we overlook half the meaning of karma by only looking at the negative, but it’s important to remember karma is both negative and positive and is dependent on the things one does. In Hermeticism, we have the principle of Cause and Effect, in Christianity we reap what we sow, in Taoism, while there’s no single concept that karma can be related to, living life harmoniously through Wu Wei by "holding onto the center" can prevent the cause and effect relationship with the universe, and in science, Newton’s third law states that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
But what does Scientology say? The one that comes to mind most is what LRH says about Cause and Effect and how we are responsible for our own lives -we also know that this is not just a relationship with the physical universe, but the spiritual as well.
We "pull things in" based on our postulates, negative or positive, and our postulates reflect our level of sanity, happiness, and responsibility. If we truly do accept this law across several religions to be true, that means the best way to live would be to live mindfully instead of reactively. Living life reactively means living on an automaticity through our patterns and when we do that, we can never escape our shortcomings and instead, we corrode our very beingnesses by pretending they don’t exist, or making them seem not that bad, or promising we’ll do better but it doesn’t happen.
That last point is VERY important, because we have all made analytical promises to ourselves and others that we won’t do the things that hurt ourselves and others but it was never an ANALYTICAL issue, but a REACTIVE one. We may entirely believe we will never do the thing again and beat ourselves up or turn a blind eye because they’re unconfrontable, but a pattern is a very hard thing to break unless you can find the original postulate (self-created truth) that holds the pattern in place with the reactive mind. At the bottom of it, it’s all just a fear-based decision that is made "right" by the reactive mind with the justifier of "this decision helps me to survive."
If one’s causes are caused reactively, then the effects will be reactive as well in one’s life, and so it’s important to learn ways to conquer the reactive mind. I’m not going to say Scientology is the only way, but it is a practical and workable way when you have a good auditor who is interested in your case and your ability to cause good effects in your life.
Another concept that needs to be remembered is that input doesn’t always equal output, as seen in the case of concepts in Scientology such as "problem, solution, problem" and "order vs disorder" which both state that negative effects from positive causes do occur and such is the way of the universe. This isn’t a bad thing -a game needs to have its barriers after all, but it all depends on viewpoint. A reactive mind looks at barriers and sees them as unconfrontable and dangerous to survival. An analytical mind sees barriers as necessary challenges for personal growth. You can’t have positive statistics against nothingness -whether that barrier is time, distance, or obstacles, a statistic is always something "challenged" against something else.
As a personal side-note to close off this blog post, I have seen in my own life the destruction and chaos that fear caused by the reactive mind creates and it honestly creates a personal hell. Looking back on my experiences this life-time, much of it was spent in my own self-created agony and suffering lead by fear, whereas the actual situations in my life weren’t even a fraction of the "big deal" I was creating them to be. We hold all this suffering close to our hearts and think that those experiences make us who we are, and we wear them like heavy armor believing that they protect us while our feet are blistered from walking the long journey with all this excess weight "just in case" a monster comes out of the woods.
Fear is not who we are, it is a placeholder for the indescribable beauty and goodness that we are intrinsically, and that fear is only assigned to ourselves when we think we’ve lost our power. We don’t have to mock up power -we already have all of it right within all of us. Unfortunately, analytically knowing this is easy, but we’re beings with a reactive mind which often takes precedence over logical thought. I have made the mistake in the past of assuming I could think my problems away, but the funny part is, the more I thought, the less I understood. You can drive yourself quite mad trying to solve problems with the reactive mind -that’s why we have the problem in the first place, all of our overts and bad effects and engrams were at one point solutions to problems but it was created and "solved" by reactivity.
If you could do any one favor for yourself it’s to realize that you are a perfect being, infinitely capable and beautiful, and that your shortcomings ARE NOT YOU, but an installment that can very much be uninstalled through processing and training. Every single one of your errors and all of your problems have been made because you in some way didn’t understand something, which is a heck of a lot better than just being evil. Your reactive mind can be a very difficult beast to confront but it’s infinitely better than living a miserable life with the same patterns and the same excuses to those patterns. The best things in life are said to be worth fighting for -fight for you, and we will do our very best to help you every step of the way.
~ Scientologirl
