Selfish Spirituality

Jonathan said: I just get the feeling that with the clearing of the reactive mind, that morals would fly out the window as the search for spiritual ends, in the end are selfish, and your told to do it for yourself. I believe that people are good, But when environments make it SO easy to be bad, and even rewarded in cases that clearer lines should be made about how much you do it for yourself.

Thanks for your comments Jonathan.

You say "the search for spiritual ends, in the end, are selfish". If that comes from your own personal observation, then that is sad. Personally, I have found that the search for the spiritual is very far from selfish.

As an example, would you call Mother Teresa selfish? I sure wouldn't.

Let me give you the Scientology view on this:

First: the dynamic principle of existence is SURVIVE! In other words that is the driving force behind everything we do.

Next: the purpose of the mind is to resolve problems relating to survival.

And third: When we talk about survival we don't mean just for oneself, we are talking about survival of self, ones family, the groups one is part of, of mankind, of all living things, of the physical universe, of all things spiritual and of God or Infinity.

The analytical mind in its optimum state tries to bring about the best possible survival in all those areas, not just self.

The reactive mind gets in the way of this. The selfish and destructive things you see in this world are products of the reactive mind.

Once a person has gotten rid of his reactive mind, all that is left is the analytical mind - the optimum mind. So a Clear acts in the best interests of all and a Clear is as active as he can be in that direction. He or she works toward the best possible survival for all the areas I mentioned above.

So, in my experience, people who are improving spiritually become more and more interested in the rest of existence and they become more and more active in helping others - that's why the Scientology Volunteer Ministers are such a huge organization and why you see them whenever disaster strikes. They have improved enough spiritually that they want to, and do, help others.

You say "you're told to do it for yourself". Perhaps there are religions where that is the case, but Scientology is not one of them. Yes, it does require active participation if you want to improve spiritually, and yes, it is necessary sometimes to look inward at your own existence in order to understand yourself, but it is not a solo effort, you need to both give and receive help in order to make it.

I hope your own path towards the spiritual is successful and that you too can help others be unselfish and help their fellow man.

Scientology Logic and Political Solutions

Although "logic" is a very important subject, the tools and methods you can use to come up with logical conclusions and solutions are not well defined. If you don't believe me then just wade through the Wikipedia article on "Logic" and afterwards try to apply something from it to your everyday life to come up with a decision. Good luck.

This lack of tools for logical reasoning is manifested all over our society, but one of the most obvious places is in the field of government. Sadly this is a field where logic is most needed and where it is apparently least used.

The recently concluded war over the debt ceiling was a horrible example of this and almost every day we see others.

I'm not going to attempt to solve the country's financial problems in this article, but I will attempt to help you understand, a little better, the type of logic being used.

In Scientology we have practical and workable descriptions of Logic and we have many tools that are easy to use when you need to come up with logical solutions.

In observing the back-and-forth up on Capitol Hill and in the White House here is what immediately comes to mind for me: They are working on "Two-valued Logic".

So, what is that?

Back in the middle of last century, when he was trying to figure out what made man tick, L. Ron Hubbard had to first work out what was "logic". One of the first things he did was describe the evolution of logic:

"Ancient Times: One-Valued Logic. Exists as the logic of 2/3 world's population today as 'Fatalism'. No Decision. All action based on "The Will of Fate." No Right - No Wrong.

Dark Ages: Two-Valued Logic. Absolute Right or Wrong. Wrong. Right.

Present: Three-Valued Logic. In general use, 1949. Wrong. Maybe. Right."

Two-Valued Logic is the sort of logic sports fans use: "My team is good. The other team sucks."

Three-Valued Logic is used in computers: The smallest value a computer deals with is 1 (right), 0 (wrong) or no-value (maybe).

If you are willing to cast aside your political biases for a moment and just look at what is, then I think you will see that the main method of logic being used in attempting to solve the country's problems is mostly Two-Valued Logic: If you are a Republican then what your side says is right and what the Democrats say is wrong. If you are a Democrat then what your side says is right and what the Republicans say is wrong.

This is the method of logic that was used in the Dark Ages and so the solutions coming out of Washington are of the quality you'd expect from a pitched battle in the muddy fields of Medieval Europe.

Some in Washington have managed to rise to the level of Three-Valued Logic: "Maybe some of the suggestions from the other side aren't all wrong." But that's about as high as it gets.

The sort of logic they should be using was first described by L. Ron Hubbard in a 1950 lecture and is called "Infinity-Valued Logic". This type of logic has "degrees of right" and "degrees of wrong". "Absolute Right or Wrong Unobtainable."

He described this more fully in a set of rules of logic called "The Logics". In one of these rules he said:

"Gradient scales are necessary to the evaluation of problems and their data.

This is the tool of infinity-valued logic: Absolutes are unobtainable. Terms such as good and bad, alive and dead, right and wrong are used only in conjunction with gradient scales. On the scale of right and wrong, everything above zero or center would be more and more right, approaching an infinite rightness, and everything below center would be more and more wrong, approaching infinite wrongness. ... Any datum has only relative truth. ... Truth is relative to environments, experience and truth."

So "suggestion A" for solving some political crisis is not "right" or "wrong" but is relatively right or wrong. If right is 10 and wrong is 1 then maybe it scores at 6. Maybe "suggestion B" gets a score of 7. If we rate all suggestions and then take the top 10 perhaps a workable solution acceptable to both sides could be derived.

This is how thinking should be done and how solutions should be derived.

One can only hope that at some time in the future our government will catch up with the rest of us and move out of the Dark Ages when it comes to the method of logic it uses.