The teaching of Scientology is based on three conditions of existence: be, do, and have.
To be is to identify, and being is identification. In other words, in order to be, one must have one or more identities, such as: his name, his face, his mind, his body, etc. His identities are those he has either chosen or accepted for himself, or they may not be actual identities at. all. He may, for instance, be in his father's valence, which is to say he may have accepted, at least in part, his father's identity. Or he may be in any of a hundred possible valences. In such cases, he is trying to be someone else and has no identity of his own. The more he is in someone else's valence, accepting someone else's identity, the less he can be himself.
What is more, to the person existing in other valences, identity becomes a rare and valuable commodity - so rare, in fact, that he is unwilling to allow anyone else to have one of his own. Such a person is not likely
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to be a very good companion, since he will refuse to grant that we have an identity of our own and will tend, therefore, to act as though we do not exist at all, except perhaps in the role of serving his convenience.
To do is to produce an effect, and doing is the act of producing an effect or effects. The creation of an effect is action. When one feels that he can no longer create an effect, he will become aberrant and will act irrationally. Apathy will probably set in and he will be lazy or careless in his work.
One who is creating an effect needs to have attention, but if no one pays attention to him, he will try to create more attention-getting effects. The child who lacks the attention of those around him will begin creating noisier and more counter-creative effects. And pretty soon, he will have counter-created Mama's best jardiniere
One of the axioms of Scientology is that the creation of an effect is the supreme purpose operating in the universe. Without producing effects, one has no purpose. And yet there are occasions when one's security may depend on one's ability to create no effect; one's very survival may hang on non-effect. Things that are not subject to effect survive. Part of the value of gold, aside from its comparative scarcity, is that little in nature can affect it, and it can, therefore, retain its gleaming beauty. Iron, a far more useful element having far greater real value for man, is more readily affected by various corrosive processes and consequently has less monetary value. One who tries to conceal his assets from
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the tax collector, or who is in hiding, tries his best to create non-effect in order to prevent an effect from being created on him.
To have, as defined by Hubbard, is to be able to see, touch, or occupy. Most people think that to have means to be able to carry away, but for them (since there is only a small portion of this world's goods that one can carry away) the ability to have is severely limited. One can have the Rembrandt in the museum, since one can see it as often as one chooses, even though one cannot touch or occupy it. The having of the Rembrandt is far greater than the "havingness" of one particular collector, a wealthy publisher who scoured Europe for art and antiques, buying the contents of several castles and an entire castle itself which he had shipped to this country, stone by stone. All but a few of his treasures were stored in several warehouses, and most of them he never saw again. Who enjoys the greater havingness: the man who can see a fine painting, or the man who actually owns many fine paintings that he never sees? Having is essential to living. One must be able to have, and if one cannot have, one will be diminished. One may even die.
One of the prime requisites of existence is a problem; in fact, many problems. The reason for the greater incidence of aberration among the idle than among the overworked is a lack of problems. When man has too few problems, he sets about inventing more of them. Puzzles and conundrums are made for those who feel a lack of problems.
A problem exists when two or more purposes are in
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opposition. The purpose of the creator of a crossword puzzle is to frustrate those who will try to solve it, while the purpose of the solver is not only to discover the solution but frequently to bring low that unprincipled limb of Satan who created it. Opposed purposes create problems, and problems are the life breath of existence.
Be, do, and have, in company with attention, are at the root of all problems or lack thereof. If a man could possess all the identity possible to any human, if he could do anything he wanted to do, if he could own everything in the world, he would have only one problem - a complete lack of problems - and he would be literally bored to death. On the other hand, if he could not establish any identity, could not accomplish anything or have anything, he would soon descend into apathy and die.
The cure for an absence of identities is to process the preclear for his valences. If his mother did not pay enough attention to him but did pay attention to someone else, his father or a sibling, he will get into the valence of that father or sibling. The processing consists of the auditor's asking him to lie about the sort of identities that would receive Mother's attention, lying, as we have discussed, being a form of creativity, although its lowest form. After several such false identities have been described, the auditor will have him invent identities that would receive her attention.
We have all known people who are exhibitionists and people who are shrinking violets. Both types are operating in other valences, and therefore believe that identi-
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ties are rare. They both have difficulty in getting attention and either try to create louder effects, like the exhibitionist, or give up trying and retire into a corner, like the shrinking violet. The cure for either is to cure the lack of identities.
To cure a lack in doing, a deficiency in creating effects, the auditor will again employ the lie technique, asking the preclear to lie about what effect he might have upon someone or something. Then he will be asked to invent some effects he could create on the same persons or things. When a man cannot create constructive effects, he may well turn to counter-creating them, and this is usually referred to as crime. An additional procedure is to engender a sense of being able to control oneself or some other. Control is based on a cycle of start-change-stop, which will be described in a later chapter, but it can easily be seen that anything one wants to control, whether oneself or an automobile, must be made subject to one's ability to start it, change its direction, and stop it.
To cure a lack of having, the auditor will ask the preclear to "have" certain objects, either in the auditing room where he is sitting or out on the street. He must arrive at a point where he is able to have anything he can see, touch, or occupy. Then he will be told to "not-have" some objects of his own choosing. This will be discussed more fully in a subsequent chapter on processing.
It does seem like a strange way of going about the curing of somebody's problems, asking him to lie about
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them or to invent others of the same magnitude as the ones he has. No other religion has ever asked its followers to lie. In fact, truth, whatever the truth may be, has always been a highly prized, although usually terribly scarce, commodity.
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