Volume 3, Issue 7, page 4

according to our time and space -- the age and
culture in which we live. Our thought processes are operated by a kind of machinery,
and the circuits are laid in before we reach
adolescence.

Sometimes, the machinery breaks down.

These days, when this happens, the individual goes in search of help. Adjust", says the
wise man to whom he has appealed. Adjust to
your environment and all will be well."
There is an old saying: "What can't be
cured must be endured." But you know there
just doesn't seem to be many things that someone hasn't been able to find a "cure" for --
somebody refused to "adjust" to the situation
and changed the situation.

Adjustment to a situation causes a static.
The pre-literates -- the jungle tribesmen and
savages who have walled themselves off from
contact with the outside world -- are that way
because they adjusted. If the rest of mankind
had done likewise, there would have been no
progress. Progress comes, not by adapting oneself to the environment, but by changing the
environment. If there had been no deviationists, any original thinkers, mankind would
have remained adjusted to being a two-legged
being, and he would have no other means of
transportation. It is because some ancestor of
ours dared to be free that today we ride in
trains, cars, and planes.

People are as enslaved as they want to beas free as they want to be.

Prior to birth, we built into our cells a
knowledge of freedom and a knowledge of restriction. But of the freedom we had only tantalizing glimpses. The rest of the time was
spent in restriction -- restricted space, restricted motion -- and restriction was survival.

And that seems to be the history of man.
Our reactive mind tells us that we must have
barriers, boundaries, limitations. Some few
individuals, who perhaps retained clearer memories of those tantalizing moments of freedom
than most of us do, succeed in overcoming some
of mankind's limitations, either physically or
mentally. But the vast majority are content in
the security of barriers.

All our perceptics are needed if we are going ;;o think optimumly. We have to be willing
to look, to feel, to hear, and so on. The more
you close off these things, the more you restrict your thinking. And at what a youthful
age we begin these restrictions! Away back
there in the womb when we began to compute
(not think) that restriction is necessary to
survival.

Away back there we also agreed that freedom
is something one can only get glimpses of,
taste fleetingly, and so in later life we
think of freedom as something to dream about,
to talk about -- an impossible, future goal to
fight for, but not a goal that can be reached.

In Dianetics, we say that survival is the
effort to accomplish action, and happiness is
the emotion of progress toward desirable goals.

But -- restrict a person enough and he goes
out of action. Examine the areas where you
feel most restriction and you will find that
these are the areas in which you either do not
operate at all, or where you operate poorly.
Where do you feel most resentment? Where
you feel most restricted.

The ability that has made the human being
the most capable being on earth is what has
entrapped him. An animal, for instance, is
responsible for his own survival, or the survival of its own immediate group. Mankindl in
his highest state would be fully responsible
-- and that's a lot of responsibility. Bernard
Shaw once said: "Liberty means responsibility
and that is why most men dread it.

Why? Actually, because it's the other way
1 TLa. S 1
around -- responsibility means freedom, and that
is why most. men dread it.

When, in the pre-natal, we accepted that
restriction meant survival, we began to lay
the foundations for thought and habit patterns
that would keep us from being free. We began
to accept other people's thoughts, other people's beliefs, other people's emotions. We
come into life looking as much as possible
like some other person. If we accepted the
responsibility of being ourself, with our own
physical appearance, our own beliefs and attitudes and motives, we would be free -- and our
circuits tell us that this is non-survival.

Then brick by brick the walls of restriction are built up until finally the individual
looks around him and realizes that he is trapped. At this point he might indulge in a little rebellion, but since he doesn t know what
he is rebelling against, he is not successful
as a general rule, so he slips down tone into
apathy and, since apathy is the greatest of
all restrictions, his circuits tell him he is
really safe and secure and he doesn't have to
worry any more.

Originally, in Dianetics, we felt that what
made you the way you are was the things that
people did to you. It's soothing to one's
self-esteem to feel that others are to blame.
That is, it's soothing until you begin to realize that by blaming others you are agreeing
that they are Cause and you are Effect. And
that's not such a happy thought.

Just the same, when we began running off
all those awful things that others had done to
the pre-clear, we found our pre-clears going
down in tone. Quite clearly, then, ridding the
bank of things others had done to you was not
the answer.

Then the overt-motivator sequence was observed. Motivators are good for us, and all
these things others had done were necessary to
balance off the bad things we had done to others. We need motivators -- we need justifiers.
Our overt acts entrap us; motivators set us
free from feelings of guilt.

But we are entrapped and restricted in other ways. Every time we become obligated to
someone, we restrict ourselves. Every time we
let ourselves become dependent on someone, or
make someone dependent on us, we restrict ourselves.

We are entrapped by people who are nice to
us, people who like us, are friendly, kind,
interested. This is security to us, but the
need for their approval inhibits and enslaves
us. From whom do you need a "license to survive"? That person is your master. What traumatic moments in your life can be restimulated? Every one of them is a restriction on
your present time freedom. What habit patterns
do you follow? What past beliefs, attitudes,
and motives still govern your conduct? What
misemotions are you subject to? What psychosomatic ills?
To the extent that you are hag-ridden by
the past, you are not free. To the extent that
you operate on past habit patterns, past computations, past postulates, you are not free.

We are restricted by our aberrations, and
by aberrated thinking. And our most restrictive aberration is the need to feel restricted.

That is why Dianetics is the most useful of
all systems designed to help mankind. Almost
every technique we use is designed to rid the
individual of his reactive computations, of
his past need for inhibition and restriction,
and to open to him -- and him to it -- the path to
freedom.

When one has achieved all this, he would be
fully aware that only when we are fully free
do we fully survive.
)VEMBER