The past century has been the most turbulent in man's history. That is undeniable. Fifty million people died in the two World Wars alone. Additionally, there have been millions of deaths due to racially or politically motivated massacres in Africa and Asia. Violent revolutions subjected more than a third of the world's population to totalitarian political rule and, to this day, constant human rights abuses take place in many developing nations. It doesn't take much imagination to think that some change occurred in man, something that turned him into a violent, uncaring and dangerous being.
The lessons of history would question that premise, for man has often resorted to war and revolution to solve his problems. Yet never have the results of war been so destructive. And never have the consequences of man's other actions been so potentially disastrous.
Something about man has changed.
Something caused a deterioration in man's sense of community. People today can live in an area for years and never know their neighbors. Long-held social values such as charity have been replaced by alienation. The United Nations reports that more than one hundred million people lead isolated lives, without ties to family, work or community.
Something affected society's attitude towards marriage and divorce. In 1895, there were fifteen marriages to every divorce. By 1990, there were two marriages for every divorce, a drastic change.
Something has caused this disregard for the earth itself. More than two-and-a-half million square miles of forest have been denuded. With every passing second, an area of rain forest the size of a football field is cut down. And hundreds of species of birds, mammals and other creatures have become extinct, never to be seen again.
Something has led man to spend more money on drugs today then he does on food. More and more people depend upon drugs to relieve their ailments, escape boredom and prop up their ability to face the day. Even children now take drugs. And millions more are given tranquilizers in the classroom, justified by a fictitious condition called "hyperactivity." What has changed man's attitudes about dealing with existence to the point where he rubs a chemical salve on every part of his life?
Something has sparked a sharp increase in man's violence towards his fellows. In Los Angeles, for instance, 150,000 of the city's youth belong to gangs and, of these, 80 percent have been wounded by gunfire at least once. Man has always had rituals of manhood where young men were welcomed into adulthood and adult society. Never before have these rituals required bullet wounds.
More violent, more callous, more careless, more antisocial ... what has happened to man?
One could blame science and technology. These have magnified man's ability to affect himself, his fellows, his environment and all life. Sure, we have always had wars, but technology now allows wars capable of total destruction. Yet technology also conquers disease to prolong life, raises standards of living and creates many other positive effects. While it increases man's capability for evil, it also increases his power for good.
No, undoubtedly the change is within man himself. The something, whatever it is, has affected the ways in which man thinks, and the ways in which he behaves.
Along with the increased turbulence, this century has seen the rise of another view of man. From this have come many repercussions in the way man looks at and treats himself and his fellows. And from this grows the most fundamental challenge facing man as he approaches the year 2000.
The thing that most separates man from any life form is his ability to understand and reason. And perhaps the thing he has most universally tried to understand is himself. How is it that, despite being able to act rationally, man could also act so irrationally ? Philosophers, religious leaders, scientists and scholars -- the greatest minds among men -- have wrestled with this riddle, but never arrived at a satisfactory explanation.
Many great thinkers in history believed that life consisted of both the material and immaterial, that the mind was separate from matter. This idea is called "dualism." Other people throughout history, known as "materialists," believed that everything is made of matter.
In nineteenth century Europe, the Industrial Revolution caused many changes in Western culture and materialistic theories became dominant in man's thinking.
And it is in this view that we find the source of what troubles man and casts the longest shadows over his happiness and, indeed, his very survival.
One of the first of these materialistic theories in modern times came from British naturalist Charles Darwin who spent several years on a scientific expedition studying plants and animals in many parts of the world. In 1858, he wrote Origin of Species, a book which explained a theory of evolution to show how life forms had gradually developed from common ancestors. His ideas were bitterly contested by religious scholars because they seemed to provide evidence for those who wished to deny the existence of a Creator or creative force in the universe. Naturally, this upset many other people who believed man was not merely a hairless ape.
Still, Darwin's ideas gained general acceptance and created the groundwork for another theory to take root.
It came from a German, a Professor Wilhelm Wundt of Leipzig University. In 1879, Wundt advanced the theory that man could be totally understood by studying material things only. Wundt had been trained in physiology, the study of physical structure and function in living things. Through his training, he arrived at the notion that investigating the soul or spirit was a waste of time because a man could be studied in the same way that a frog or a rat is studied. His teachings refuted the dualist idea that mind and matter were different. From this it was only a short hop to the conclusion that man was just another animal who had merely evolved to a higher level of intelligence than all the others. It was simply a matter of brain cells, the theory went.
In spite of the fact that Wundt never really proved any of his ideas, the school of experimental psychology was born.
The word psychology means "study of the soul," from the Greek word "psyche," meaning "the soul." But today, psychologists proclaim that there is no soul and instead study human and animal behavior. This makes as much sense as a baker claiming there is no such thing as bread. The original definition of psychology died with the unproven idea that an individual's actions were simply a response to stimuli perceived by the organism and were not related to any nonmaterial part of a person. According to Wundt, there was no nonmaterial part of man, no mind, no soul.
Ultimately, then, man was no more than a higher order animal. And if a person could be convinced of this, his ideas of personal responsibility could be changed.
The German Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, had definite militaristic ambitions at the time, and Wundt's ideas lay the foundation for seventy years of attempts to solve Germany's problems through warfare. After all, went the thinking, if a dog can be trained to salivate, a man can be trained to fight. It merely required that he become conditioned to different ideas about the value of human life and the makeup of those in the enemy camp.
Experimental psychology began to amass data to support this view. One of Wundt's students at Leipzig was the Russian physiologist Ivan Petrovich Pavlov. After returning to his country, Pavlov formulated his principles of mental conditioning, best known for his demonstration that a dog will salivate when a bell rings, if he was earlier fed to the accompaniment of a ringing bell. From this grew the idea that men could be conditioned like dogs.
Pavlov's work in the field of conditioning led to the attempted brainwashing of individuals and entire populaces. Avidly utilized by both Lenin and Stalin for political ends in the then USSR, it helped spread communist rule over almost half the world.
It is no wonder that these new psychological theories, this wholly materialistic view of man, found great favor with governments during this restless period of revolutionary social thought; the control of populations was much on their collective minds. If man could truly be understood in purely physiological terms, then one could control or solve the problems of man on a purely physical basis, much like moving a recalcitrant cow by prodding it with a stick.
This was the "new" view of man and life. All is material. Man and all life rose spontaneously from a sea of ammonia. The theory was not new, however. It had appeared thousands of years earlier in Egyptian mythology and was repeated in Greece by the philosopher Thales who believed that everything had water as its essence. Nevertheless, as man advanced into the twentieth century the traditional concepts of Soul and Spirit went the way of the horse-drawn cart and buggy whip.
Materialism quickly ascended to supremacy in many fields which had traditionally held nonmaterial views of man, society and life. Sociology, philosophy, psychology, politics, education and biology, among others, began to reflect the materialist's view of the world. And soon, the effect of their theories began to be felt throughout society.
This is not to say it was all bad. Applying the principles of materialism to material things brought about remarkable increases in our scientific knowledge about the earth and the universe. It has given man a host of tangible improvements in his way of life.
The grave error, however, has been to apply these same materialistic principles to man himself. This is, in fact, the something , the basic source of the troubles in our modern era.
The materialistic view provided man with numerous false solutions to his problems. Man was placed in the confounding position of being materially rich, but spiritually and morally poor.
Broad application of Wundt's "man is an animal" theory had disastrous and widespread consequences. And nowhere is this heritage more apparent than in the field of psychiatry.
Nineteenth century psychiatry, with its long history of mistreatment of the insane, leaped onto the coattails of experimental psychology to enter the universities of Europe and America. Thus, in short order, the psychiatrist expanded his sphere of influence from insane asylums to the halls of political power and other institutions. Now, however, he carried with him not only the creed of materialism, but the attitudes of his heritage: that the insane needed to be controlled through any necessary means of force and duress. Applied to populations at large, these attitudes have had disastrous consequences for society.
The belief that force can monitor thinking, personality and behavior, laid the foundation for two world wars -- the most destructive in mankind's history. Psychiatrists in Germany developed the pseudoscience of eugenics, with its ideas of "racial purity." "Super races," they claimed, could be bred to improve racial characteristics in the same way that farmers breed horses to get bigger, stronger animals. From this idiocy came Hitler's political ideology that the race could be improved by cleaning it of inferior stock. And thus resulted the wholesale slaughter of entire populations during the Nazi Holocaust. The German people were duped into believing their problems stemmed from the presence of genetically inferior races within its population. Their "solution" is forever imprinted upon human history.
The genocidal activity in the former Yugoslavia, euphemistically termed "ethnic cleansing," is but a continuation of this brutal mind-set. In the late 1980s, a psychiatrist traveled widely throughout the region and stirred up Serbian nationalism, inflaming long-buried ethnic hatreds. Another psychiatrist, a pupil of the first, became a Serbian political and military leader and it is his troops who initiated the bitter warfare which erupted in 1990 and conducted the campaign of terror to rid the area of "inferior" Muslims. It was psychiatrists who stirred up the hatreds that are so horrifying the world.
If this strikes one as outrageous, it is. Nevertheless, it is true. The facts speak for themselves. The materialist idea that some peoples are genetically inferior to others and need to be wiped out for the greater good of mankind is a lunacy created and perpetuated to this day by psychiatry.
And what of mental illness, the area psychiatry officially claimed expertise in?
Materialism decrees that any personality problem is physical in nature. Thus psychiatry treats it with physical means: drugs to tranquilize or shock the system; electricity to convulse the person out of his current patterns of behavior; and, operations to incapacitate the nervous system and make unacceptable behavior impossible. Today's extensive use of psychotropic drugs is simply an extension of this philosophy. After all, if a living being has no soul, it does not really matter what one does to it.
Psychiatry has had almost half a century in which to gauge the success of this approach. And governments the world over have poured money into its coffers, based upon its promises of a new world with a docile populace. The success of this grand experiment would be easily provable by improvements in apparent mental disorders, emotional problems and a general bettering of the quality of life. Instead we have exactly the opposite -- a drastic deterioriation in all the above.
Psychiatry has consistently invented more and more mental illnesses during the last fifty years, and the pharmaceutical industry has been quick to jump on the gravy train by inventing the chemical "cures." The effects of these drugs create yet more categories of mental illness profiting everyone but the patient.
In the mid-1800s, 1 in 1,000 individuals in the US was deemed mentally ill; today, psychiatrists claim that 20 percent of the population is in need of psychiatric treatment.
It is not just mental illness, however. All societal problems which existed before the rise of materialism have drastically worsened through the use of materialistic solutions. And, in particular, it is easily provable by statistics that any segment of society in which psychiatry has dabbled has considerably deteriorated.
The statistics of violent crime and US government funding of psychiatry are disturbingly parallel. According to Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) figures, the violent crime rate increased 560 percent between 1960 and 1991. And crimes against property have tripled. Meanwhile, psychiatric funding increased from $254 million in 1960 to $17.4 billion in 1990, an increase of 6,750 percent. Is the solution to give them more tax money? That would be like feeding the wolf in the chicken coop.
Psychiatric methods in our prisons have resulted in an 80 percent rate of repeat offenders. The rehabilitation of criminals is no longer even discussed as a possibility.
And ever since psychiatry began to meddle in matters between men and women, counseling them, filling popular magazines with their "solutions," and influencing the messages put forth by our gullible philosophers and artists, interpersonal relationships have, to put it kindly, become more strained than at any earlier time. If divorce rates continue to increase during the next twenty-five years as much as they did in the last, divorces will outnumber marriages in the United States.
Morally, mankind has often skated on thin ice, but it could be argued that the ice has never been as thin as it is today. In virtually every arena of life -- from business to politics to our young -- morals are at a low ebb. This too can be traced to materialistic ideas. If everything is material, who can say what is moral or immoral? Who can truly pin responsibility anywhere? Psychiatry? No field in the humanities or sciences is more ethically bankrupt than psychiatry, which encourages licentiousness as therapy in many cases, avidly chases the dollar without providing any valuable product in return, and heavily attacks the entire concept of morality -- right and wrong. Many aspects of society have suffered for it. Psychiatrists have the stated goal of redefining the concepts of right and wrong to suit the arrogant-beyond-belief attitude they are the ones best suited to shape mankind's values and his future. And this from people who have the highest suicide rate of any profession.
In our educational systems, Wundtian-based psychological and psychiatric theories have left a legacy of spiraling illiteracy. With the broad introduction of psychiatric mental health programs into the US school system in 1963, Scholastics Aptitude Test scores declined nationwide for sixteen straight years and have leveled off in a much lower range. While illiteracy has always been with us, it has generally been because of lack of schooling. These figures have worsened in spite of the availability of schooling for everyone.
All of these trends yield a clear conclusion: materialistic solutions applied to human problems do not work. Without massive public funding, the methods of nineteenth century psychology and psychiatry would quickly go the way of that horse-drawn cart and pass from view. In fact, if funding for unworkable psychiatric solutions was simply cut off, this alone would improve the general state of mental health throughout society.
The trends are clear to those who are willing to look. It would not be an exaggeration to project, after another century of materialistic influence, a slave society on earth where a small class of technocrats rules a drugged, illiterate and violent populace -- a virtual planetary bedlam.
No matter how many mechanical tricks the materialist can demonstrate through manipulation of matter, his basic assumption contained a serious flaw. Experimental psychology has never produced one convincing explanation for feelings, memories, expectations, desires, beliefs, thoughts, imaginings or intentions. Materialism cannot account for either the towering clouds of sound in a Beethoven symphony or the sense of delight in a child's laughter. By denying even the possibility that life itself was influenced by something other then mechanical factors, the materialist started off in a hole out of which he has never been able to dig himself.
And he ignored one of the most powerful forces in man.
If man is not an animal, as Wundt declared him to be, then what other view is there?
It is no coincidence that the declining influence of religion in our society has seen a large increase in our problems.
While religion may not have successfully dealt with the host of new problems brought on by the Industrial Revolution, this should not have totally invalidated its value. That is, however, exactly what the materialists did. Religion was entirely jettisoned in favor of "All is matter. There is no soul. Man is an animal. God is dead." Any progress man had made due to the civilizing influence of religion was dismissed. Religion was criticized as "the opiate of the masses." No matter that such ideas ran counter to everything decent man has ever done. Belief in God was thought to be outmoded.
There has never, thoughout history, been a culture that did not have some form of religion. The most so-called primitive Aboriginal of Australia had a sophisticated and organized system of religious belief and worship. As did the tribes of Central Africa, and those of the Amazon. From our earliest records, one of man's firmest convictions has been that he has a relationship to superhuman powers of some kind.
The word religion has many definitions, all of which can embrace sacred lore and wisdom and knowledge of God or gods, souls and spirits. Religion deals with the spirit in relationship to itself, the universe and other life. Essentially, religion is belief in spiritual beings. As it relates to the world, religion is a system of beliefs and practices by means of which a group of people struggles with the ultimate problems of human life.
These concepts describe a condition that is as natural to man as breathing. Just as man has tried to understand the material world around him, so too has he always sought to understand the part of existence that was not material. That is the essence of religion.
Mankind as a whole has been and is religious, regardless of how his belief in spiritual beings manifests itself. Civilization in large part exists because of man's belief in spirituality and his aspirations to something higher than his current existence. Even science is an attempt to overcome anxiety by providing an understanding of life and the forces of the universe.
Medicine, psychiatry and psychology, however, try to solve the problem of human nature by classifying man in material terms: body and brain -- motivated by force. Yet, Darwin's theory of evolution does not necessarily contradict religious belief, for it does not rule out the fact that God or life may simply be using evolution as a means to provide ways to design the structure of physical organisms. That bodies evolved from lower to higher forms doesn't prove a thing except that they evolved. But to blindly assert that no spiritual factors were involved can only be called bad science, for it is based solely on opinion.
Humanity has paid dearly for materialism's many false solutions. Whatever failures religious, political or social institutions had prior to the seminal year of 1879, when Wundt's themes took root, the situation has deteriorated with the denial of man's essential spirituality.
In 1950, something new appeared. L. Ron Hubbard, who had traveled extensively in the Orient and been educated in Western science, broke through the barrier of ignorance that had stifled man's progress in the humanities. The result was an entirely new subject, Scientology, which means "knowing about knowing."
Scientology is an applied religious philosophy which contains workable answers to the problems people face in their lives. The subject matter of Scientology is all life. It contains practical means through which predictable improvement can be obtained in any area to which it is applied.
The philosophies of materialism and dualism can, and have been, endlessly argued, for they are opinions and not based on any hard evidence. Today, Scientology has the evidence to prove the existence of man's spiritual nature. It is based upon thousands of research hours, and the results attained by millions of people.
Scientology recognizes that man is not just so many vials of chemicals fortuitously combined into a remarkable stimulus-response machine. Scientology views man as a spiritual being with native capabilities which can be improved far beyond what is generally believed possible. In fact, it has been demonstrated that man deteriorates to the degree that he denies his spiritual nature and ceases to live with moral values, such as trust, honesty, integrity and other sometimes intangible characteristics.
By seeing man as essentially spiritual, Scientology follows in the traditional view of man and his relationship to the universe. Scientology, however, is unique in that it contains practical means of enabling man to resolve his material concerns and so come to achieve his spiritual aspirations. In this regard Scientology is an improvement over any earlier practice in terms of what it can actually do to help man.
The problems of drugs, education, morals,
relationships, trust and others contain solutions in
Scientology which do not beget further problems. The matters
which affect one most intimately, the concerns with oneself,
family, friends and associates are understood through
For example, a child cannot read well and is falling behind the rest of the class. Scientology can help him dispense with a liability that would otherwise affect him for his entire life.
Your best friend and her husband are having serious marital problems. One can say with a shrug of the shoulders that 50 percent of all marriages end in divorce anyway. But does that relieve any part of the anguish these people you care about are going through? With Scientology many, many marriages have been saved and strengthened.
A neighbor is having trouble with his business. Failure will mean severe hardship for him and his family. Can a condition like this be turned around, or is it inevitable that most small businesses fail each year? Scientology can raise the abilities of a man in all aspects of his life, increasing his awareness, certainty and knowledge. Such a man would be more likely to deal successfully with his business -- and everything else.
Someone you know has been arrested for drug usage. Is he doomed to a life in and out of rehab centers or could you do something effective to get him off drugs for good? Scientology not only has the most effective drug rehabilitation program in existence, but also precise methodologies which enable a person to uncover the reasons why he began using drugs in the first place. Scientology addresses and can handle the spiritual factors underlying the drug scourge and has helped hundreds of thousands live drug-free lives.
It is from the individual problems of men and women that the larger concerns of the world grow: drugs, crime, the environment, war, hatred, the economy, and others. Each stems from individuals who dealt unsuccessfully, to a greater or lesser degree, with different aspects of living.
The emphasis in Scientology is on the application of exact methodologies in order to bring about change in the conditions of an individual's life. Scientology's aim is to put a person into a condition where he can be more self-determined about living a happier, more fulfilling life. It is a firm conviction in Scientology that the way to a true resolution of a person's problems is to work toward putting him in a position where he is brighter and more able and where he can identify the factors of his life more easily. When this has been achieved, he has been put in a condition where he can understand the underlying sources of any situations he may face and so deal with life more successfully.
The complete materials of Scientology contain more than 40 million words in dozens of books, thousands of articles and thousands more recorded lectures. It is highly probable that this is the most extensive body of knowledge ever assembled on the subject of man, his mind, his capabilities and potentials and the different aspects of his existence.
Millions of people all over the world have used Scientology to improve their lives and help their fellows. Can any subject guarantee that it will help you solve all your problems? Maybe not, but basic Scientology principles and methods have been used countless times and, when honestly and exactly applied, have brought about invariably beneficial results. And Scientology does not require that one change his beliefs or convictions to use it successfully. All you have to do is apply the data and observe for yourself whether or not it works.
A sincere look at the conditions around you will reveal situations in the lives of people you know who would benefit from your help. Factually, there isn't a person you know who doesn't have something in his life he would improve if only he knew how.
You only have to avail yourself of the tools Scientology offers. If enough people used them it would solve enough of the problems in their own spheres to elevate the entire society to a higher plateau. And ultimately, a civilization would form on earth based on trust, decency, honesty and tolerance.
But knowing such tools exist and not using them would be like pouring water into the sand beside a man dying of thirst. It is an observable fact that nothing stays the same for long. Things either get better or else they worsen. Even if only by tiny increments, the conditions in a person's life, his environment and the society as a whole are always changing.
Man is at a crossroads in his history as man. He can begin to move upward towards a golden age or continue his descent into a new dark age of slavery to mechanistic principles where individuality and freedom are lost. With Scientology, you can change conditions for the better. Such an opportunity never existed before. All man had was unreliable advice, superstition, unworkable remedies and the dim hope that somehow he would be saved.
The dream of Abraham, Moses, Zoroaster, Lao-tse, Buddha, Confucius, Christ, Mohammed and the other spiritual leaders of man throughout the ages is still with us. Peace, harmony, happiness, higher states of spiritual awareness are as desired by man today as they ever were. The wisdom of Scientology can be used by followers of any faith to achieve the goals man has cherished for so long.
Wisdom is for any man who chooses to reach for it.
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