The Veda, the Buddha & the Tao: Connections Part VI — Independent Scientology

Hi, and welcome to another Scientology Outside of the Church podcast. This is Season 14, Episode 6, Part 6 of our Continuing Connection series. I'm here with Quenton and Simphiwe. How are you guys this Saturday afternoon or evening? Doing all right here. I'm good. Good. The title of this one, for everybody listening, is this is the Veda, Buddhism, and the Tao Te Ching. So, first off, it might seem like, wait a minute, we're going back in time? Yes, but for good reason. This isn't a detour. Every episode in this season has been building on one idea. LRH read, studied, and distilled constantly, kept what worked, and like I said, distilled it down into something operational. We've watched him do it to Freud, Korzybski, to Spencer, to his own teachers, Thompson, and Dr. White. And we've watched that distilled material eventually in what it became, the axioms. At the very top of the pyramid, and the loops and the recursion that occurred, the reactive mind, the service facsimile, the dwindling spiral, and the bridge. That describes what happens when nothing is held still. This afternoon, and this evening, depending on where Quenton and Simphiwe and I are, we're doing the same thing with older sources. And then this episode, we're widening the lens one more step. Adding a fourth Eastern tradition most listeners have never heard connected to this story. Filling out the Buddhist material with two passages that don't usually get discussed together. And this is going to be really, really something I've never, ever seen anybody talk about before in a podcast, on YouTube, in videos, or anything like that. So, why did these claims surface exactly when they did? That last part isn't corpus material. It's the documented historical record. And per what we're dealing with in this season, we're naming it plainly, rather than leaving it out. So, I think you guys will really enjoy this. Here we go. Yeah, and we can start way back when, right? And this is, as LRH put it, over 10,000 years of thinking men, kind of coming up with these concepts. But we can start with the Veda, okay, the Hindu Veda. And this is over 10,000 years of looking at the same thing we talk about in Axiom 53, and we state it in one line. So, we're going to start with the Veda because this kind of goes back to the oldest recorded oral traditions. I want to make sure this is clear. The earliest recorded oral traditions that later became written traditions or written documents and so forth and so on. But what is the Veda? What is it actually a record of? So, the Veda is actually a core record of several thousands of years of civilization trying to find one thing that they can hold still to, hold fast to, and build an entire understanding of life around. And LRH himself points exactly when he says the very word Veda simply means lookingness or knowingness. Here we go, okay? And remember the axioms, Axiom 53, if you guys remember, it says a stable datum is necessary for the alignment and order of data. And that confusion doesn't get handled by just throwing more data at it. It gets handled by one datum, held still, so everything else can align itself against it and around it. So, now when we look at the Veda through this lens and the 10,000 plus years of information and all this stuff kind of being brought together, LRH is crediting the single largest, longest running, prior attempt at actually the problem of axioms 53 solves. All in one sentence, all in one sentence, what are we trying to align here? And the Veda talks about lookingness and knowingness. One of the things that the Veda talks about, okay, is, first of all, let's look at this. It's of the oldest religious texts in continuous use on Earth today, carried by disciplined oral traditions for centuries before being put into writing. So, that's one thing that the Veda can hold true to. Yeah, so this basically then becomes the oldest ancestry to the subject of independent Scientology. Like, you're looking at 10,000 years that we know of, that man has been on this track. And it's also the oldest documented reach towards this fixed point, which then gets later recorded as Axiom 53. Quite amazing. Exactly. And the Veda itself, the word itself, actually means lookingness or knowingness. And when you dive into it, it actually means he or she who knows. The idea is that when you read the Veda, when you work the Veda, it brings you to a level of knowingness. It's he or she who knows. The way of seeing and knowing, not just a fixed doctrine, but it was spread through oral tradition. It was spread through writing. It was spread through practice. And this is how it came about. Yeah, and the definition of Scientology is knowing how to know, the study of wisdom. Okay? It's not the study of a science. It's the study of wisdom. And I'd like to point out also that if you look at the confusion formula in the ethics conditions, the confusion formula states find a particle, locate it, get a stable datum. And this is what was going on with the Veda at the time, is what are we dealing with here? This is the foundation of the foundation of the foundation in, quote unquote, what would be, and from our standpoint, recent history. Geologically, it happened a millisecond ago. But in the most recent history of man, that's what it was for, is, okay, this is something we're grabbing onto, and we're using that as the stable datum. Knowingness. So I wanted to point that out real quick. Well, 100%, yeah. And it's centuries of accumulated reflection on the nature of existence and of the self. And even when you, I mean, obviously the Veda, like I said, it was oral and written traditions. But it was done through hymns, and it was done through poem, and it was done through stories and allegory and stuff like that. And so when you look at the Veda, even the Hindu gods and even the way the stories are told, you can see how it actually is, I'm going to use a word, an exegesis, or pulling out of the information. That allows a person to kind of know themselves and know who they are and how they came to this awareness of self. So each of these gods can represent different archetypes and different experiences and different things that we have to deal with, you know, stuff like that. And so the Veda was, the way it's written is actually quite beautiful. And then once you really dive into it, you get this awareness of existence of self and the nature of existence itself. So it's pretty interesting. Yeah, I mean, I like that word, exegesis, because it gives us a way into create, like the West, making philosophical leaps. Because once you take a look at some of these things, and you come back, and then you're like, oh, wow, then you start looking at things very differently. It's even said that Europe has made tremendous strides forward immediately as they started opening up to this Eastern information. And it's like it opens a new level of operation, if I may put it that way, a new level of thinking. And independent Scientology basically has been that LRH was taking these things into account, suddenly took something that would have been limited, like a philosophy that would have been limited, and then made it like very big and very broad, like looking at the spiritual nature of everything. You know, it's quite amazing. For sure. Jonathan, do you want to go over that LRH quote we were talking about? Yeah, one thing I wanted to ask, and this is more of a, LRH says, I always love your questions because I know what you don't know. But it seems to me, if my understanding is correct, within the Hindu civilization tradition and everything like that, that a lot of the gods, I was just thinking about this as we were reading this, that a lot of the gods, that a lot of the gods, they sort of have, they smack a little bit, if that conveys, of an early tone scale. Yep. You get what I'm saying there, because some of them are, you know, they're angry, or they're benevolent, or they're giving, and all of that. And I was just thinking about that, and I thought, huh, that's pretty interesting. And, you know, when you said archetypes, and I thought, well, that's really kind of what they are. Yeah. Well, I was going to say, just to that point, and even the way a practicing Hindu might see it, and I'm not that, but I've spoken to many, I've worked with many, I've studied this a lot. But the gods aren't separate from our universe, like the spiritual universe and the physical universe operate in tandem. And so, if you've ever seen that movie, Life of Pi, there's an excellent movie called Life of Pi, and he was in the boat, and he was starving. If you remember, he was starving, and all these fish jumped up out of the water, and flying fishes jumped up out of the water and started landing in the boat, landing in the boat. And he was able to eat the fish, and the tiger was able to eat some of the fish and not eat the boy, you know. And so, he goes, thank you, Vishnu, for becoming the fish so that the tiger may eat, you know, so he wouldn't eat meat. So, he recognized that Vishnu became the fish so that the tiger may eat, and that's like Theta Misty, but that Vishnu became the fish versus sit the fish, or the gods rained out a blessing on you, you know, that kind of vibe. So, it was really interesting how that is all a part of their own existence, not separated. That's my point. Right. That's a good point. Now, LRH says, this is from Scientology, its general background, part one. This is in 1954, July of 54. He says, for about 10,000 years that we know of, man has been on this track. This is somewhere between 125,000 and 150,000 books. Books which have been written and which comprise the Veda and Buddhist libraries. Now, that's a lot of books. So, there was a lot of description. There was a lot of allegory, much like what Quenton just relayed to us in The Life of Pi. So, they were all trying to, the authors of these books, they were all trying to convey something later that would end up being what we now call in independent Scientology, the axioms. And having some sort of stable data in order from which to operate and compare because a stable datum is nice, but having two is much better. And that's because now you have something to compare to. And that's the important point on this, in this set of connections. Yes. Well, so, after this, okay, we go into talking about Buddhism. And we talk about Siddhartha Gautama Buddha. And now, LRH actually mentions Buddha about 26 times throughout many of his lectures, more than a lot of some of his other earlier mentions. And it's really interesting to take note here because when we talk about loops and we talk about recursions and the stuff that we've been mentioning over and connections, the stuff that we've been mentioning over the past number of podcasts, we get to this point where the reactive mind kind of starts to take a real hit, if you will. Now, the reactive mind, of course, we know is just a series of records that are replayed back over and over again, service facsimiles, we called it, that get played over and over again, engrams. And these play back at the person without their conscious awareness, okay? And they never lose their power unless their power is taken away from them. And we're going to go into that in a minute. But it becomes a dwindling spiral, the point I'm trying to make here. It becomes a dwindling spiral, okay? Where curiosity dims into desire and desire then hardens into enforcement and enforcement collapses into inhibition. All of these things start to hit, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. It's a dwindling spiral. Now, when we listen to LRH, what he says about the early Bodhis that he ran into before Siddhartha Gautama solved it, they hit a stumbling block. And their answer was that suffering was dissolving into the self entirely. When LRH talked about this, this is not just stopping there. It's not just the end all to be all of this. And so there was this part where then self-determinism then becomes very important. LRH took it where now when one can start to determine for oneself, not other determinism, but when one can start to determine for oneself what one wanted to be, the self-determinism then becomes the stable data. We just talked about this a moment ago. So you don't erase the self to escape the spiral. You don't deny the self to escape the spiral. This is the deviation here. You don't deny the self to escape the spiral. You hold the self still enough to climb back up out of it. You know thyself. Okay? And when you start to understand this, this starts to become the way out or the way through, if you want to look at it that way. It becomes the way out and the way through. Now, Shakyamuni Buddha, Shakyamuni basically means the sage of the royals. So Siddhartha Gautama, Shakyamuni. Shakyamuni was one of the greatest of the many bodhis or teachers who trained other intellectuals in ethical perfection by human means. So he wanted to help even the royals. He wanted to help the poor. He wanted to help all people become more ethical and more self-determined so they can come out of this dwindling spiral of desire and enforcement and inhibition and all the stuff that causes suffering in life. Causes suffering. And so all of these things are things that we can do, can look at as a precursor per LRH. I just wanted to throw one thing in here real quick, Simphiwe. Okay. You're looking at 10,000 years. Okay? The average man in this window might live 30, 40 years. If they were lucky, they might get to 70. But the lifespan was a lot shorter. So you have these people distilling over and over and over and over in this 10,000 years. And you have some brighter than others, some burning twice as bright and burning half as long. Distilling this information over and over and over and over. And these are all of the precursors to what became the axioms, the cues, and the logics and the sublogics. So there's a tremendous amount undocumented because nothing was in writing. And we still got here. Go ahead, Simphiwe. Yeah. Now I was just going to look at the idea of a body. So in independent psychology, that would be comparable to a Dianetic release. And then in art, art would be comparable to our idea of a theta clear. So these concepts have been there. But with the distillation of how to get there or how to achieve the states, it has now become like LRH made it sort of like a paint by numbers kind of a thing where it's like you do this and then you get this. You do this and then you get this. Whereas before, as you're saying, Jonathan, a lot of the material was not even recorded. So you had to go and meditate or whatever. And somehow get the... Yeah? Yeah. Well, what's cool about it... So I love how you just broke that down, Simphiwe. Because yes, bodhi, B-O-D-H-I. A bodhi is basically meaning one who has awakened, right? Awakened to the travails of life, the sufferings of life. What causes this? Putting an end to greed and suffering and ignorance of self, right? That's a bodhi. An arhat is one who literally has achieved a state of enlightenment, a state of nirvana, this peace that passes all understanding, as it were. And this person who really the word means worthy one. Worthy, right? And so it actually is interesting because when one has attained this level called arhat, they recognize themselves as one who is worthy and deserving of truth, deserving of this awareness, these offerings of truth. Interesting. Right. So more comparable to LRH's original definition of what a ThetaClear was at the time. Can you expound on that? Thomas said... ThetaClear. Yeah. Well, I'm just a bit curious about it. Early on. Early on, you had, in 1950, you had Clear. And then as LRH continued on throughout the 50s, he came up with the idea that there was a ThetaClear. Okay. A ThetaClear would be what later would be OT. This is before the term Operating ThetaClear came about. Okay. Later on, in the 50s, it became a messed Clear. And that would be what Clear basically is, a being who no longer has their own reactive mind. So these states, LRH was recursively improving as he did all these different auditing processes and tried to find his own way based off of what we're talking about right here. So you have all of these recursive loops going on for 10,000 years. And LRH is still trying to find a stable datum of Clear, even though it was mentioned in Dianetics and became a ThetaClear, then became a MessClear. And then later on after that, he later said, you know, I wish I'd just said Clear and left it at that. Because, you know, even today we get people that listen to those lectures and they say, I want to be a ThetaClear. You got these three different brands. And the misunderstanding is, is that this was all distillation, recursion, and loops. As things were more established and he got a better idea of what a stable datum was. And more importantly, and most importantly, on the meter where you have 2.0 as a tone arm reading and 3.0 as a tone arm reading for a male or female body, that became the later definition of Clear with the meter. So that became the stable datum after Clear, ThetaClear, MessClear, and then finally just Clear in big capital letters in 2.0 and 3.0 on the dial. Because you're looking for, you're trying to get a physical universe indication, verification, or validation of something that is a subjective thing. Now, why is that important? Because for 10,000 years they were trying to describe the same thing and LRH did it in 15. I mean, it's really interesting how that distillation through all that period of time, and here you have a man that's taking all of that information in that 10,000 or so years and getting it done in about 15 years and codifying it, and most importantly, putting it in writing. They didn't have it in writing. They didn't have a way to do that, or at least supposedly based off of what we do know and what's left. So that recursion got distilled down and distilled down for centuries. And then in about 15 years, we had a sharp point on it in writing, this is what you get with the meter. So, the hope of Buddhism was salvation in one lifetime, but no precise, repeatable practice reliably produced it. That's what I'm trying to say. Okay. Now, in independent Scientology, it's framed as fulfilling a forecast inside that tradition, attainable in one lifetime and for many. Okay. That's the difference between Theta Clear, OT, Messed Clear, clear. The original clear was the rough idea. And now we have the independent Scientology grade chart. That's right. And even in pre-Siddhartha Gautama Buddha, pre-Siddhartha Gautama, the seekers of this enlightenment, they started to hit a roadblock or a stumbling block because the idea was that ceasing to be self, the denial of self, is what dissolves you into nirvana. But, of course, you know, Jonathan, we don't, we don't, there was a deviation from that. Yeah, well, it was the, it's literally the opposite. It's literally the opposite. And my, my, my own personal opinion on this, this is from Intensive Procedure Lecture Part 3. This is in 1954, around the period of the Phoenix Lectures. These guys, they, they were close and they had it and they could go exterior and all of that. And, and this is the same problem that LRH faced. Okay, you can pop a guy out of his head, but it doesn't stick. It keys back in. And so, he says here, you cease to be self. You are, you are yourself because once you realize you are no longer your own reactive mind and you can go exterior, at least sometimes, not stably. And that was something that LRH wrestled with for years. How, how to keep a guy out of his head, not in his body all the time. He struggled with it as well because he knew all of this earlier recursive material. And that is a release, that is a stable OT. That's, that's the difference. As you go up the OT levels, that instable state of clear, because a clear can, per LRH, a clear can create their own reactive mind, even though they're clear. This is what these guys were wrestling with. They didn't have the OT levels. We wouldn't have the OT levels if he hadn't codified how this whole phenomena works. But he wouldn't have been able to do it without this information. Hmm. For sure. Well. It gets all silent. Blown away. Yeah. Well, because he, because he says, he says in intensive procedure lecture, part three, this is from the Phoenix lectures. He say it was upon this stumbling block that the early Bodhis tripped before Gautama. That was just this, that after you cease to be self, why you just get into nirvana. And so the idea was, is that at some point, if you stop being who you really are, being yourself, you'll go into this state where you don't need anything. You don't, you understand everything. You have this full awareness of, of all things because you deny self so much. But what we know is that it's like you said, it's the opposite. It's that self-determinism. It's that self-knowingness. It's the know the mystery scale. It's all of these things that are so important to one being able to step into this state of being. Right. And you also have to take into account valences. This was, this was something they weren't aware of 10,000 or, or even 5,000 years ago. These were new things that he discovered based off of this information. Okay. Because you, you, you might be able to go into nirvana exterior, but if you're not in your, if you're not you, you're not being you and you're being something else, you're out of valence because of valence is a solution to a problem. And this was the thing that they, they struggled and struggled and struggled and struggled with is that the, the, the end game, the end phenomena, the valuable final product was nirvana. Nirvana was exterior to the body, but they couldn't hold it. It wouldn't stay stable because of, well, they didn't have what we now have in independent Scientology. I hope I've made that clear because it's a little, it's a little tricky because there's all these, these different names for the states that we have now, those names for those states where nirvana would, would be clear and exterior, but they couldn't stay exterior, which is the same thing LRH struggled with in the fifties, interestingly enough, but he figured it out. So it's, it's worth naming plainly rather than smoothing over the reverent credit giving register. We've traced all season Phoenix, 1954, the Hymn of Asia sits alongside at least one passage where LRH treats the Buddhist goal is an outright failure state, which is what I was saying. In a document never meant for public eyes, both are real and that's all there is to it is we're trying to make the distinction here. What, what is the truth? Well, how, how were they, were they able to describe it? LRH having distilled that information and having been such a good author in the English language and having such a command of that language was able to put a much finer point on it. And that's how we have independent Scientology. Yeah. Interestingly enough. That's from the 1963, um, communication bulletin that came out April, 1963, where he actually kind of spoke about that. Yeah. He says, um, the Buddhists spoke of nirvana. So without knowing it, they spoke of vanishing forever into nirvana. They had come, they had become completely overwhelmed, lacking any e-meters or a map. And we are Scientologists. We don't fall, we won't fall into the abyss and we won't join nirvana. We have meters and a map. So that's kind of where he was making the statement that while we still herald from many, many years of this tradition and this viewpoint, there's some, some parts where we depart from and then we go into independent Scientology. So, yeah. I mean, it is an interesting contrast to actually have here. Like you have, um, the states and then you have the names of the states and it can be confusing. And I'm actually glad that, uh, Jonathan, you just clarified and brought back like this. This is what this is talking about. This is what this is talking about. And I think this is what LRH was doing even back then, you know, you're looking at like, uh, the idea that, um, the state of clear was envisioned 2,500 years ago by Gautama Siddhartha. And then he was actually taking us back to that. And it's that loops, um, idea and also subsets again. So it's quite, uh, it is quite amazing. Yes. Was that the, you mentioned the hint of Asia. And the, there, there's, there's the reference that LRH talks about. Yeah. And that's, that's, uh, keeping Scientology working number one, where the misunderstanding was messed. Okay. You have all these stone idols in the, in the jungle and they're all overgrown and everything like that. And it didn't get any further than that because it wasn't a stable state. It wasn't a stable state. So they try and try and try and try and try and try, but they weren't able to really quite codify it. And therefore that's why you have all the idols in the jungles covered up with vines and plants and everything like that. You know, Indiana Jones type stuff as a visual reference. Right. And that's, that's the difference is because they weren't able to, they weren't able to make the distinction between messed and theta LRH did. So, and, and, you know, he also wrote the Hymn of Asia where what he was trying, basically what he was trying to say here, and he's, he's mentioned this in many lectures, is that he was Gautama Siddhartha. He was Buddha. He just hadn't quite figured it out yet. And then came back much more recently within the last century to give it another go and try again. That's what the Hymn of Asia is all about. So you can see the recursion here. The Buddha to come. Yeah. The Buddha to come. Because he wanted to give it another whirl. And he's actually said this in lectures. So, and that may or may not be real to our listeners, but it was real to him. And, and I, I can see, and, and what we're trying to relate to you as a listener is it makes a whole heck of a lot of sense that he didn't quite have it himself. And then eventually came around again and said, okay, let's give this another shot. Now we have independent Dianetics and Scientology. So, that brings us to section 3C. Simphiwe? All right. So, yes. Like, you're looking at a tradition here that was never named directly. But one that scholars have mapped into Scientology in detail. Like, it's a genuine, a new thread, basically, for this episode. Samkhya Yoga, the philosophical system behind the Patanjali Yoga Sutras. LRH sites, there's the name in the corpus. Like, so it's in, it's in our, it's in our materials or knowledge base. And the materials that we, like, in the materials that we have. And it, it does use the terms that come from that, that tradition. Like the dhyana, for instance. It's a Sanskrit word for meditation. Without demonstrating the critical reading that he would, that, that he'd worked on with, like, with the text directly. So, the section runs differently from the other three that we've looked at. We're not tracing LRH's own claim derivation. We are presenting a parallel. Outside, that outside researchers have drawn. And letting, like, letting you actually see both and look at the resemblance. I mean, is there something you want to say to this one, Quenton? Yeah. I mean, so when you look at this particular tradition. The idea that the spirit here is plural. And there are many individual spirits, but one universal one. And, of course, we don't really have that viewpoint. But you, we are all individual beings, right? But this idea that we're disentangling. I'm trying to say a lot without saying too much. We're disentangling these spirits in order to have you recognize and become the fullness of who you really are. And, again, Jonathan, you're going to have to, because I don't want to say too much from the O.T. levels. But we're disentangling who you are from all the everything that's going on. Right. Well, there's a very large implant on the whole track that was delineated by LRH. That basically, and we actually did a podcast on this, where everybody is part of a collective. The Borg, if you will, from Star Trek. And we are not individual beings. We are just one sentient whole. And that implant was put there because it takes away your own self-determinism and you're no longer a threat. And this is something that the earlier civilizations, which we're detailing here in this podcast, couldn't get past. Thanks to the E-meter and the distillation of these aforementioned authors over 10,000 years, LRH was able to find it. And so, it isn't that we are all one, it's that we are all, and we have our own beingness. Thinking this, doing this, creating this, postulating this awareness. And this is a marked difference from what the old term was, was purusha. Mm-hmm. Okay. So, out of something that couldn't get past a common incident on the track came independent Scientology. Thanks to the E-meter and LRH doing this research and saying, well, how come? That's basically the best way to put it. Which brings us to salvation. Well, because, exactly, because in this particular yoga tradition, the idea was that by disentangling yourself as a being from the material universe, which is the purusha, from the prakti, prakti, prakti, I'm not saying it right, prakti, then you actually can attain salvation because the two are fundamentally separate categories, theta and mist. And so, the idea is that the more you identify with mist, the less free you are, the less saved you are, the less aware you are. And so, this particular tradition of yoga, the idea was that you can disentangle yourself from the physical universe. Well, it kind of goes back to that idea of the theta-mest theory. Right, which is what we were detailing earlier. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, it's quite, but I mean, the interesting, I think the interesting thing here is the recursive nature of those loops. Because it keeps going back to, like, this, what it was, or what other people had discovered or said about it, to what LRH actually codified it and distilled it to be. Like, for us, it's easy to understand, theta-mest theory. Oh, okay, that makes sense. Exactly. In this same tradition, the system postulates that rebirth from transmigrating spirit forgetting its previous lives. So, there's this idea here that in this tradition that you're born or you come back or you have a new experience of life and forget the past lives. And it's in this, we've done podcasts on past lives. We've done podcasts on theta-mest theory. And we've even done podcasts, if you remember the podcast we did on Gnosticism, a lot of this stuff was talked about in Gnosticism, too, about the physical universe and the spiritual universe and stuff and so on. And how that impingement, you know, spirit impinging upon the physical universe creates a problem for the spirit, you know? And so, a lot of this stuff is all, like you said, recursive and LRH distilled them all into a workable system that actually goes through these things. And it's just interesting to look at them and see how, wait a minute, we know this stuff. Oh, yeah. That's so true. Well, it, and the thing is, is what was happening is these individuals that were in this past 10,000 years, they kept running into something they couldn't get past. You know, yeah, yeah, I could, you know, I could reach nirvana, but I couldn't keep it. On and on and on and on and on and on and on. Well, that was because there was something that wasn't discovered, but it took that long to be able to actually codify what it was. And with Dianetics, now we've figured out what was there that couldn't be as is, which is the reactive mind. And the reactive mind, recursively, LRH found out as time went on, became what we now know as OT2 and OT3. So there were these hurdles. One hurdle took 10,000 years. Another hurdle took 15, 16 years. Okay. So you can see how things got really sped up, much like large language models and computers. I was just about to say that. I was just about to say that. Loops. Isn't that funny? Yep. Right. I mean, it goes back to this. I'm just thinking, it goes back to this idea that the thetan, the person is not a thing, but a creator of things. And we're actively creating our own universes. This is like how Santorji looks at it. Exactly. Well, as we as we continue on, what I'll say is, is that in Buddhism, so there's this concept called the Eightfold Path. Okay. The Eightfold Path. And what we're going to look at is a graduated path towards releasing from release from suffering and in two systems, four centuries apart. Okay. And so in Buddhism, this Eightfold Path structure was a doctrine that basically says that when one follows this noble Eightfold Path laid out in right view, right intentions, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right efforts, right mindfulness, and right concentration. Okay. These eight sequences all were graduated sequences. So you would attain one and then, okay, good. I got this one. Now I can go to the next one. Each stage building on the one before recursively. Moving the practitioner up out of suffering step by step. And we have in independent Scientology, the grade chart as a similarity in the sense that this gradation and awareness chart, if you look at the awareness characteristics right there in the middle of the chart, right? Each of these is the idea is that to move a person up through the grades, up, up, up, to this point where they regain abilities. Abilities are regained and they're moving up towards clear and up towards OT, which is what we just talked about earlier. So the Eightfold Path is a graduated series of eight sequences or eight stages, each one building on the other to release a person from suffering. And I think it's really interesting. Looking at the grade chart itself, like, for instance, if you look at, from where it starts, going up, there's abilities that a person regains as he does the steps. You know, like, you finish grade zero in your communications release, you regain the ability to communicate with anyone on any subject. And then there's problems release, you regain the ability to look at problems and make them vanish, basically. And it just keeps adding on to itself up to the point where the person gets, like, is moving up the bridge towards clear and beyond. Exactly. You were going to say something? What I was going to say is, what we talked about at the beginning of the podcast with confusion and finding a stable datum. Well, as I mentioned, as LRH mentions, that once you have a stable datum, you can build on that stable datum. Now you have a set of comparable magnitudes. Then you have three, then you have four, then you have five. This is exactly what you were just saying, is you build upon each one, and that is a gradient approach. Now, we're going to be getting into gradients and their application as a connection and a subset here in the next couple of podcasts. So keep this in mind when you're listening to this series, how all of this recurs. Okay? And these are all subsets of each thing. And this all took place in a very, very short order of time where it took 10,000 years to get there. And another point, and we were just talking about large language models, and I wanted to add something to that, is here we are in 2026, and we're dealing with, you know, the thing that's going to change mankind in all of this. And if you went back 10,000 years, and they were saying, this is going to change mankind, and then we had stone idols in the jungles. Well, large language models do not believe in certainty, which the Scientology axioms and the definition of the word Scientology, knowing how to know, do. So at this very moment when you're listening to this podcast, all a larger language model can do, and not that they can't do anything at all. That is not the case. But the people who built it as a subset, a loop with a reactive mind, built a large language model on the premise that nothing is certain. That is why a large language model is a predictive linguistics model. It's not built on certainty. Because the guys that built it had a reactive mind, just like they did in the Far East 10,000 years ago. They're running into the same loop. Think about that. Replay this. This is what's going on. If you want to know why the world is in the state that it's in, and all of the insanity in it, it is the same thing that a computer-generated model that was made by people with the reactive mind created. Because they themselves, the guys that created it, had a reactive mind, and they couldn't get past the same things that the Bodhis did 10,000 years ago. It's really something to behold. Well, one thing I like to also about this mention. End of the sermon. And there you have it. Well, I would say one thing I like mentioning about this Eightfold Path is that each of the levels of the Eightfold Path, whether it be right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, or right concentration, they all focused on abilities. It all focused on what the being is doing right, right, right, and I think that's really worth mentioning, too, when we look at the grade chart, because the grade chart actually focuses on abilities regained and the EP or the phenomena of each of these levels. And so these things that you write speech would be communication, right, intentions, livelihood, actions. Like you're able to do things as it relates to one's abilities being regained. And as you go up the bridge and go toward clear and into your OT levels, you're going up the bridge in order to regain these abilities that are natively yours as a being. And so it's not something that you have to, you know, let me, you know, hopefully I can learn this thing. It's not something you're learning. It's actually something that is being regained because you're removing any of those things that have been suppressing you or holding you back or keeping you from expressing who you really are. Yeah, you're unlearning. You're reteaching yourself because it's an altar, because it's an altar is. That's literally, literally what's happening. Yeah. And so as we understand all this, then too, let's then go into the TRs in independent Scientology. The TRs are the training routines. Now, this is the last point on the Buddhism thread, but the dhyana was a way of practicing where you would actually have this mental state of concentration. So it's a Buddhist concentration practice called dhyana, and it was, you attain this defined mental state, okay? First of which involves a temporary setting aside of sense desires, ill will, sloth, and restlessness in a seated position, and it's still practiced today, right? Well, do you want to talk about the TRs, Jonathan? Where would you like me to start? As it relates to this, because, I mean, obviously, this has to do with the ability to be able to be there, sit still, and yeah. But, yeah, well, the ability to just be there and be comfortable, this is something that 10, 5,000, I mean, you know, and it's still done today in the Far East, is just being there and becoming one, in their viewpoint, not in TRs, but becoming one with the universe. Okay, now, what universe that is, I couldn't tell you what their viewpoint on it is. However, in TRs, it's just being there. Just be there. Don't think about anything. Just be there. Because doing anything else other than that is a via, okay? And there's a distinction that needs to be made between meditation and TRs, okay? Meditation can be lots of things, and there is no fine point put on it, like LRH stated. This is the most important difference. You're just being there. You're not thinking about the laundry. You're not thinking about the person in front of you. You're just being there. Now, you could say, okay, I'm being there in a body. Maybe you are, maybe you aren't. It depends on what your awareness level is, which Quenton talked about earlier in the middle of the Independent Scientology grade chart. But your reality is your reality, and that's what TRs are for. But the opposing side of this is for you to be there without distracting the person in front of you with anything other than just being. And this is something that has been sorely misunderstood on the Internet about TRs. Right. And that is because if a person can't be there, they criticize it. Right. Which is a marvel in and of itself. All right. So, TRs, per the TRs with modernized HCOB, involve sitting still for extended periods of time without moving. Okay. But just being there. And then you're trying to throw the person off with bull baiting and all of that to get them to just be there. And if you are not distracting the person in front of you, then you're just being there. You're not being distracted by the person that's trying to distract you. So, that gets you to be there even more because the whole idea of TRs is doing what you're doing while you're doing it and nothing else in the way. And this is something that the Eastern philosophies could not get except their boldest and brightest individuals. And there were so few people that could attain that state, though many tried. This was the precursor, no pun intended, the earlier recursion, that's what that means, to TRs, interestingly enough. And it gets so frustrating. Like, now, this is in everyday life. If you're speaking to someone or you're trying to communicate with someone, whether it's I have a problem and I'm trying to get their help on, or they have a problem and they are trying to get my help with that problem. And the person is just not there. It's like I'm just talking to myself here. It gets so frustrating. But that's what TRs do. It's training. You're learning how to be there. And it's like the first fundamental before you can communicate. You have to be there. Otherwise, you can't actually say that you are able to communicate or to be communicated to if you're not there. Because you're not there. And that's the basic thing about it. It just trains you to be there. And it gives you the ability to be there. And as you're saying, Jonathan, doing what you are doing when you are doing it. Yeah. Now, let's take this a further step. Okay. And this is all within the construct of what we're talking about, about the dhyana. If you're an auditor and you're not being there, and you're trying to help somebody who is also not being there, because their attention is on other things in their past, where 5 plus 5 equals 13, how are you going to get them to be there when you're distracting them, on top of what's already distracting them? You're not. You're not. You can't. That is, that is, that is, you, you, you, you, you, you won't. Because they're not, the definition of in session is willing to talk to the auditor and interested in on case. If you're being interesting instead of interested, well, then they're not paying attention to their own case. That's why TRs are so important. And that's why an individual who wants to be clear has to have somebody, whether they're clear or not, can be interested without being interesting. And therefore, they are being there. So you can almost say, not quite, but you can almost say, that when a person's TRs are in, they have no reactive mind in that moment. Isn't that interesting? Yeah, because, right. Yeah, because their case is not, the case is being looked at. It's not, it's not about the auditor's case. Right. If you can't, if you can't, if you're not, not capable by being there, and when I say that, this might be a little tricky to say, but if you're not capable of being there, you can't get somebody else to be there either. So being there disallows them to not be there themselves in order to look at what it is that is ultimately and largely causing them not to be there on a larger scale. So you're mocking up being a clear in order to help someone go clear by being there yourself. Because when one is distracted by other things, they themselves are not clear. Because if you're doing what you're doing while you're doing it, that's the definition of clear. You no longer have your own reactive mind. That's right. It's not, it's not, it's not playing back at you. It's not making you be compulsive or repulsed or anything. Right. You're just able to be there. Right. And this was what LRH struggled with in the latter part of the fifties is how do I get other people to do what I did? Why can't they make, why can't they make people, why can't they make clears like I can make? This is what was happening in the latter part of the fifties. This is where, when the TRs were finally codified and he got other people to do it, that they could then make, because that was the problem. I can make clears. Some people can make clears because they're being there. But he couldn't get people to be there in large enough numbers to make clears. So he kept looking for other routes to make a better clear. And then when he figured out the TRs and got that codified and said, all right, you're going to be a clear and you're going to be there and you're going to help this person go clear. And, and this is recursiveness. This is subsets is you, you, you, you, if you're going to clear a planet, you need to make, you need to be able to make clears to clear a planet. Who's going to do that? And this is what the dhyana and what they were trying to do back then is they couldn't pull this off either. And they never had TRs. Not only could they not name the state and, and, and attain it and, and stay exterior, they could not get other people to do it well or at all. Unless you are a monk sitting on top of a mountain somewhere, or like, I literally just had this conversation with a Thai person recently about the difference between the monk's level of discipline and the lay person's level of discipline. And the lay, from, from a lay person's perspective, you're not, you're not even supposed to do it at the monk's level. Right? Like the monks are supposed to have a, a, a higher mastery of this, but the lay person, you know, you can, you can try, you know, you can sit there and be there sometime, you know, maybe meditate for seven and 10, 15 minutes, you know, it's like. Right. Well, and, and. It's not supposed to be at the same level. Yeah. And that, and that's, that's the thing. When, when you get the idea of a monk, do they have their TRs in? Of course they do. Hmm. You know, when they, when they sit there and that, that's the whole thing. That's what that, these guys, these Buddhists. And you love talking to them. And you love talking to them. Because the guy's there. Listen, I don't even speak Thai, but when I go to the Buddhist temples and stuff like that and go, you know, touring and stuff like that, you can, these monks are so there. They're so present. And they're so aware that just in the moment, like you can literally feel them almost like looking into your beingness. It's like, wow. And that's what a good auditor is. Yeah. That's what a good auditor is. And this is through recursion. And, and through LRH distilling all of this information, he recognized when he was a boy, when he was in the Far East, he was like, I know what that is. And it took him 30 years, a little bit more, to figure this out and distill it down himself to say, this is what an auditor should be like. Wow. Yeah. So that's what, that's why TRs are so important. And I mean, you know, that's why LRH says the world begins with TR zero and that, that executive directive. Oh my God. This is, this is such a good podcast. I was just talking to somebody about, we were having a conversation about getting on lines with AOGP. And I was just talking to him about the power of pro TRs. And I was like, bro, like the, the TRs are so good. And when you can do the pro TRs, it's, it's, it's life-changing. It really is. And now that you're reaching this way, I guess I'm a Scientologist monk. Yeah. Yeah. And it's probably, it's, it's probably the best course in Scientology because of that, because it's so, it's such a distillation of all of this data based off of the axioms, based off of the 10,000 years. So that's, you know, if, if, if, if you can confront life, you can confront anything. If you can confront a PC, you can get a PC to confront their own case. If you can't get a PC, if you can't get yourself to confront a PC, the PC isn't going to confront their own case because the auditor plus the PC is greater than the PC's bank. Oh, so that brings us to the, the, the, I was going to say, yeah, because that really opens up like how we create and stuff like that. So, okay. So TR zero, say it again, TR zero, the world begins with, say it again. The world begins with TR zero. It's an LRH executive directive. Yeah. Now, when you said that the first thing that came to mind is the Tao Te Ching, the Tao Te Ching or in Taoism or Taoism is, is this is the last of the things I'm going to talk about when we talk about all these connections and stuff like this. But when you look at this structure that we're creating for you here, and at the top of this structure, at the top of this pyramid is independent Scientology. And then there's these subsets, there's the axioms, there's all these other things that kind of build this whole pyramid out, right? And when you clear away all the illusions, and when you look at this whole thing laid out, what we've been talking about over these last few episodes, and even up until now, you get to something called the Tao, T-A-O, the Tao, or the Tao Te Ching. This is known as the way. That's what it really means, the way. And it maps out onto the cycles of action, the cycle of action, which is create, survive, destroy. Now, we go back to 1948, Dianetics: The Original Thesis. Page four states, the very first written axiom of the whole subject is survive. LRH says it's the lowest common denominator of the finite universe. And so when we look at the Tao Te Ching, the way, right, create, survive, this is where that comes from, create, survive, destroy. Survival isn't sitting there like as this equal part thing. Survival is the whooping wharf of it all. Structurally, it's bearing the load of everything else that happens in one's existence. So when LRH says that the lowest common denominator of the finite universe or the whole subject of Dianetics and Scientology is survive, this is so huge. And I'm going to say this, and Jonathan can back me up on it. This goes back much bigger than we can even talk about in this conversation. But just understand that that axiom right there, survive. That is a huge thing. And I'm, yeah, I'm enjoying it. Jonathan knows. Well, if you think about it, in order to survive, you have to have something that was created first before you can survive it. So who made it? You did. Right. And if you can survive it, you're at cause over it. So what can you do with it? You can destroy it. Yeah. You can, right. You can unlock it. You can turn it into something else. You can create something else, survive that, and destroy it. This is what we've been talking about in last season's episode. And this is all of the connections right here. And this started in the Tao. So anyway, I just wanted to interject. And it goes further. So, yes, we're talking about the way, which is create, survive, destroy, survival being the most important part of this. But it also, the Tao Te Ching also goes into the contemplative dissolution of illusion. And to dissolve illusion out of your universe, where it's like you can see truth now. Somebody want to talk about that? Yeah, so it's basically the idea of as-is-ness, seeing something as it is. You know, because you have all of this noise surrounding what actually is there and dissolving the, the noise is the illusion. That's what's not. And LRH codified and distilled how you get to that state of actually as-is-ing, seeing it as it is. And it blows off all of this madness around it. And you stop being loopy. Right. You see, problems vanish, conditions vanish. I mean, listen, and I've talked about this before. I'm going to talk about it again. My eyesight, I used to have to wear glasses when I was a kid. And just doing Dianetics, book one auditing, just doing book one auditing, I was able to, as is, a physiological condition. This is my experience. What's true for me is true for me. But I was able to, as is, this experience, it was no longer a problem. And I say that from my viewpoint to say that, as is this, and to be able to dissolve the illusion out of your own eyesight, out of my own eyesight, what I can now see clearly. That was huge for me, huge, my allergy, being able to get rid of allergies that I had for years. My mama used to have to wrap my face up when I would go outside and have to put masks on me. This was before COVID. I was wearing masks before COVID. Okay. When I was a kid. Because I had really, really bad allergies and was able to clear up allergies with auditing. Jonathan helped me through one of them. But bananas. I was allergic to bananas, literally. And Jonathan helped me get through banana allergy. No longer have a banana allergy. That's gone. I'm happy to have helped. Well, then, thank you. I appreciate you. But that's my point. So in the Tao, it talks about this dissolution of illusion. And like Simphiwe just said, in Scientology, it's called as isness. And it's the conditions literally, the situation literally vanishes from your reality. It's no longer real to you. It's no longer there. So anyway, I like to testify. So in the Tao Te Ching, there's this concept called Wu Wei, where it's the idea of non-action and letting nature take its own course without contrary interference. Now, in this, it doesn't mean just give up and surrender. You know, just throw your hands up and surrender. Wu Wei is more like not letting anything stop you no matter what. Wu Wei is more like no matter what's happening around you or whatever, you can be you. And it doesn't have to interfere. What would that be like, Jonathan, comparatively? Well, on a gradient scale, that's something that you're doing as a subset to every grade and process, every process and grade that you do. And as a subset of that is every flow. Some flows read, some flows don't. But the flows that do read are areas where your confront is low. That's the plainest way I can put it, having done it for thousands of hours. It's interesting because Wu Wei is like, it's kind of described as effortless action. Effortless action. The thing that came to mind for me, and some people might have his own viewpoint too, but for me, effortless action to me meant like tone 40, intention without reservation, right? Tone 40, intention without reservation, that I can create, I can hold this intention, and there's no reservations. Effortless action. Non-forcing. I'm not trying to force it in and make my will be, you know. So it's just like, no, it's effortless action. And I love that, Dr. Jean. Yeah. So to kind of wrap this up and close the loop on this, there's the shape of it, basically. Across this season and these episodes, we've traced two reading lines running at once. One Western and recent, Freud, Korzybski, Spencer, absorbed through Thompson and Dr. White as subsets. The other Eastern and ancient, the Vedas search for a stable datum, Buddhism's diagnosis of a compounding loop, the Taoist cycle of create and destroy, and right now, a fourth read, scholars have drawn to Samkhya Yoga, that LRH himself, never named outright, but he did know about it. I promise you. Both lines feed the axioms and our earlier season on loops. And both lines here get a second reading, not just what LRH claimed he took from them, but what an outside careful look finds when you set his claims besides the source text directly. All right, so spring 1952, Wichita, bankruptcy was still in motion, the Dianetics copyrights heading to the purchaser, LRH starts teaching under a new word, that word is Scientology, and its axioms. That's the moment the assembled thing, East and West both, distilled down to axioms and mapped out loops, finally gets called something. So what we've shown you here is we've kind of recursively gone way back and come all the way forward. And the places they hold up, the places they don't, and the record of exactly when each claim entered the public conversation and lectures. So we've hoped you, we really hope that you've enjoyed this recursion into the future and the past while all at once sticking on our connections. So for all of us, namaste, and we love you. Bye-bye. Peace. Bye.